As companies continue to grow, so does their employees count, and with growing workforces come greater challenges for Human Resources (HR) teams. These challenges can range from time management and HR operations to payroll processing and supporting complicated onboarding and scheduling requirements. Given the nature and complexity of HR management, even professionals can often get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of work, especially without the right tools.  

Modern workforce solutions address these challenges by offering tools that automate and simplify the management and administration of all HR activities. Among such platforms, Deputy Software and Tanda are two prominent solutions designed to streamline and centralize key HR operations. However, the existence of these tools begs the question: which platform offers the best HR solutions for your needs? Our Deputy vs Tanda comparison guide answers exactly that, by examining how each supports businesses in achieving their strategic investment goals. 

Deputy Vs Tanda: At A Glance

Feature Deputy Tanda 
Time Management Employee time clock with labor law compliance Employee time clock with auto-approval and payroll integration 
Workforce Management Complete set of workforce management features, including shift management and planning Workforce management with rosters, timesheets, and award templates 
PTO And Leave Management Flexible time-off settings with automated accruals and alerts Complete leave breakdown with team leaves planner and greater visibility 
Onboarding Paperless onboarding and secure form storage Customizable onboarding software with TFN declarations and compliance 
Reporting And Analytics Large library of pre-built reporting templates and custom reporting capabilities Centralized reporting with customizable data to suit business needs 

What is Deputy?

Deputy is a workforce management and employee scheduling solution designed with features that are specifically designed for hourly shift-based businesses. Its core functions are dedicated to speeding up the hiring process, managing employee scheduling, and accurately tracking employee time and attendance, while streamlining team communication between employee and managers. 

The platform also has tools that allow managers to manage staff, cover shifts, and track timesheets from their mobile app. It also lets employees view their schedules, swap shifts, and manage their availability through a self-serve app, helping businesses reduce administrative tasks and improve workplace efficiency. 

Unique Features Of Deputy 

Unique Features Of Deputy

  • Deputy AI: Deputy-AI is a dedicated intelligent assistant that offers assisted labor optimization and automated scheduling solutions. The AI can deal with employee availability and training with regard to specific workforce demands to create accurate schedules. This reduces the time that managers spend on manual scheduling
  • Business Insights Dashboard: The platform offers a centralized dashboard with demand forecasting features that can unify business systems. This gives users a centralized dashboard to analyze data on sales, traffic, or bookings. It uses this data to accurately forecast how many staff members are needed at any given time
  • Shift-Based Task Management: This feature allows managers to assign specific tasks to individual shifts and not directly to employees. It ensures the consistent completion of important tasks, regardless of who is working on them. This way employees have a clear checklist of responsibilities for their shift

Pros And Cons Of Deputy 

Pros:

  • Highly accessible platform allows employees to pick up shifts in case a colleague is unavailable.
  • Easy-to-use platform allows for more professional development.
  • Gives visibility into where teams are clocking in and clocking out with pin drops.

Cons:

  • Some staff members can have difficulty receiving push notifications.
  • Inflexible design architecture lacks interface appearance customization features.

What Is Tanda?

Tanda is a workforce management platform specializing in rostering, time keeping, payroll processing, and HR management for hourly shift-based businesses. The platform aims to eliminate manual work by providing an integrated system for time and attendance tracking, and automated correct wage calculation.  

The platform is designed to ensure businesses pay their staff accurately and on time according to complex local labor laws and awards. Tanda empowers businesses with tools to verify attendance with photo verification and seamlessly export verified timesheets to payroll systems. 

Unique Features Of Tanda 

Unique Features Of Tanda

  • Award Interpretation Engine: This is a core compliance feature that automatically calculates complex pay rates, penalties, and allowances based on industry and enterprise agreements. The platform maintains a library of modern awards and allows businesses to build custom rule sets, ensuring that every shift is costed and paid correctly according to legal requirements
  • Employee Time Clock App: Tanda offers a dedicated app for employees to clock in and out of shifts. The app captures a photo with each clock-in to verify the employee's identity. This provides managers with a reliable and indisputable record of attendance that syncs directly with the timesheets for accurate payroll processing
  • Live Insights: The platform provides managers with a real-time view of wage costs as the week progresses. This allows for data-driven decision-making by tracking wages against budget in real-time, helping managers control labor costs and optimize staffing levels to stay profitable

Pros And Cons Of Tanda 

Pros:

  • App saves time by sending reminder notifications about employee schedules.
  • Makes it very easy to roster staff and reschedule due to unavailability.
  • Simplified set-up makes software easy to use for employees.

Cons:

  • Reports can be one-dimensional and thus not cover complex reporting needs.
  • Lacks the ability to filter employees by employee code in timesheets.

Deputy Vs Tanda: A Comparison Of Key Features

Time Management

Deputy offers flexible and modern time tracking solutions that can be used in different scenarios. Employees can clock in and out via their own time clock app with geofencing to ensure they are on-site, or through a touchless clock-in feature using facial recognition. All time punches are instantly converted into digital timesheets, which managers can go over and approve or deny in real-time, reducing the possibility of manual errors.

On the other hand, Tanda focuses more on accuracy and fraud prevention with its dedicated Time Clock application. Employees can use the time-keeping app to clock in on-site and capture a photo with every punch to verify their identity, with unique passcodes eliminating risks like buddy punching. This creates an indisputable, timestamped record of attendance that syncs directly with timesheets and payroll, ensuring reliable processing.

Winner: Tanda wins this category because of its dedicated time app and mandatory photo verification.

Workforce Management

Deputy deals with workforce management with intelligent and data-driven staff scheduling. Its platform features an AI-powered auto-scheduling tool called ‘Deputy AI’ that can create and optimize schedules with a single click. These schedules are based on employee availability, training, and competence.

The platform also has features like ‘demand forecasting’, which allows managers to schedule the correct number of staff members to meet specific workforce needs, while also controlling labor costs and getting the best out of their teams.

Tanda centers its workforce management around compliance, awards, and real-time cost control. As managers build rosters, Tanda’s ‘Award Interpretation Engine’ provides a live calculation of the wage costs for each shift, including penalties and overtime. The platform allows managers to actually see the impacts and outcomes of their scheduling decisions instantly, helping them stay within budget and avoid uncalculated labor expenses while managing shifts.

Winner: Deputy wins this round with its AI automation and demand forecasting capabilities, which empower managers to build data-driven schedules with greater accuracy.

PTO And Leave Management

Deputy provides an integrated approach to leave management where employees can request and approve leave at any time, directly through the mobile app. With this platform, managers receive instant alerts, with automated accruals and custom settings, based on workforce requirements. Once these leaves are approved, the employee is automatically marked as unavailable. This helps managers reduce the possibility of accidental shift overlap due to employee unavailability and makes it easy for managers to not schedule staff who are unavailable.

Tanda’s leave management system, on the other hand, is closely integrated with payroll and allows managers to classify leaves into paid and unpaid with ease. The platform automatically calculates balances and gives users greater visibility into employee hours, and makes sure managers have accurate data for payments and approvals. The solution also ensures that leaves are not only tracked but also recorded in real time and constantly monitored, lowering the risk of compliance errors.

Winner: Tanda wins this round with its powerful leave accrual automation, which ensures that leave balances are always compliant with award rules, needing minimal, if at all, manual calculations.

Onboarding

Deputy provides a simple and paperless digital onboarding system for new hires. Managers can send a link to new employees, who in turn can then enter their personal details, including tax information and bank account data, directly into the system. This information then automatically populates their employee profile, saving more time, while also ensuring that all necessary information is recorded for future use. The solution also stores employee data safely, without the need for manual signatures or physical forms.

In comparison, Tanda provides a more compliance-focused onboarding solution. In addition to capturing standard employee information, Tanda’s onboarding workflow includes sending and digitally signing employment contracts and policies along with Tax File Number (TFN) declaration forms. It also ensures that all information required for specific awards is collected, creating a completed employee file from day one.

Winner: The winner once again is Tanda, with its digital contract signing and compliance-related information gathering features.

Reporting And Analytics

Deputy offers its users a large library of over 25 pre-built reporting templates that cover everything from labor costs to team attendance. Managers use these pre-built reports to gain insights into workforce performance and efficiency. Managers can also run custom reports comparing scheduled hours versus actual hours worked, track bottlenecks, and analyze workforce requirements. These insights help businesses understand team performance and make data-driven decisions to improve productivity.

Tanda has a more centralized set of reporting tools that unify payroll, compliance, and any other kind of required reports into a single interface. The platform provides detailed reports on timesheet history, leave liability, and wage costs, all broken down by location or team. These reports are designed to give businesses a clear set of data to fall back on and ensure all payroll data is accurate to avoid audit issues.

Winner: Deputy wins the reporting category by offering a wider range of analytics that provide valuable insights into business performance.

Deputy Vs Tanda: Which Solution Offers the Best Pricing Options?

Both solutions offer different pricing structures, based on required features. Deputy offers pricing in the following plans: 

  • Lite at $5.50/user/month 
  • Core  at $7.25/user/month 
  • Pro  at $10/user/month 

Disclaimer: The pricing is subject to change. 

On the other hand, Tanda offers the following modules, with customized pricing: 

  • Payroll 
  • Workforce Management 
  • HR  

Disclaimer: The pricing is subject to change. 

Final Verdict: Which Workforce Solution Is Best For You?

Both Tanda and Deputy stand out as powerful platforms when it comes to scheduling and workforce facilitation, excelling in ways that cater to different types of HR needs. Tanda, the apparent winner of our comparison, excels in its advanced leave tracking and shift management as well as powerful scheduling automations that ensure accuracy across different metrics of compliance. It can be a good choice for businesses looking to manage complicated workforce needs and require more powerful monitoring tools. 

Deputy still stands out, however, for its simplified workforce solutions. The solution offers a more streamlined approach to shift swapping and time tracking. It offers users an easy-to-understand system and helps them meet their requirements with AI automation. However, as the comparison suggests, it may not be ideal for users with more complicated workforce needs. 

Instead of picking one over the other, the truth is, both platforms offer different ways to automate scheduling and HR needs. Choosing between the two ultimately depends on the specific needs of your workflow and the nature of the issues your business might be dealing with.