One basic feature within TimeForge that you may not have fully appreciated is the overtime calculator. Why is that? Overtime is complex and varies from state to state. It’s nice to be able to consistently monitor overtime within the same software that tracks your schedules and attendance.
This overtime calculator is pretty smart. When scheduling with TimeForge, you can be notified BEFORE one of your employees is using overtime. You can also create a general labor budget and TimeForge will notify you if you are close to exhausting it. What’s especially useful about the way TimeForge does this is that it can foresee overtime and the costs associated with it by referencing the schedules you build in TimeForge.
Have you considered utilizing a time and attendance system that will not allow your employees to clock in ahead of schedule? For many businesses, enforcing their schedule is a critical component to maintaining a labor budget. This may be particularly true as new stages of Obamacare take effect. For example, if you are a large employer, and required to offer healthcare coverage, TimeForge can help you limit how many employees are being classified as full-time and are entitled to healthcare. Making sure that your part-time employees work under a certain number of hours can help you avoid being classified as a large employer, and thereby required to offer healthcare coverage to your full-time employees in order to not pay penalties. In some cases, the less expensive alternative to hiring more employees and then having to offer healthcare to full-timers is allowing more overtime. However, it depends on your specific case and a comprehensive labor management system with an overtime calculator, like TimeForge, is the best way to find out for sure.
To maintain your small employer-status, TimeForge Scheduling can also help you get the most out of the hours that your employees are available to work with the auto scheduler. Keep a lower number of employees to remain a small employer, but have auto scheduler build the most efficient schedule based on their availability. The auto scheduler can quickly compare the availability of all of your employees at once and build a schedule that meets the needs you specify. Even better, consider utilizing your sales data to determine what an adequate number of staff will be for any department on any day at any time. The auto scheduler works with the overtime calculator so that you can control your labor costs. Set rules regarding how much, if any, overtime you want your employees to work, and auto scheduler automatically takes them into consideration when building your schedule.