Welcome to the TimeForge website! It looks like this is your first time visiting the TimeForge blog, and we want to make sure your experience here is as wonderful as possible. In these pages you will find labor scheduling success stories, press releases about new TimeForge releases, articles and white papers describing the [...]

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Income Is Not the Same as Profit
When the front of the house is full and the kitchen is just short of being backed up, it’s easy to think you’re making money as you watch the cashier process ticket after ticket. And the truth is: you probably are making money; but, it’s not how much you [...]

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Several months in development, our new Media Kit is ready for public distribution. The Media Kit is a great reference if you need a one-stop document to quickly understand what TimeForge.com can do for your employee scheduling problem.
It can be downloaded here.
How long does it take to make an employee schedule? It should take [...]

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Online Dedicated Scheduling Software
Online dedicated scheduling software offers all of the advantages of offline software without the drawbacks. Access to the software is permitted from any Internet-enabled computer. This means that managers can work from home or from anywhere they can access the Internet. This also means, with most online vendors, that employees [...]

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Offline Dedicated Scheduling Software
Offline restaurant scheduling software is more effective than both paper-pencil scheduling and POS-based scheduling modules. The software is specifically designed for scheduling restaurant personnel; it is created with your restaurant’s specific needs in mind. Most of the available packages provide a method for inputting sales figures and tracking payroll costs using one [...]

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Point Of Sale System Scheduling Modules
Some Point of Sale (POS) providers offer scheduling capabilities. The issue with this solution is that the capabilities offered by these POS providers are simply an electronic adaptation of the pencil and paper method. These modules store employees’ names and usually provide a way to call up the previous week’s [...]

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Pencil and Paper Scheduling
Scheduling with pencil and paper is the oldest method of scheduling and is widely used among owners and managers of small capacity restaurants and those restaurants with few employees and no complicated shift requirements. If you are running a restaurant with one cook, one counter waitperson and another to handle the handful [...]

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In preparation of our next major update, we did need to make changes to several user accounts to conform with our new features. Specifically, all username accounts are now lower-case, so if your username / login was amazingRestaurant@aoL.com, it is now amazingrestaurant@aol.com Please let us know if change causes any problems with your business; [...]

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Fixed Labor Costs and Staffing
There is a certain fixed labor cost that a restaurant can not drop below without affecting service quality levels. These costs include the minimum staffing levels required to open the restaurant each day and do the prep work. Optimal staffing procedures call for gradually increasing scheduled wait and kitchen staff as [...]

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How to Calculate the Payroll-to-Total-Sales Ratio and Other Ratios

Total all payroll costs for each shift.
Divide the total by each shift’s gross sales.
Multiply the result by 100 to convert the number into a percentage

Payroll-to-Total-Sales Ratio = ((Payroll/Sales) x 100)
There are other metrics available that some believe provide an even more accurate measurement of payroll costs. Here [...]

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