Labor Management. NOW Simple.

Wish you could go home early today? You could if you built your employee schedules with TimeForge.

With TimeForge’s AutoScheduler, you don’t waste hours confirming that every shift has the correct staff member scheduled. The AutoScheduler comprehends the myriad of guidelines such as minimum and maximum hours for employees, whether or not employees can work doubles, labor costs, skill levels of employees, and employee availabilities and requests. With this knowledge and without a bit of exertion on your part, TimeForge automatically schedules the correct workers in the correct shifts.

TimeForge’s Daily Templates make labor scheduling a cinch! Each Daily Template can have shifts which are already given to salaried employees, or they can be given to part-time laborers when you put together the current schedule. Many TimeForge customers have Templates for every day of the week, and extra Templates for holidays, special events, and other occasions. To build Templates, navigate to the Schedules tab, and then choose “Templates”.

The TimeForge Availability and Request system helps rapidly put together streamlined schedules that agree with staff members’ requests and availability. TimeForge automatically presumes that all staff members are available, so workers need only to enter the times that they are unavailable to work. Requests can be a one-time thing, such as “I need Friday off”, or reoccurring, such as “I cannot work every 2nd Sunday or Monday starting next week.” Requests entered by workers can be required to be approved by a member of management before the request appears on the schedule.

Keep in mind, TimeForge needs no contracts and no long-term commitments. There are no no per-call or per-hour support fees, supplementary service contracts, and you can cancel TimeForge at will, no matter what the reason is. The monthly fee includes upgrades, and we handle the data backups. Best yet, setup is free!

Are you ready to go home early? It should take less than 5 minutes to make the employee labor schedule for your business! Did you know that TimeForge can streamline and minimize labor expenses through effective employee labor management at your business, bar, club, restaurant, office, or store? Sign up for a 100% no risk free trial today!

Of all the magazines that restaurateurs should be reading, Restaurant Startup and Growth is definitely one of them. It’s geared towards owner/operators, small chains, and independents. Their monthly articles concentrate on leasing, marketing, staffing questions, inventory, restaurant tips, human resources, and other relevant topics for independent restaurants (most of the advice can be applied to other industries, too).

In July of 2009, Jim Laube wrote a wonderful article called Fairy Tales! The Top 10 Myths of Restaurant Profitability. Myth 5 and Myth 6 of this list focus on labor and labor costs, and we’ll take a close look at them here.

Paying Higher Wages Increases Labor Costs: Myth 5

Jim explains that every business has its overachievers. A staff member that can accomplish at least twice the amount of work as any other employee. A busboy who can keep the whole store clean without any help. A cook that can cook more than anyone else. A cashier who can run two lines. These fine staff members are working their tales off, and therefore should have a higher salary than an employee who just does the least work possible.

Despite what you may think, paying these overachievers more than their apathetic co-workers doesn’t raise labor costs , it frequently lowers them. Which situation would you rather have, assuming that both are able to serve an equal amount of customers?

Scenario 1:
Two bartenders making $8.50 / hour, working a 5 hour shift?
Total wages: $8.50 per hour * 2 employees * 5 hours = $85

Scenario 2:
One bartender making $12.00 / hour, working a 5 hour shift?
Total wages: $12.00 per hour * 1 employee * 5 hours = $60

A stellar bartender (Scenario 2) can outwork two so-so bartenders for an overall lower price.

Part of the difficulty in managing is locating these phenomenal employees. However, if you can locate them and promote them, your business will benefit, and so will your bottom line.

Paying Overtime is a Sign of Bad Management or Poor Scheduling: Myth 6

In most restaurants, there is an operational mandate to guarantee that part-time personnel works less than 35 or 40 hours per week. This is to avoid paying overtime, which is generally 50% costlier (time and a half), or even 100% costlier in some cases (double time). It’s an awesome idea from an hours and cost point of view, but this mandate does leave out an important key factor , the worker.

Frequently, staff members who are working part-time need additional hours to make ends meet. These employees, who may be pivotal to the establishment, have specific economic requirements and occasionally need to pick up extra hours to meet these requirements. By refusing to let these employees work additional hours (perhaps 45 to 50 hours) sometimes, they may look for a new job somewhere else , therefore increasing turnover, and costing the business in lost business, turnover, and hiring while looking for a replacement.

If even remotely possible, make an effort to accommodate personnel needs, be it with the intermittent added overtime hours, or building the employee schedule so that staff work on particular days to work around a second job or other availability. Employees are less likely to quit if all of their needs can be met at one specific place of employment.

TimeForge employee scheduling software is used by managers and operators of independent restaurants and retailers, as well as franchises and chains of companies in the hospitality, food-service, retail, and other service-oriented industries. TimeForge will increase profitability, reduce turnover, and improve retention at your business! Try it free!

Customer service is the bread and butter of any company. No company can survive without good customer service. But customer service relies on the willingness of the employees to provide it. Thus, business owners make it a point to instill in every employee that customer service is part of their job. This is why business owners invest in things that will improve customer service in their company. Today, a useful process that has helped several companies is what we refer to as employee scheduling.

Employee scheduling is the process of assigning a schedule to employees based on the needs of both the company and the workers. A systematic approach to scheduling is the workforce analyst in the human resource department. This is often the one responsible for ensuring that no business hour has fewer workers than needed. To aid the workforce analyst in this job, an employee scheduling software is highly recommended.

In a business like hotels, restaurants, and retail stores, employee scheduling plays a vital role in ensuring that every employee is on the right track to providing excellent customer service. For instance, a restaurant that has workers coming in right on schedule means any customer who comes early will be attended right away. But if you have several workers who are on vacation leave during the peak season you’ll have less people handling your guests that you may end up unable to provide good customer service.

With the use of an employee scheduling software, scheduling your ten, twenty, or even thirty employees will take you no more than fifteen minutes. You can then assure that your employees leave requests are followed and your company’s workforce needs are satisfied.

Good customer service goes a long way. So if your company is interested in customer retention, then investing in a technology like an employee scheduling software is a great option for you!

TimeForge can save you time and money. Sign up for a free trial now!

Building a great police officer duty roster can be a hassle. It can be hard to maneuver several shifts, patrols, meal breaks, accrued PTO, and every officer’s individual availability (including time off requests and shift swaps), while also making sure that you have all the officers you need 24/7 without running into any unnecessary overtime. Labor management can be a headache, but it’s important.

It’s boring and endless. After you’ve gone over all the various factors and built a roster, you have to notify all the officers, face endless questions about next week’s schedule, and then rework the roster to allow for an illness or unexpected time off request, then re-notify all the officers… and probably do it all over again.

Great labor management used to be tedious and time-consuming. If it takes you hours, you are not alone. Luckily, TimeForge helps scheduling officers cut scheduling and attendance monitoring time from literally hours to minutes. With TimeForge, you can monitor your labor costs and overtime in real-time, and more accurately forecast future payroll costs and overtime.

Your officers are going to love it!
With TimeForge, you can inform officers of schedules, meetings, trainings, and any schedule updates by text message or email. They can check the password-protected employee portal 24/7 to view work schedules, view time cards, request time off, change their upcoming availability, swap shifts with other employees, and set up daily schedule alerts via text messaging or email.

You are going to love it!
You can create an officer schedule (no matter how complicated) in minutes (literally), easily try out several “what-if” scheduling scenarios (and return to your saved schedule without redoing it), and securely monitor attendance on site or remotely, using the web, a cell phone, or even Facebook.

If you’re still not convinced, read what other TimeForge users say about the time and money they’ve saved with this easy to use staff scheduling software… or sign up today for your free trial and experience TimeForge for yourself!

Read more about TimeForge Scheduling, TimeForge Attendance, and TimeForge Daily Log.

Rumpf Computer Solutions can be your company’s technology department, without costing you floor space! The business was created in 2006 as an alternative technical support solution, and can handle your company’s entire range of tech needs with a close and personal relationship you might not expect from a remote service.

Rumpf’s close and friendly relationship with its customers enables an intimate understanding of the functioning of each customer’s business. Rumpf can handle every aspect of your company’s technology needs. The capabilities of Rumpf are seemingly endless and include purchasing, support, strategic development, project management, and everything else imaginable that is technology related. The company prides itself on being experienced enough to “handle the entire gamut of technology in your business from start to finish”.

Running Restaurants has been on the internet for over thirteen years now, culminating in over seven hundred pages of content and endless hours of audio seminars designed to inform and assist restaurateurs at every level – chefs, owners, crew, and management.

Backed by Restaurant Report, the Running Restaurants website’s tag line is “Helping restaurants to be more profitable!” and the page publishes one of the industry’s leading e-mail newsletters, “Just One Thing”. With endless positive reviews, subscribers love Running Restaurants. In fact, one subscriber says, “It is the first place we go to when an obstacle presents itself.”

By Chris Butler, TimeForge Educator

Having worked as a manager in a retail environment, I know how difficult it can be to manage employee requests and availability. At the store where I worked, everyone’s schedule was pretty much the same from week to week, including mine. Scheduling should have been a breeze right?

The company I worked for had a requirement that there always be two employees in the store, I managed a fairly small store with a small number of staff members. This could make the two employee requirement difficult to achieve. As a manager, often, I was the second person on the schedule. So what happens when I need to take time off?

That two person rule was most difficult on Fridays. I was taking the weekend off to visit family out of town. I got someone to cover for me on Friday, so things were golden. I flew off to see the family and was having a great time. Then it hit me! I hadn’t gotten someone to cover for me on Monday afternoon when I AM the second person. I had a great team and they probably realized about the same time I did what had happened and worked together to get my shift covered on Monday afternoon.

I wish I had had a tool like TimeForge back then. When I put in my request, it would have let me know that I was going to be short staffed that Monday afternoon. Also, when I was looking at the Daily View of the schedule, I would have seen on the lovely bar graph that I had a gap in coverage in the middle of the day. I would have gotten someone to cover for me and would have avoided a mildly panicked call from my staff and the eventual verbal warning I got from my supervisor.

Like everyone else, correctional facilities are facing increasing pressure to cut costs. Labor costs can be one of the largest costs facing correctional facilities, so it’s only natural that there is an increased scrutiny on projected labor costs. But forecasting labor costs can be difficult without the proper tools.

TimeForge provides over 30 unique reports, enabling you to follow labor costs in real-time and predict future labor costs accurately.

TimeForge can also reduce your paperwork time from hours to minutes by streamlining the labor management process through our automated software. Creating a correctional officer duty roster can be a hassle. You coordinate 24/7 shifts, multiple employees, required skill sets, major and minor shift, each officer’s availability, accrued PTO, and meal breaks. While juggling this officer information, you also need to ensure that all posts are adequately covered, but also minimize overtime. Once you are finished, an officer or employee will inevitably request unexpected time off or a shift swap, so you’ll need to restart the entire process.

Without the right tools, notifying everyone about the finished schedule (and any schedule changes that arise) can be frustrating for everyone involved. Failure to communicate effectively can lead to staff shortages when an officer or employee misses a shift, which unfairly encroaches on the personal time of other employees who unexpectedly need to cover that shift. Unexpected schedule changes (like fills for missed shifts) lead to negative job satisfaction and increased turnover.   TimeForge addresses high turnover at the source: miscommunication. You can notify officers about the schedule and any changes through TimeForge text message, email, or social media (like Facebook). TimeForge can even send these messages automatically.

Much like communicating the schedule, attendance monitoring is often dreaded by correctional facility managers. Monitoring attendance is a hassle. It can feel like you’re babysitting your employees, and requires a lot of your time. However,   it is absolutely necessary in order to control labor costs. TimeForge can help with your attendance monitoring needs by preventing early clock ins or late clock outs, preventing staff from buddy punching, and equipping you with the power to see who is (and who is not) clocked in… whether you’re on site or at a remote location. You can monitor attendance through your TimeForge website account, from your smartphone, or through a social networking account (like Facebook).

TimeForge is an essential (and easy-to-use) labor management software for correctional facilities, but if you are still not convinced, read what TimeForge users are saying here.

Read more about TimeForge Scheduling, TimeForge Attendance, TimeForge Human Resources, and TimeForge Daily Log.

What’s your name?
Matthew Phelps. I go by “Phelps” at work.

What do you do at TimeForge?
I design embedded systems, write software, test software, and occasionally handle customer support.

How long have you been working with TimeForge?
Since March of 2009.

What’s your favorite part of working at TimeForge?
I like working for a company where I feel like what I do matters. Also, the management is very lenient with my schedule since I’m also a student. Mostly, I just love working with computers, software and electronics.

How do you make the lives of TimeForge customers better?
I design software to help meet the needs of our customers everywhere. The bottom line of what we do is help our customers save money on labor, make the process of managing time easy and efficient, and allow our customers to easily and seamlessly access their labor and sales data. Anything I can do as a developer to make this process easier on the customer, either by designing software to meet their needs, or constantly updating our software to make it more and more user friendly, I do in order to build a better relationship with our customers and help them meet their labor and schedule management needs easy and hassle free.

What was your first hourly job?
My first hourly job was at Sam Houston Race Park in Houston Texas. I was a paramutuel teller. My job was to take bets and pay out winnings on horse races.

What was your first restaurant or retail job?
The first restaurant I really worked in, aside from a short job at Luigi’s in Houston as a host when I was 14, was at Spanky’s in Lubbock Texas. I was a shift manager for 2 years and a kitchen manager for 2 and a half years. I ran the kitchen.

What’s your favorite hobby?
My favorite hobby is playing basketball. I play basketball 4-5 days a week and I play in local leagues every season I can.

What’s your favorite sports team?
the Houston Astros

Do you have any pets?
I currently have no pets.

What’s your name?
Chris Butler

What do you do at TimeForge?
Customer Support

How long have you been working with TimeForge?
Since the 12th of September, 2011

What’s your favorite part of working at TimeForge?
Helping customers learn how to get the most out of TimeForge

How do you make the lives of TimeForge customers better?
By showing them just how easy employee scheduling really can be using TimeForge’s AutoScheduler™.

What was your first hourly job?
When I was about 14 I worked at a bank, shredding old reports.

What was your first restaurant or retail job?
I worked at a family owned fast food restaurant. I did a little bit of everything but mostly worked as a cook in the kitchen. I did occasionally get to try and create schedules. I wish I had had TimeForge then.

What’s your favorite hobby?
Watching Riley, my nephew, play sports.

What’s your favorite sports team?
The Dallas Mavericks

Do you have any pets?
Nope, no pets right now.