Archive for December, 2007

We just received this great testimonial from Robert, a hospitality management instructor:

Robert just signed up for TimeForge.com!

How long does it take to make an employee schedule? It should take less than 5 minutes! Did you know that labor costs could be as much as 30% of your expenses? TimeForge can help streamline and minimize labor costs through effective employee scheduling at your restaurant, bar, or club.

Over the weekend, we began improving some of the internal systems on TimeForge.com to provide our users with an improved labor scheduling experience.

Demand for our simple scheduling system has increased over the past few months, and it was time to invest in more RAM, faster hard disks, and other improvements to ensure that TimeForge is available when you need it. The upgrade should have been a four - six hour outage, but instead spiraled into a twenty-one hour outage. We apologize for the inconvenience this caused, but really hope that you enjoy the new hardware!

All services have been restored to their normal operating conditions.

If you were affected by the outage, and would like some credit for the pain we put you through, please send an email to support@timeforge.com, and we will credit your account for two free days of usage (48-hours).

How long does it take to make your labor schedule? It should take less than 5 minutes! Did you know that TimeForge can streamline and minimize labor costs through effective employee scheduling at your retail business, restaurant, bar, club, or hotel?

Some of you may have noticed that TimeForge was unavailable for an hour or three earlier today. We are aware of the issue (which is a faulty server) and are working diligently to restore it to working condition.

Feel free to check back here for updates on our progress.

It’s been one day since the release of TimeForge Version 1.9, which introduced a number of new features such as easy-to-use calendar availability, improved multi-location (multiple unit) scheduling, and many other improvements. And we’re excited to announce that more than 800 businesses have signed up for the most simple and powerful labor scheduling tool on the market: www.TimeForge.com

Although we are obviously excited by the number of TimeForge users, we are more excited about the time savings and cost savings that have been provided to our users. For example:

• On average, managers spend more than 2.64 hours making the schedule, every week with a spreadsheet program such as Excel, by hand, or with an inefficient scheduling system (like most Point of Sale systems).

• On average, managers spend 15 minutes making the schedule, every week using TimeForge.

• On average, managers in retail and hospitality businesses receive an annual salary and benefits package equivalent to more than $62,500. That’s more than $31 per hour.

• TimeForge is directly saving our users more than $59,272 every month! That’s more than $710,000 a year.

Of course, there are dozens of other benefits like reporting, employee notification, reduced employee turnover, less time fragmentation (employees calling your business), etc… which are more difficult to calculate in a direct dollar-to-dollar return on investment (ROI).

We are pleased to announce TimeForge version 1.9 – the easy-to-use employee scheduling program for food-service (restaurant, bar, club), hospitality (hotel, motel), and retail companies.

Thank you to our users who provide priceless feedback about the software can make their lives easier!

This version provides significant enhancements to all TimeForge users, and includes several dozen new and improved features. Some of our time-saving improvements include:

• Many areas of the scheduling system, including the creating schedules from templates, publishing a new schedule, and deleting schedules are significantly faster.

• A new field is available for employees, which allows managers to enter an identifier for tracking the employee (such as an internal employee number).

• Internationalization! TimeForge now works in Canada, the United Kingdom (England), Australia, Ireland, France, Spain, Scottland, and many other countries. The best labor scheduling system from the US is now available to anyone, anywhere. In fact, if you are a multi-location (or multiple unit) operator, with stores in different countries or locales, TimeForge will appropriately manage notifications for the whole team.

• Do you schedule more than one location from within your TimeForge account? The improved scheduling system in version 1.9 will automatically disable employees that are already scheduled to work at other locations. TimeForge already disables employees that are scheduled to work on other conflicting schedules.

• Day parts have been renamed “Work Periods”, which is … simple. More improvements with “Work Periods” and “Day Parts” are coming in Version 2.

• A number of minor bug fixes, improvements to Internet Explorer 6, and other changes.

Of course, we look forward to your ongoing comments about changes to the TimeForge scheduling system.

How long does it take to make your employee schedules? It should take less than 5 minutes! Did you know that TimeForge can streamline and minimize labor expenses through effective employee labor management at your retail business, bar, club, or restaurant.

What is FindApps.com? FindApps is a comprehensive guide to hosted applications (also known as Application Service Providers or ASPs). They currently list several thousand applications which require no installation, no updates, and no service contracts (like our own labor scheduling program). It’s a resource that every business owner should have saved in their Bookmarks.

What kinds of things are on FindApps.com? Although many of the programs listed on FindApps.com are “generic” in nature and apply to anyone who uses a computer, some of their listed programs apply directly to TimeForge.com employee scheduling users.

Some of the categories that you may be interested in reviewing include:

• Human Resources (employee reviews, background checks, benefits management)
• Utilities (backups and virus scanning)
• Accounting and Finance (payroll and online accounting)

TimeForge is posted in the employee scheduling section of FindApps.com

How long does it take to make your employee schedules? It should take less than 5 minutes! Did you know that TimeForge can streamline and minimize labor expenses through effective employee labor management at your business, bar, club, or restaurant.

We are pleased to announce TimeForge version 1.9 – the easy-to-use employee scheduling program for food-service (restaurant, bar, club), hospitality (hotel, motel), and retail companies.

Thank you to our users who provide priceless feedback about the software can make their lives easier!

This version provides significant enhancements to all TimeForge users, and includes several dozen new and improved features. Some of our time-saving improvements include:

• Availability and requests both received drastic improvements for both managers and employees. You can now view weekly availability on a continual basis on a calendar. Availability is color-coded based on when employees “want to work”, are “available to work”, “do not want to work”, and are “unavailable to work”. Requests awaiting manager approval are also displayed for employees. This is what the improved requests look like:

• In addition to the calendar view of requests, TimeForge users can quickly make new requests, or change availability by using “drag and drop” techniques. Each day of the week is split into hourly segments, and you can now click and drag to create schedules in a single click. Of course, our flexible scheduling system still allows users to build both simple and complex requests!

Of course, we look forward to your ongoing comments about changes to the TimeForge scheduling system.

How long does it take to make your employee schedules? It should take less than 5 minutes! Did you know that TimeForge can streamline and minimize labor expenses through effective employee labor management at your retail business, bar, club, or restaurant.

Yesterday, some of our users were sent a email describing how well TimeForge.com can assist with labor scheduling at multi-unit or multiple store concepts.

For instance, TimeForge users can manage an unlimited number of locations from their account, and each store can have different employees. Employees can work at more than one store and TimeForge automatically detects when employees are scheduled at other locations so that no staff members are double-scheduled. TimeForge has other multi-store labor scheduling capabilities as well – and we are always adding new features to the software.

However, the email program that sends out short reminders and email tips malfunctioned, sending many of our users multiple copies of the same email. We are truly sorry for “spamming” your mailbox, and can assure you that we have taken the necessary precautions to ensure that this doesn’t happen again.

Thank you for your understanding. If you have any further questions, please send an email to our support group.

It should take less than 5 minutes to make the labor schedule for your business! Did you know that TimeForge can streamline and minimize labor expenses through effective employee labor management at your retail business, bar, club, or restaurant?

The Nation Restaurant Association is forecasting a shortage in workers over the next several years, as the growth of the hospitality sector surpasses the available labor force. Instead of hiring new laborers, many growing operators will need to maximize their existing workforce – and supplementing trained workers with advanced technology solutions is a wise decision. Shorter training times, tighter staffing, faster service times, improved accuracy, and more consistent product quality are just a few of the benefits of blending technology and employees.

Restaurant Business, one of the nations leading restaurant and food-service publications, recently featured an article on the topic of “High Tech Takes on Big Labor”, focusing on many relevant technology advancements including:

• Pay-at-the-table technology (Faster table turnover which means more sales with fewer employees)
• Wireless order taking (Directly enter orders into the POS system, servers can focus on guest satisfaction)
• Web-based employee scheduling (Build schedules faster and notify employees of upcoming work, reduces overhead drastically)
• Online ordering (labor is not needed to field phone calls, enter orders, or pay customers)

A number of technology vendors were highlighted in the article, including TimeForge.com

Some of the scheduling related vendors mentioned in the article include:

• ASI’s Restaurant Manager Labor Scheduling Module that generates staffing rosters and then can be printed, posted to the website, emailed, or sent as text messages.

• CrunchTime!’s Labor and Workforce Management tool which is a web-based solution that interfaces with various POS and HR systems.

• HotSchedules web-based product which offers enhanced reports, rule-based auto-scheduling and POS integration.

• Deterministic’s Labor System is a web-based labor forecasting and management program.

• MacromatiX’s Scheduling and Labor Management product is a web-based QSR and fast-casual scheduling program which alerts managers when labor is “over” or “under”.

• MICROS Systems has a new mylabor product (part of the mymicros.net suite), offering a web-based labor management tool.

• TimeForge.com is a web-based scheduling system designed to keep management on the floor, and reduce turnover by keeping employees “in-the-loop”. The software builds a complete schedule in just a few seconds, and can be manually adjusted to meet specific needs of the business. Employees receive daily reminders about schedule changes, through the website, email, and text messages – and workers can trade shifts online, read messages from management, and request time off (or change their availability).

How long does it take to make your employee schedules? It should take less than 5 minutes! Did you know that TimeForge can streamline and minimize labor expenses through effective employee labor management at your business, bar, club, or restaurant.

In many states, the Department of Labor and Industries (L&I) performs routine audits of retail, grocery, contracting, and food-service businesses to determine if the establishment is following all federal, state, and local laws governing overtime, underage workers, and workers compensation. Like any audit, failing an L&I audit may result in heavy fines and significantly reduce profits. L&I audits may also be performed by your insurance company rather than a state agency.

Labor & Industries auditors will review your payroll, accounting, and schedules for compliance - a daunting task if your employee schedule records are kept in request books, various availability sheets, sticky-notes, scraps of paper, and Excel spreadsheets. However, with TimeForge.com, an L&I audit is simple. Historical records are always available and can be recalled by simply logging into TimeForge and running the appropriate report on any past, present or future schedule. Schedules are archived forever. Requests are stored forever. Audits are now simple!

How long does it take to make an employee schedule? It should take less than 5 minutes! Did you know that labor costs could be as much as 30% of your expenses? TimeForge can help streamline and minimize labor costs through effective labor scheduling at your restaurant, bar, or club.