Staff scheduling… it’s easy, right? How hard can it possibly be to schedule a few staff members for your business? Well, it depends on the business. Staff scheduling is as unique as the person doing it, and blanket features rarely truly meet the needs of a business – and its people. Offering limited features to our customers was never an option, no matter what Erik and Anthony thought in the beginning...
Our easy scheduling software started taking hold, and our customers were not very shy about voicing their opinions – they called or emailed our office, and we asked them to voice their opinions. Daily. Some questions were:
- Where is my labor cost? I want to see my labor totals for the day. And, I need to see which position costs the most! The owner will only let me schedule up to 18% labor cost for the day. Oh, and on Sundays, we use labor hours to schedule with, and I cannot go over 80 man hours for the day.
- Why aren’t sales included on the staff schedule? I need it broken down by day, then by hour, then by 15-minute interval. Shouldn’t this data come from my Point of Sale system where it already is?
- How do we handle no shows? I want to modify the schedule after the day is over so I can show who didn’t show up. Where’s the report to show me who didn’t show up? Where are the reports?
- I have six minors working for me – they cannot work past 9pm most nights during the summer, or I’ll be fined by the department of labor. Why do I still need a sticky note to tell who is, and isn’t, a minor?
- Our lifeguards require annual certifications, and if they are expired, and someone is injured at the pool, that would be very, very bad. I don’t want to schedule anyone who has an old certification!
- Our servers in Section 1 all need to have alcohol training, or it’s a large fine and they shut down the restaurant for the night. We could lose our alcohol license. Don’t let staff members who are missing the training pick up shifts for staff members that I already scheduled.
Whoa! I thought employee scheduling was simple? We went back to the drawing board. While we were planning what to do, our phone wouldn’t stop ringing! It was time to bring Gurkan into the picture.
TimeForge has evolved, and will continue to evolve to encompass the needs of our users. We live and breath our three tenants of software development for our labor management software package:
- Make sure staff members stay in the loop on everything the business does.
- Keep managers happy and on the floor – keep them out of the back office.
- Be flexible, so that the software can change as needed for our customers.
Have you tried TimeForge recently? Sign up for a free trial to see how our amazing software can help run your restaurant, retail, or hospitality business!
Read Part One, Part Two, Part Three, and Part Four! Part Six is coming…
