Why should you pick WhatTimeDoIWork.com Online Employee Scheduling Software?

10 Feb, 2014 | Tags: bar scheduling software, conflict free schedules, Employee Schedule, Employee schedule calendar, employee schedule template, Employee Schedules, Employee Scheduling, employee scheduling programs, Employee Scheduling Software, hospital scheduling software, hotel scheduling software, job schedule, Job scheduling, Medical Scheduling, Medical Scheduling Software, Online Restaurant Scheduling Software, Online Scheduling Software, restaurant schedules, retail scheduling software, Scheduling staff members, Shift Scheduling, Staff Scheduling, Staff Scheduling Software, Web Scheduling Software, What Time do I Work, Whattimedoiwork.com, Work Scheduler, Work Scheduling, Workforce Scheduling, workscheduling

The first step to success is to stop working in your business and start working on your business. You have probably spent far too many hours creating and updating your weekly schedules, and yet, do you have a full grasp on the amount of overtime wages you have needlessly paid? This is the ideal time to start looking for scheduling support. There are many different options available today and you should put some serious thought and consideration into what exactly you are looking for. In this 3 part series we will extensively review the scheduling software options available.

The simplest solution would be using an Excel spreadsheet instead of pen and paper. This will make a clean scheduling template, but it really doesn’t save you a lot of time. What you really need is a program developed by expert schedulers that has been designed to save you both time and money. While it may sound counterintuitive to pay for scheduling software to make money, the money and time you will save will far outweigh the cost of the software.

The first decision to make regards the the type of program you would like to use. Traditional software that you purchase once and is housed on a single computer, or an online software that does not require downloading, and you receive automatic updates without having to download any additional information. Not to mention that you can pay as you go, and you will have all of your information saved in the cloud so it can be accessed from anywhere, at any time, not just from your office. Online scheduling software offers the additional ability for your employees to have access to their schedules from home.

With online software your employees can enter time off requests, view the schedule, fill open shifts, and even swap shifts with other employees. You can also communicate a new schedule, an updated schedule or an open shift to your full staff (or select employees) with just one click of the button. Just think of all the extra time you will have to devote to other aspects of your business.

In our next edition, we will be examining some of the features you should be looking for in online scheduling software. If scheduling, employee requests, and time management have become a problem for you and your business, try What Time Do I Work.com online staff scheduling, and store all of your employees’ scheduling and contact information on the cloud for your access from anywhere at any time. Try it risk free for 30 days!

Increase Your Profit Series: Part 2 (Accurately Priced Menu)

07 Feb, 2014 | Tags: Bar Promotions, bar scheduling software, Employee Schedule, Employee schedule calendar, employee schedule template, Employee Scheduling, employee scheduling programs, job schedule, Online Scheduling Software, restaurant scheduling software, Scheduling staff members, Shift Scheduling, Staff Scheduling Software

In the conclusion of our 2 part series “Increase your Profits” we are going to review the pricing of your goods, aka your menu. In our last discussion we reviewed that your labor costs should not be more 18% – 24% of your sales. This will need to be monitored closely to ensure you are constantly within your target labor costs. Of course once your sales increase, you will have more customers and need to have a higher number of employees to serve those customers, while balancing this with your target labor cost. But how do you increase the profits on your menu item while maintaining your current level of customers? You can ensure that your menu items are accurately priced to give you the best possible profits.

There are many different theories on how to price menu items and traditionally you look at the food cost for each plate offered, multiple that by 3 and you have your menu price, but this is not the whole story. There are a number of questions you should ask yourself before an accurately priced menu can be truly effective for you.

Are you storing a large amount of capital in your freezer?
- If a large amount of your money is sitting in your freezer waiting to be sold, your profits can be significantly affected
Are you offering too large of a selection on your menu causing you to have large inventory levels?
- Evaluate the items on your menu to see what does and doesn’t sell. By removing the low sellers you will not be stocking inventory on those items and regain some of your capital for use in other parts of your business.
Do you have a regular inventory audit procedure?
- While we never want to think that our staff may be stealing, you need to maintain regular inventory checks to safeguard against theft.
Are you sure that your staff is following the strict recipes for your food and drinks? (Or do you even have strict recipes?)
- If your bartenders are notorious for over pouring, or if you kitchen staff is increasing the portion size of your plated food, your accurately priced menu means nothing.

Once you have addressed these concerns, you are ready to look at your menu. You want to determine what the exact food cost is for each of your items and then figure out the plate cost. Once you have this information for each of your menu items, you are now able to accurately price these menu items. The plate cost of food should be no more than 29% -32% of your price. Beverage, however are a little different, some involve recipes of multiple items and have a more complex pricing strategy:

What Time Do I Work.com is a simple, easy to use, affordable staff scheduling software that is designed to help you save time and money managing your schedules, so you can focus on other aspects of your business (like an accurately priced menu.) Clients currently using the online scheduling software have found areas where they are overstaffed or scheduling a lot of overtime shifts and have significantly decreased their labor costs. Try it for yourself with our no obligation 30 day free trial!

Increase Your Profit Series: Part 1 (By Simply Managing your Labor Costs)

05 Feb, 2014 | Tags: Bar Promotions, bar scheduling software, conflict free schedules, Employee Schedule, Employee schedule calendar, employee schedule template, Employee Schedules, Employee Scheduling, employee scheduling programs, Employees Schedules, job schedule, Menu, Online Restaurant Scheduling Software, Profit, restaurant schedules, restaurant scheduling software, Schedules

We all know that sales equal profits, but we don’t always think about how much profit we get from each sale. In the restaurant and bar industries there are 3 main costs that can have a significant impact on your profits. The most successful business operators are constantly checking their budget weekly to ensure that they are hitting their target costs to equal the highest amount of profits. These three main sections are food costs, beverage costs and labor costs.

Labor costs can be the trickiest piece of the puzzle to figure out, and unfortunately it usually works out to be about 60% of operations costs. You may think that a standard, repeating schedule each week can help you, but it can be one of the biggest mistakes. Yes, you can save time in creating and communicating your scheduling, but you could be faced with over- and under-staffing. Without adequate staff you are faced with the inability to provide consistent high level service to your customers and if you have too much staff working during a slower shift, you are losing a considerable amount of money. So how do you schedule the right number of staff for each shifts/days/weeks/months?

To accurately calculate the right number of staff on each shift is through reviewing past schedules against shift sales and then forecast your sales for the upcoming weeks/months. On average a good rule of thumb is that your labor cost should not be more than 18% – 24% of the expected sales. Accurate forecasting can take a while to master, but WhatTimeDoIWork.com offers the ability to help you.

WhatTimeDoIWork.com online employee scheduling software was developed by employee schedulers from the restaurant industry. The software saves and stores previous schedules for easy access when comparing to your sales reports and for creating upcoming schedules. A unique feature of WhatTimeDoIWork.com scheduling software is the ability to track and calculate labor costs as you create the schedule, telling you while you make the schedule what your labor costs will be. There are many other great features offered by WhatTimeDoIWork.com online scheduling software to help you save time and money. To learn more try our no obligation 30 free trial today!

How can Scheduling Software Reduce Employee Labor Costs?

31 Dec, 2013 | Tags: bar scheduling software, conflict free schedules, Employee Schedule, Employee schedule calendar, employee schedule template, Employee Schedules, Employee Scheduling, employee scheduling programs, Employee Scheduling Software, Employees Schedules, hospital schedules, hospital scheduling software, hotel scheduling software, job schedule, Job Scheduling Software, Medical Scheduling Software, online employee scheduling software, Online Restaurant Scheduling Software, online scheduling program, restaurant schedules, Retail Scheduling, Scheduling staff members, Staff Scheduling, Staff Scheduling Software, What Time do I Work, Work Scheduler, workscheduling

As a business owner, you want your organization to thrive. An important part of ongoing success is tracking every aspect of operations—from facilities management to supplies ordering. You must also keep track of costs—including labor costs, which many analysts claim is your highest expense.

To control labor costs, you must understand who works when for how many hours at what rate. Gathering this type of insight requires careful:

Planning
Scheduling
Analysis
Reporting

But here’s the problem—finding the time to complete all these necessary tasks, when there are so many other things on your list of things to do.

If these business analytics seem beyond your reach, then maybe it’s time to consider something new—such as an online-work schedule solution that not only helps you create accurate work schedules quickly and easily, but also shows you at glance:

Employee pay rates
Weekly costs per employee
Overtime warnings

Rather than spend time performing in-depth manual analysis with paper and pen, online scheduling software from What Time Do I Work automates the entire process and creates a real-time 360-degree view of your labor costs. Offering point-and-click simplicity, What Time Do I Work is a comprehensive yet easy-to-use online scheduling solution that enables you to:

Enter employee information, including names, emails, phone numbers, preferred shifts, and requested time off
Create a new schedule by simply moving time slots to the appropriate names on your schedule template
Immediately correct mistakes, if you happen to select a name for a time slot that the employee requested off; simply move the time slot to a different name
See real-time labor hours, labor costs, and overtime hours; this information automatically updates directly on the schedule
Improve profits and boost your organization’s success

To discover for yourself just how much time and money you can save by using our web scheduling software, you can test drive it for free. There’s no obligation, and no credit card is required to sign up. For complete information on our web scheduling software, please visit https://www.whattimedoiwork.com/features/

How do you create a Time-off Policy

17 Dec, 2013 | Tags: bar scheduling software, conflict free schedules, Employee Schedule, Employee schedule calendar, employee schedule template, Employee Schedules, Employee Scheduling, employee scheduling programs, Employee Scheduling Software, hospital scheduling software, hotel scheduling software, job schedule, Job scheduling, Job Scheduling Software, Medical Scheduling, Medical Scheduling Software, online employee scheduling software, Online Restaurant Scheduling Software, online scheduling program, restaurant schedules, restaurant scheduling software, Retail Scheduling, Scheduling Software, Scheduling tools, Staff Scheduling, Staff Scheduling Software, What Time do I Work, Whattimedoiwork.com, Work Scheduling, Workforce Scheduling

For many companies, managing vacation and time-off requests is a constant challenge. You need to maintain adequate business coverage and support while understanding that your employees have times when they need to take time off. The outcome of not having a formal policy in place about when and how to submit requests results in employees asking for time off by:

Talking to you in the hallway or your office
Calling you on the phone
Sending you an email
Scribbling the days and dates on a piece of paper and dropping it on your desk
Taping a note to your office door

These types of requests are not only hard to deal with on the fly, becasue of the no boundaries on “acceptable ways to request time off,” but you are also tasked with trying to keep track of who requested what time off. And if you have two employees requesting the same days off, who gets first dibs?

There are many different options and ways to create policies, but the most common in the service and health industries is to create a “time-off bank.” Here’s how the bank works. Let’s say each employee is allowed 160 hours off each year, which equates to 20 work days. The bank includes time off for:

Holidays
Vacation
Sick days
Personal days

You can’t always give all your employees all of the holidays off, so they can use their banked time to request vacations or personal/sick days off. Each employee is responsible for scheduling the days he or she wants off from work, using a single prescribed method, within the needs of the business. You can require that requests are submitted for planned time off within 2 weeks of the date, and that they must submit requests on special forms that are filed away for you to refer to when creating upcoming schedules

This plan offers many benefits to employees. They can:

Ensure that their time off request will not be forgotten
Assume responsibility for their own time off; they make their own choices, and they need to abide by them. For example, some employees might prefer a day off for religious holidays, rather than the Fourth of July.
Draw from their time-off bank for emergencies, such as caring for a sick child. Remember, the bank is for all time off—holidays, vacation, sick days, and personal days.

The plan also offers many benefits to you. You will:

Spend significantly less time managing time-off requests; all requests will come to you through the standard form submitted in the “time-off request box”
Create more accurate schedules that require fewer changes, as you no longer have to try to remember who asked for what time off?
Empower your employees by letting them make more choices about how they spend their time away from work
Create a more positive working atmosphere at your company

All of these ways are great, but they are still time consuming, especially when going through all the requests each time you make the schedule. Wouldn’t it be nice if you had a way for the requests to be waiting for you right on the schedule? How about knowing when each request was submitted so that you can grant requests in a first come first serve method? The solution is available today from WhatTimeDoIWork.com and there are many other benefits far beyond tracking time-off requests and auto-populating them right into the schedule.

Automatic alerts to scheduling conflicts and overtime hours
Calculation of Labor costs as the schedule is created
Posting of the Schedule online allowing employees easy access without picking up the phone
Communications sent to your entire staff as soon as a new schedule is posted.

We are so sure that our software will solve your scheduling needs that we offer the first 30 days at no charge, with no obligation.

Learn more here.