Shifts Excel Add-in - Complete Set-up Guide

The Beekeeper Shifts Excel Add-in - once configured - will allow you and your teams to synchronize the latest shift plans into Beekeeper directly from the Excel sheet where you have been planning and managing your schedules.

If you prefer a video to reading through documentation, check out our video guide below. 

In this document we’ll cover: 

• How the Solution Works
• Requirements to get started
• Installing the add-in 
• Connecting the add-in to your Beekeeper environment 
• Configuration of the middleman tab

How The Solution Works

Beekeeper’s Excel Shifts Add-in takes data from a customer's usual planning sheet and transforms it into data that can be consumed by our API. 

To do this, we create an intermediary sheet (this is another tab in the Excel file). The intermediary sheet has a section called “Workers table” where we map the employees’ names to a Beekeeper user ID (we try to do this automatically via the Beekeeper API for users). The “Definitions table” is another section where we specify what the shifts names mean (e.g. when does the shift AM start and end, a description, preferred color for the shift).

Requirements to get started

In order to use the Beekeeper Shift Excel Add-in, you need to be on Excel version 2016 (MacOS, Windows for desktop or Office 365 for web) or higher.

For best success, we recommend that you are an Excel savvy person or find one in your company who can ‘own’ the add-in and support team leads with any questions. 

Installing the Add In

The Beekeeper Shift Excel Add-in is listed in the Microsoft Office Store (free of charge), where you can download it, making it available to use in Excel.

After downloading the add-in, follow these steps: 

1. Open the Excel sheet where you are planning your teams’ schedule(s)
2. Click on “Insert” 
3. In the menu bar, find “My Add-ins” and click on the dropdown chevron to the right 
4. Click on the Beekeeper Shift Excel Add-in 

Connecting the Add-in to Your Beekeeper Environment

1. In the Beekeeper admin dashboard, create a Beekeeper schedule per your Excel schedule (should be a 1:1 mapping): 
   1. Create a schedule for the team (no need to do anything besides creating a schedule with an intuitive name e.g. “Housekeeping”)
   2. Go to the ‘Members’ tab and add the group / team, location or individuals who should be considered in this schedule (this is important as we will map employees from the excel sheet to Beekeeper based on this data)
   3. Create a new bot and copy the token. Please make sure the “Admin Permissions” are turned on for the bot (more info on this in the FAQ section)
2. Open the Beekeeper Add-in in Excel, and click on the “Settings” button
3. Add your tenant URL and a bot token 
4. You can validate the url/token by pressing  the “Test connection” button

Configuration of the Middleman Tab

1. Now that you have connected the add-in to your Beekeeper environment, click “First Time Set Up”
2. Go to the newly created “Beekeeper middleman tab”
3. Map the SCHEDULE TABLE - map your data to the schedule table in the Beekeeper middleman sheet. Each row should be an employee and each column should be a date.
4. Click "Synchronize" to populate, if possible, the user IDs of your employees 
5. If users cannot be found this way, you will have to manually go to the Beekeeper dashboard and copy the User ID to this mapping so that the shifts of a user can correctly be imported in Beekeeper
6. Define the shifts being used - if it’s a full day shift, type “true”, otherwise add a start and end time 
7. Once the sheet is ready, click “Synchronize”
8. Go to the Beekeeper Dashboard > Toolbox > Shift Schedules and check if the Overview of the respective schedule reflects what was planned
9. Going forward make any changes in the Excel table and click “Synchronize” to push the data to Beekeeper

Frequently Asked Questions

• How long does it take to set this up?
  • Depending on the resources you have available and the complexity of the planning sheet(s), the initial set up and configuration of the Beekeeper Shifts Excel Add-in can take anywhere from an hour to a day of work.
• What kinds of permissions are available here?
  • You can connect the Excel Add-in to your Beekeeper environment with a bot token. The bot can be either a global admin, which would have access to view / update any schedules existing in the tenant. Alternatively, you can add the bot to any groups or locations within Beekeeper and make it a group or location admin. In this case, the bot will have access to view / update only schedules for groups or locations to which it has admin rights.