Back of House / Manager

Having the ability to book breaks with multiple people and reoccurring at the same time. It seems I can only do one or the other and include people even if it's outside of their working hours. Sometimes we have staff meetings that overlap peoples shifts.

For example we have some employees who are assistants on certain days and open up one day a week for clients while they build their clientele

A place where people can request time off, we can approve or deny though phorest. This would help save a lot of time!!

When adding time off, you can only select from Holiday, Sick, Training, or Custom. As we regularly use a standard “Day off” label, it would be far better to have this as an option rather than to use the Custom option and then type that in as the reason. Possibly make this the first option

Allow a staff member to have more than one department and show on the schedule when they are in that department. In other words, allow for the schedule to show when a staff member is working the desk or if they are assisting that day. We want to have one of our assistants learn the desk. But it doesn't easily show the staff member which position they are scheduled for that day. It would be nice for them to be able to see which position we have them scheduled for, as the dress code is different for assistants and receptionists.

It would be helpful if Phorest could support separate timing for standard spa services: Preparation Time Before Guest Service Duration Cleanup / Reset Time After Each period could block the staff member, room/resource, or both. For example, some spa treatments need preparation before the guest arrives and cleanup afterward, while the guest only sees the actual treatment duration online. It would also be helpful if Phorest could recognize same guest + same room + consecutive services, so unnecessary cleanup time is not automatically added between treatments when a full room turnover is not required. I’d also love to see improvements to Smart Scheduling. When a business is not fully booked, it does not always consolidate appointments effectively and can still leave awkward gaps in the day. Ideally, Smart Scheduling would prioritize filling existing gaps and grouping appointments together more tightly before opening additional scattered booking times. These changes would make scheduling much more efficient for spas and help reduce unnecessary gaps and manual calendar adjustments.

Not everyone needs to clock in. I can disable this from app but not desktop.

There doesn't seem to be any way to get to have any variation in staff rota. I want to work 2 weeks the same then 2 weeks different days or when I work a Saturday then have the following Monday off. You should be able to programme 4 / 5 weeks then have it on repeat

here are some photos of how it was set up in Boulevard and it made it incredibly easy for online booking and our timing worked for everyone.