In the not-too-distant past, controlling labor in a food-service establishment was mostly an instinctive process. Having an effective labor control meant by being able to manage employees during a rush to keep the operation up and running, and send them home as quickly as possible when the rush is over.
In order to make projections of future sales, restaurant manager keeps track of their business for the past few weeks and converted those numbers into an employee schedule. And when the day is done, the manager sits down on his desk calculating time cards for the day’s labor percentage where success or failure of those efforts is determined.
But today, these manual tasks are eliminated with the help of a restaurant POS system where managers doesn’t have to do things by hand.
With the minimum wage set to rise to .25 over the next few years, operators are looking for every tool they can find to keep labor costs under control.
Jim Phillips the general manager of a Pizza Inn restaurant, tracks down his daily labor record via the store’s Point of Sale System. He uses a restaurant point of sale system from Pixel Point.
“I check my labor cost every 45 minutes when I’m in the restaurant,” Phillips said. “I can pull it up on the terminal, hit labor cost and it tells me where my labor stands, or if I want to I can go into my hourly stats and look at those,” says Phillips.
The restaurant POS system can display forecasted sales, actual sales and a variance between the two, as well as scheduled versus actual hours.
“The system tells me everything I need to know,” Phillips said. “I can look at the POS and see the number of pickups for any given hour; the number of dine-ins and the number of buffets. It gives me my supervisor hours, my kitchen hours and my assistant’s hours all in a breakdown.”
An extra pair of eyes
Other POS reports show labor trends over time, and owners or district managers can track labor cost manager performance shift-to-shift, said Jennifer Wiebe the marketing manager of Speedline Solutions. This system also provide detailed reports on manual editing of time clock reports where you can easily spot potential abuse.
Time clock reports and schedules also can provide important documentation for labor board reviews of attendance-related employee terminations, she said.
And by the end of the day, a system such as Phillips’ can generate payroll- and employee-information export files to integrate with above-store accounting systems or third-party payroll services.
It can also assist managers when assigning staff shifts by forecasting sales and generating a schedule based on those sales.
With sales forecasting and labor plans, operators can schedule efficiently to meet their labor targets. Pixel Point’s scheduling tool is linked with employee skills and availability which can speed up scheduling process.”
Hours and breaks restriction is easily done through schedule- and time-clock alerts. The schedule can also include a built-in time clock that requires a manager’s for overriding untimely ins and outs.
Mostly, operators sets their clock-in and clock-out times within 5 minutes before or after the actual time.
“Employees can’t clock in until 5 minutes before their scheduled shift or clock out late without a manager override. The system tells me if an employee is supposed to be off but he is still on the clock.”
The author of this article is a Customer Relations VP at POS-FOR-Restaurants.com – a national organization of retail and restaurant POS systems dealers.
For more information see their website at POS-For-Restaurants.com
