During Set Up, you will be asked to enter information about your employees. This information can provide names, positions, and pay rates to help TimeForge manage your employees. TimeForge also provides employee contact information to enable the software to contact them through email and phone messages. To avoid unnecessary time spent during set up, you can import this data from an existing Excel spreadsheet (or CSV) with your employees’ information on it.

You might want to delete a department if an unnecessary department was created by accident, or if a department has been eliminated from your business. For example, if Amazing Vittles ‘n Things has closed down their “Dog” department, their managers will want to eliminate the Dog department from the TimeForge system to avoid future Dog related confusion.

Leave types help you track employee leave and eligibility. For example, an employee might be eligible for one paid week of vacation every year. You could label the leave type for this as “Vacation”. You can also modify leave options when you fill out the Leave Type Information, so TimeForge will automatically calculate accrued and used time off.

You may want sub departments if your business needs them to track sales or labor needs. An example of a sub-department would be if a sporting goods retailer had a “Marketing” department, and the marketing department had a “Television Advertising” department. Sub departments mostly apply to businesses with an established departmental hierarchy.

Leave Types enable your business to track and prepare for employee absences, including extended absences. Leave Types you might enter could be Vacation, Sick Leave, Maternity Leave, Jury, or Family/Loss Leaves. By editing the options of the Leave Type, you can provide an accrual period for the leave, and other relevant information. If, for example, an employee is eligible for 1 hour of paid vacation for each paycheck they receive, you could enter an accrual period of “Every Paycheck”, and 1 hour accrued per period.

TimeForge enables you to set up multiple departments in the TimeForge system to represent the departments in your store. When editing a department, you can select which Payroll ID information for that department, position(s) will be associated with that department, open/close times for that department (if different from the store times), and configuration settings. Configuration settings include options like time punch settings (if different from the store settings). An example of a department for a sporting goods retailer might be “Outerwear”, “Camping supplies”, and “Cash registers”; or “Customer service”, “Stocking and Merchandising”, and “Marketing”.

You may want to change the positions in a department to enable employees to view department schedules, to manage the labor differently, or to easily manage sales and labor metrics. Employees will not be able to see a schedule for a department that is not associated with their position. The position(s) associated with each department are set up according to your business’ needs.

For example, if Joe is a “Craft Manager” (position) in “Crafts” (department), and all “Craft Managers” are assigned to the “Crafts” department, then Joe won’t be able to see what’s going on in the “Produce” department, unless you assign “Craft Managers” to “Crafts” and “Produce”.

If you don’t want to assign all of the employees associated with that position to a department, you can add them individually. So, if you only want Joe to work in “Produce”, you can reassign Joe without assigning all the other “Craft Managers” to “Produce”. Below are instructions for reassigning department positions.

TimeForge enables you to set up multiple locations in the TimeForge system to represent the physical locations of your stores. Each location has specific employees, and often times different locations have completely different schedules and managers (or they can be shared).

By adding additional locations to your accounts, you can easily access schedules and employees for each individual store without needing multiple TimeForge accounts, keeping your business organized and efficient.

Human resource within TimeForge enables you to store and easily access all applicable paperwork regarding employees and their information. You can upload HR documents like I-9’s, W-4’s, training manuals, insurance verification, and other forms that are applicable to the labor management needs of your business (such as uniform sizes). Below are instructions for uploading HR documents to the HR area of TimeForge, which is general to all staff members, or to a specific position.  This is not where you would want to upload information specific to a single staff member.

Want to get your schedule for the upcoming week? Need to see who’s clocked in … right now? Want to see your sales totals for the day while you’re at home? You can perform all of these labor management tasks, and more, on our TimeForge website.

However, you can also do these tasks (and others) using Facebook – from anywhere you can access Facebook applications.

This lesson discusses using the TimeForge Facebook app.