Who can work? Who wants to? Who needs the hours? Where does the business need coverage? Which role is missing? What changed, and what did not? Puppy was built around that part.
It started with one distinction: available does not mean preferred. Somebody can be available Friday and still strongly prefer Wednesday, while a colleague actively wants Friday. A simple availability system treats both as equally workable. A manager knows better — so managers compensate. They remember, they ask, they text, they learn everyone’s routines. They carry information the system does not. We thought the schedule should know more of what the manager already knows.
Then we saw the same problem on the business side. Businesses do not always think in predefined shifts; they think in coverage. Two at open. Five during lunch. Three after two o’clock. So Puppy lets a business describe the need that way too. That became the principle: represent both sides of the scheduling problem more truthfully, then build between them.
We do not think software eliminates judgement. There is not always one perfect schedule, there is no universal fairness equation, and no algorithm understands every human circumstance better than the people running the business. That is fine. Puppy does not need to replace judgement to be useful. It needs to stop spending judgement on work the system could have already done.
So it follows a few rules. Remember what repeats. Keep constraints and preferences separate, because “I cannot” and “I would rather” mean different things. Describe the business as it actually operates. Make trade-offs visible when everything cannot work. And leave the final decision with the manager: software can build, people still decide.
You already have most of the information needed to build next week.
It is in texts, conversations, notes and memory, and every week somebody has to turn all of it into one schedule. Puppy gives it somewhere useful to go.
From $12 a month billed yearly, or $19 monthly. Your whole team included.