Pixels To Points Converter
Managing Labor Cost Using Restaurant Point of Sale Systems
A few of years ago, controlling labor cost for food-service establishments was done mostly by natural 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 respectively when the rush slowly shrinks.
Restaurant managers kept track of business from previous weeks in order to make projections of future sales, and then laboriously converted those numbers into an employee schedule. And when the day is done, the manager sits down with a sack of time cards, calculating for the day’s labor percentage where success or failure of those efforts is going to be determined.
It’s a good thing that those days are no longer with us and a restaurant’s point-of-sale system has taken over many of the functions a restaurant manager used to do by hand.
With the minimum wage set to rise to $7.25 over the next few years, operators are looking for every tool they can find to keep labor costs under control.
Jim Phillips general manager of a Pizza Inn restaurant, tracks labor throughout the day via the store’s Point of Sale System. He uses a restaurant POS system from Pixel Point.
“I check my labor cost every 45 minutes when I’m in the restaurant,”
said Phillips. “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.”
Your POS Systems as your extra pair of eyes
There are POS reports that shows trends over time which eases labor cost tracking manager performance shift-to-shift, according to 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.
The time clock reports provides important documentation that can be used as a basis for labor board reviews of attendance-related employee terminations.
And by the end of the day, a good POS system like Phillips’ can generate, export and integrate file reports of your payroll and employee information, store accounting systems or third-party payroll services.
The POS also can assist managers properly assign employee-shift by the forcasted sales and by generating a schedule from them.
Managers can efficiently schedule to meet their labor targets using sales forecasting and their labor plans. Pixel Point’s scheduling tool is linked with employee skills and availability which can speed up scheduling process.”
Restrictions on hours and breaks for minor employees can be enforced through schedule- and time-clock alerts. The schedule can also include a built-in time clock that requires a manager override for 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.”
About the Author
The author of this article writes for POS-For-Restaurants.com, with over 20 years experience in restaurant point of sale systems, helping restaurant owners nationwide increase their efficiency and bottom-line profits.
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