More time for your business and higher employee engagement with efficient workforce planning.
Most schedulers were built for a workforce that doesn’t exist anymore: one contract type, one location, one person doing the planning. The Belgian workforce is now permanent, flexi, student, temp, and freelance, distributed across sites, planned by the shift leads who actually know the work. bookU’s Planning & Scheduling is the schedule the new workforce needs: every contract type in one view, labour cost visible as you plan, shift leads working autonomously while HR keeps the overview.
Permanent staff, flexi-workers, students, temp agency workers, freelancers, every contract type the modern Belgian workforce uses lives in the same schedule, with the right compliance rules applied automatically. Student hours stop counting against the 650-hour ceiling at the right moment. Flexi shifts respect the sector extensions. Overtime caps enforce themselves. Compliance becomes a property of the schedule, not a manual checklist.
The shift leads who actually know the floor build the schedule for their team. HR sees every location, every shift, every cost without becoming the bottleneck. The planning happens where the knowledge lives. The overview stays where the strategy needs it. The bottleneck disappears.
Employees submit their availability, request leave, and receive schedule changes in one place, instead of the WhatsApp groups, the Sunday phone calls, and the email chains nobody reads on time. Availability updates reach the schedule the moment an employee taps them. Published changes reach only the affected employees, on their phones, in the language they’ve chosen.
Open the Portal. Availability, leave and contract types are already loaded. Drag a shift onto a name. The running cost updates in real time. Swap contract types to optimise. Lock the schedule when it works. The planning that used to take an afternoon takes minutes. Not because the platform speeds you up, but because it removes the data-gathering work that wasn’t planning to begin with.
Hit publish. The schedule lands in every employee’s app in seconds (by shift, by location, by start time, with any instructions you’ve added). No group WhatsApp, no email chain, no “I didn’t see the message.” The team gets the same version, at the same moment, on the device they actually check.
A flexi calls in sick on the morning of the shift. Open the Portal. See who’s available right now, who’s already at their hours cap, who can legally work the rest of the day. Make the change. The app updates the replacement and the team the moment you confirm. Real-time data turns last-minute reshuffles into a five-minute job.
At Libeert — the fourth-generation Belgian family chocolatier in Komen — the workforce nearly doubles every Easter and Sinterklaas (90 permanent staff plus roughly 130 seasonal and temp workers). For decades, the planning was a magnet board on the production floor, photographed at midday by a shift lead, then phoned in to HR. With bookU, the planning moved to the people closest to the work. Shift leads now plan their teams autonomously in the Portal — by location, by line, by skill. HR sees every shift, every cost, every site without rebuilding it manually. “Our employees now know on time every day where they need to be, without us having to call everyone,” says HR-director Désirée Libeert. The bottleneck moved out of HR. The visibility stayed.
“We don't just save time, we can also plan smarter. Digital planning lets us document our processes and make them transferable.”
Desirée Libeert
HR Director
The permission model is built for autonomous shift leads. Local managers plan their own teams (their location, their shifts, their cost line) while HR keeps the overview across the whole company. The two layers don’t compete for the same calendar, they work the same calendar from different angles.