Who you are agreeing with
Puppy Shifts is a web service for building staff schedules. It is provided by Puppy Shifts. In these terms "we" and "us" mean that operator, and "you" means the business that opens an account.
Using the service means accepting these terms. If you are accepting them for a business, you are confirming that you are allowed to.
What the service does
You describe when your business needs people. Your team says when they can work and which shifts they would prefer. The scheduling engine builds a draft from both, in the order your team asked and by the rules you set, and you decide whether to publish it.
The final call is always yours. Nothing is sent to your team until you publish it.
Accounts, and who can get in
You sign in with an email address through our identity provider. The people who work for you sign in with a numeric PIN that you issue, at a link that belongs to your business.
You are responsible for who you give access to, and for taking it away when somebody leaves. A PIN you issue is temporary until the person replaces it, which is enforced by the service and not merely by a screen — but it is still a credential, and handing one to the wrong person is not something we can undo for you.
We cannot reset an employee’s PIN for them. We have no way to tell over email that somebody is who they say they are, and the person who can tell is their manager.
Plans, trials and payment
Every account starts with a free trial. No card is needed for it, and nothing switches off without warning when it ends.
The paid plans, at the time of writing:
- Small Shop — $19 per month. One location that wants a better way to build the week.
- Multi-Location — $32 per month. Several locations, or employees shared between them.
- Full Puppy — $54 per month. The complete Puppy Shifts toolkit.
Cancelling, and refunds
- You can cancel at any time, from the Billing screen or by writing to us.
- If you pay monthly, cancelling does not cut anything short: your plan runs to the end of the month you have paid for and then stops renewing.
- If you pay annually, you choose. Let it run to the end of the year you paid for, or end it now and we refund the whole unused months. Part months are not refunded, and ending it now means it ends now.
- If a payment fails we will tell you before anything changes, and a lapsed plan stops your account growing rather than hiding the schedule your team is working to.
Price changes
We may change what the plans cost. If we do, we will tell you by email before it affects you, and a price change never applies to a period you have already paid for.
Where we have described a rate as founding, that rate is yours for as long as your subscription runs without interruption. Cancelling and coming back later is an interruption.
Your data belongs to you
Everything you and your team put into the service is yours. You can export the whole account — people, shifts, coverage, weeks, what everybody asked for, what they were given, hours and takings — as one file, at any time, without asking us.
We do not sell it, we do not share it with anybody except the suppliers listed in our privacy notice who are needed to run the service, and we do not use it to train machine-learning models.
What we ask of you
- Do not use the service to break the law, or to hold data you have no lawful basis to hold.
- Do not attempt to reach another business’s data, or to test our security without asking us first. Ask, and we will usually say yes.
- Do not resell the service, or run it on behalf of businesses that have not agreed to these terms.
- Do not put so much load on it that it stops working for other people.
What this is not
Some of what the service touches looks like other kinds of software. It is worth being exact about what it does not do.
- It is not payroll. The hours and costs it reports are there to be checked against your payroll provider, not to replace one. We do not calculate tax, file anything, or pay anybody.
- It is not a time clock of record. Timesheet hours are whatever you or your systems put in. We do not witness them.
- It does not guarantee compliance with employment law. Rest periods, breaks, overtime, maximum hours, predictive-scheduling rules and the rules about employing young people vary by place and by trade. The engine has settings for several of these and it applies exactly the settings you choose. Choosing them correctly for your jurisdiction is your responsibility, and publishing a schedule remains your decision.
- It does not decide anything about a person’s employment. It allocates shifts by rules you set, and every schedule is a draft until a manager publishes it.
Availability
We work to keep the service up and we will tell you when something is wrong. We do not offer a guaranteed uptime figure, and you should not build a process that fails if the site is unreachable for an hour. Publish your schedule and your team keeps it: it goes to their email and their calendar, and neither depends on us being reachable to be readable.
Ending it
You can close your account whenever you like, and delete everything in it. We may suspend or close an account that is breaking these terms, or being used in a way that puts other customers at risk — and except where the law prevents it, we will tell you why and give you a chance to export your data first.
Liability
The service is provided as it is. To the extent the law allows, we do not give warranties beyond those you cannot exclude, and our total liability to you for anything arising out of these terms is limited to what you paid us in the twelve months before the claim.
Nothing here limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited.
Changes to these terms
We will tell you by email before a material change takes effect, and the date at the top of this page always says when the current wording started. If you do not accept a change, cancelling is the remedy and the refund terms above apply.
Law
This agreement is governed by the law of the place where we are established, and the courts there have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute arising from it.
Questions about any of this go to hello@puppyshifts.com.
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.