With Deputy, UNTUCKit has cut their scheduling workload by 50% – allowing more time for customers, staff, and sales

It started as just an idea: UNTUCKit’s founder Chris Riccobono was seeking a shirt that looked great untucked. When he couldn’t find it anywhere, he saw an opportunity to create the ideal fit himself. 

Before this idea transformed into a thriving business, Chris began market research with a business school classmate to meticulously establish the perfect length of shirts.

The ideal shirt they envisioned would be halfway between the belt and bottom of the zipper while allowing the front pockets to be partially visible. After prototype developments, they pioneered “the original untucked shirt.”

They first operated out of an apartment in New Jersey, until UNTUCKit’s first store was established in New York City in 2015. 

Today, UNTUCKit has grown to 88 store locations across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. With fast and continued expansion, they needed a solution to efficiently manage staff scheduling, run reports, and process payroll. 

Four years ago, Michael Saldana joined UNTUCKit as a Store Manager before eventually being promoted to their Retail Operations and Communications Manager. He oversaw everything from store processes, budget planning, facilities, maintenance, and vendor relations. 

It was also around this time that UNTUCKit opened store number twenty-nine. And with the growing amount of stores, there were more shifts to fill and more employees to schedule. 

But with Excel, managing and publishing staff schedules took a lot of manual effort. On top of that, employees weren’t showing up on time and it was hard for their team to determine if they were scheduling within budget.

Michael can recall the arduous process of managing shifts and schedules in a spreadsheet. “If there was a change, you had to go back to your spreadsheet, make the change, and then redistribute the schedule to all team members so that there was a paper trail that this is the published schedule,” says Michael. 

Mistakes using Excel even affected employee attendance. Michael explains: “Human error from the person building the schedule led to attendance errors — like people showing up at the wrong times — because of mistakes with symbols like AM/PM or typing one instead of eleven.”

Using Excel also made scheduling against labor budgets a bit of an anxious guessing game. “We were manually typing shifts into a spreadsheet with formulas that would tabulate the hour spend every week, manually tracking spend for full-time employees and part-time employees against semester budgets. You had to just hope that people were scheduling to the budget.”

Another huge challenge for UNTUCKit’s team was that store managers didn’t have the autonomy to make timesheet edits. Michael shares that even if it was something simple, like an employee forgetting to clock back into work, he wasn’t able to correct it and had to rely on reporting to higher managers and wait for someone to take care of it. This, of course, affected payroll processes and created additional work for upper management. 

“I was a store manager and I couldn’t edit my own timesheets,” Michael recalls.

So, it was time for UNTUCKit to find a new system that met all their key criteria. “The big things that were important to us were that we streamline the ability for people to be store managers first, to have a clean, consistent method of building schedules, then publishing it directly to the team, making edits as needed, having a top-level view, seeing everyone’s schedule in real-time via mobile.”

UNTUCKit rolled out Deputy in 2018 when Michael was a Store Manager. He remembers their team using it right away and the impact it had from the get-go. “We immediately rolled it out in North America and Canada a month later. The impact that it had was immense.”

Automated all the manual scheduling 

Automation and a comprehensive view of scheduling, reporting, and budgeting enabled their team to build accurate schedules, stay on budget, and pull the reports they needed for payroll forecasting. 

“One of the things we were looking for when we got Deputy was to have that visibility at large — so we can export all of this information without having to manually sift through every single schedule,” says Michael.

He also shares it was “like night and day” when it came to schedule publication. “All of these things that used to be multi-step processes are now things that took literal seconds. And to have the accessibility of the app as a manager, a location manager, again, very, very, very easy and intuitive.”

Easy budget planning and payroll processing 

Deputy’s reporting feature and employee stats also helped UNTUCKit make sure they were scheduling hours properly throughout the business day. “It felt really good to visually see that I was stacking the hours appropriately, and to see the total spend calculated in real-time was very helpful.”

This also positively impacted their process for payroll. Michael explains: “When it came time for payroll processing, it was very simple to go to the reporting feature or the timesheets feature to export everything in one fell swoop, in one clean document.”

Saved time to focus more on customers and staff

UNTUCKit’s store managers have “grossly reduced” the time and workload that goes into publishing a schedule, managing timesheets, and exporting payroll since using Deputy. They’ve cut their admin time from “a couple of hours to half an hour a week”.  

In fact, Deputy reduced all the work that goes into scheduling by 50% across 45 store locations.

Michael shares: “It was a pretty astronomical change. The time savings from Deputy has allowed us to spend more time with our customers, keep people on the sales floor, and have more time being able to cultivate and build sales –  leading to higher sales days.”

“As I am the Ops Manager, my goal is to optimize those processes in the store so that there is less time doing activities that are not dollar generating,” Michael adds.

Improved employee engagement and experience 

Instead of staff having to wait for their schedules to arrive via email, screenshotting their schedules at the store, or picking up a sheet of paper, UNTUCKit employees have had a positive experience using Deputy’s scheduling app.

“At large, they’ve enjoyed that it’s a tech-forward platform. They’re able to download an app and get their schedule or swap shifts directly on their phone. They know they’re not waiting on some email that may never come. It’s going to be there in real-time [with Deputy’s app].”

Deputy’s app has also helped foster team engagement. “Having employees be able to get [newsfeed messages] very quickly, you build that comradery within the stores and within those market groups, you get them to feel more included right away. We had staff feeling more engaged right off the bat,” says Michael. 

“And when you really pull back, it’s like ‘wow, we’re really getting this from a scheduling tool’, feeling that sense of community because of how it all works together.”

Focusing on business growth 

Today, UNTUCKit is using Deputy across all of their 88 store locations – with their UK team officially onboarded this year.

As they open more stores and onboard new staff, Deputy’s ease of use and mobility continues to help their business reduce scheduling errors and confusion on when staff should be working. 

Michael says that this improved internal optimization has been one of the key factors in UNTUCKit’s continued growth.

“Deputy has really helped us focus on the bigger picture and allowed us to have one less thing to worry about when it came to something that, frankly, should be that simple.”