Callout
Crunchtime plans the week. Callout answers when the week breaks.
An SMS agent for last-minute shift callouts. Someone texts that they can’t make their shift; Callout works out who is actually allowed to cover it, offers it to them one at a time, and waits for a manager to approve before anything changes. Employees never install anything — it is all text messages.
Detects the callout
An employee texts that they can't make their shift. Exact keywords are matched instantly; natural language is classified, and anything ambiguous asks rather than guesses.
Finds compliant cover
Nine hard rules — certifications, availability, overlap, weekly and Nevada daily overtime, position, cross-store — evaluated in code, never by the model, with every exclusion recorded and its reason shown.
Runs the offers
One offer at a time, in ranked order, on a timer you set. A late yes becomes a standby claim rather than a dead end.
Waits for a human
Every schedule change needs a manager's approval, escalating through your own approval chain until someone answers. The agent never publishes on its own.
How fast is it?
On one live run, 88 seconds from “I can’t make it” to a covered shift — and that includes two people reading a text and answering it. That is the honest way to say it: an accepted offer moves to the next step in the same request, so the system adds close to nothing. Time-to-covered is your team’s response time, not ours. What the software actually removes is the twenty minutes a manager spends calling down a list.
What you can check
Nothing publishes itself
There is exactly one place in the system that writes a schedule change, and it sits inside the approval. A change with no named approver is refused twice — once by the approval, once by the integration. And the compliance check runs again between the manager's yes and the write, so an approval that went stale while it waited does not become a double-booking.
Every exclusion shows its reason
The candidates who could not take the shift are shown alongside the ones who could, each with the named rule that excluded them — not filtered out. Absence looks like a bug or a bias. “Excluded, because” is an argument you can have with a manager.
Every decision leaves a trail
Every offer, acceptance, decline, approval, escalation and timeout is a timestamped row, and every status change writes one. Export it as JSON or CSV. A scheduling decision nobody can reconstruct is one a manager has to defend from memory.
What it does not do yet
- The Crunchtime integration is not live, and it will not write your schedule. Callout reads the schedule through a Crunchtime adapter, and that adapter currently runs against a mock of Crunchtime’s data model rather than a real account. Nothing has ever been written to anyone’s real schedule — and on Crunchtime it never will be by us, because Crunchtime publishes no way to write one. So Callout does the finding, the asking and the approving, and then hands your manager the exact change to make, with the whole trail behind it. We would rather tell you that now than after you bought it.
- The compliance rules are Nevada’s. Federal weekly overtime, aggregated across all of your stores, and Nevada’s daily overtime rule. Other states are additions that do not exist yet, so if you are not in Nevada, some of the math is not yet yours.
- There is no sign-up, and onboarding is hands-on. Rosters, stores, approval chains and manager logins are set up by us, with you, one at a time. We would rather do that by hand until we have done it enough times to know what to automate.
- It is early, and small. One operator has run it, at four restaurants. There is no billing yet and no pricing page, which means an early conversation is a real conversation rather than a checkout.
Request a demo
Tell us where you are and we’ll show you the whole loop on real messages — a callout going out, the candidates the rules kept and the ones they excluded, and the approval that publishes it. Four fields, and nothing happens automatically afterwards.
Callout is a product of Callout Solutions LLC (in formation). Employees are reached by text message only, and only after they have opted in from their own phone — see the messaging terms. No schedule change is ever published without a human manager approving it.