Ever schedule too many employees for a shift? How about too few? It’s awful to spend money on unnecessary labor or to feel like you’re buckling under pressure because you don’t have enough coverage.
Enter: TimeForge! TimeForge’s sales forecasting feature enables managers to build employee shifts with sales forecasting, based on the number of transactions, sales, or whatever you would like for that day.
What’s new with sales forecasting in TimeForge?
Customers using TimeForge have more control over their labor cost than ever before. TimeForge sales options are located under the “Sales” tab. Sales Categories can be accessed on the Corporation level if the account has multiple locations. When adding a Sales Category, you can define your sales category type to pertain to “Currency”, “Inventory”, or “Other”.
These options allow you to analyze your sales in relation to:
- generated income
- items sold
- another standard of your choice
Also, you can coordinate the Sales Category to the Location level or Department level. Location-level coordination allows you to determine that your store generates sales of “X”-amount on a particular day.
Department-level allows you to determine that your “Bar” department generates sales of “Y”, and even compare “Y” to the sales generated by your “Patio” department.
Precision look at sales data
Your sales data is stored and may be assessed in 15-minute increments. You can then generate your schedule using Actual Sales, Manager Sales Projections, and even TimeForge Sales Forecasts, which are calculated by TimeForge forecasting algorithms based on your historical sales numbers. You can view your sales Actuals, Projections, or Sales Forecasts by going to the Sales menu.
Once you have selected which sales numbers you would like to view, you can select a Sales Category, and TimeForge will display your sales for that week in increments as brief as 15 minutes.
If your sales type is operating on the Department level, then you select the department for which to view sales data.
Sales forecasting in weekly view
We have recently added new functionality that displays your department-level sales data per department for an entire day. TimeForge now offers two ways of viewing sales to serve different purposes: Daily View and Weekly View.
“Weekly View” displays the sales data per day and for each department on a weekly calendar view.
Weekly View is so much easier for the user to see department sales on one page and with one click, as opposed to having to total the calculations made per day, as in Daily View. For this reason, I highly recommend checking out sales forecasting in weekly view.
Daily View allows the user to select a department to see the sales generated at a particular time. Daily View is designed to help managers determine staffing needs at specific times throughout the day, while Weekly View gives management the advantage of quickly reviewing and comparing sales between the departments during the week.
Combining these two distinct views with sales forecasting gives you power over your labor costs!
How to build employee shifts with sales forecasting
First, managers set up a sales category. This can be categorized as currency, inventory, or other. After this is created (and managers can create as many as they would like), it’s time to create ShiftBuilder Rules.
A ShiftBuilder Rule states that based on X number of sales in a category, then Y number of employees is needed.
For example, for every $100 in transactions, 1 server is needed.
Depending on your ShiftBuilder Rules, you can set it up so that if there are $500 in transactions, 5 servers will be needed. The software will schedule accordingly when using the ShiftBuilder.
To use the ShiftBuilder in conjunction with ShiftBuilder Rules, simply open the ShiftBuilder in the Daily View and select what sales category and type you would like your schedule to be based on.
Where do the sales numbers come from?
But where does TimeForge get the numbers that are used to generate those shifts? Well, one of three places:
- A manager can put in manager predictions of the expected transactions/sales/other for that day for every hour or every quarter hour. The software will then pull these numbers and generate shifts based on the shift rules.
- TimeForge learns the more it is used. After it has been in use for several weeks, the software will begin to make its own predictions. This is the power of machine learning.
- TimeForge can pull sales data from a point of sales system.
The use of sales forecasting, no matter the method used, greatly increases a company’s productivity. TimeForge makes it easy to schedule staff based on forecasted sales.
No longer will managers be taken by surprise when they are short-staffed or have too many employees. Instead, TimeForge schedules the perfect amount of employees needed. Less hassle, less stress, more time to be on the floor!
