Labor Management. NOW Simple.

Communication is key in the fast paced environment of your business.  Communicating with staff can be frustrating, whether you’re attempting to inform them of policy changes or just trying to fill a shift for this afternoon.

Miscommunication among staff members, or between staff and management, can leave you frantically trying to fill a shift only minutes before it begins, calling employee after employee, ultimately ending up short-handed, an hour behind on your managerial tasks, and pulling your hair out.

However, with TimeForge‘s unique messaging feature, those days are gone.

To send a message, select "Messages" under the "Schedules" tab, then click "Send a Message"

TimeForge’s labor management software offers a convenient communication feature (similar to e-mail or text messages) within the TimeForge system to make staff communication convenient and time saving. Now, rather than taking the time to call employees while on the clock, you can send messages specifically to the person, people, or groups you need to contact. You can choose to send the message to selected staff or management members, unscheduled or scheduled employees, the entire staff, or just certain positions or departments.

When sending a message, select which staff members you want to send the message to.

TimeForge even takes care of the “I didn’t get the memo” excuse, so you don’t have to worry about staff members failing to check their TimeForge messages (or to answer their phones). All TimeForge messages are also sent to the recipients email, and an audit log is provided inside of TimeForge for users who view the message in TimeForge, ensuring that they “get the memo”.  Messages also show up inside of Facebook, on mobile devices like Android phones and iPhones or iPads, and through an RSS feed.

TimeForge’s messaging feature helps you spend less time managing labor and more time ensuring that the business runs smoothly, saving the company money and reducing turnover by increasing communication among the staff and management.

Sign up for a free trial today and see what TimeForge can do for you!

Related articles or pages

• Workforce Labor Scheduling Updates (Part 2) (0)
• Workforce Labor Scheduling Updates (Part 1) (1)
• What’s New in TimeForge? (Part 1) (0)
• What’s New in Employee Scheduling? (Part 2) (0)
• What’s Coming Soon? (1)

In many states, employees receive paid or unpaid break periods and meal periods according to the law. The TimeForge Breaks Module allows management to enter rules which manage employee breaks and meal periods, letting you easily control and track breaks for on-duty or scheduled employees. After enabling the Breaks Module, you’ll be ready to customize your break and meal period options so they are tailored to best suit your company’s needs.

Scheduling Breaks:

You can add your state, federal, or company mandated “Break Rules” or “Meal Period Rules” and delegate whether the break is paid or unpaid, optional or required.

After adding the necessary breaks, TimeForge can automatically place employees on the schedule and will stagger the breaks to keep employees from all taking the breaks at the same time.  Alternatively, managers can specify each break individually.

When using TimeForge Breaks in conjunction with TimeForge Scheduling, you can:

• Specify breaks based on hours worked, position, or duration of work scheduled
• AutoScheduler™ can quickly stagger breaks for each scheduled shift
• Schedule and manage both paid and unpaid, and optional and required breaks
• Print break reports and worksheets to track employee signatures

Taking Breaks:

Employees can begin or end their breaks with the click of a button.  You can set options to allow employees to take breaks based on the scheduled break settings, specify all breaks as a certain type, or staff can select what kind of break they will be taking (paid, unpaid, optional, required).  If preferred, you can print out the break worksheet and capture employee signatures for any waived or new breaks.

By using TimeForge Breaks in conjunction with TimeForge Attendance, management can:

• Track employee breaks (paid, unpaid, optional, required) for labor reporting
• Automatically take breaks based on the schedule if staff forget to break in or out
• Simple one-click conversion of unpaid breaks to paid breaks (and vice versa) in the “Edit Attendance” module
• Real time web and mobile view of labor and tracking of which staff members are on break
• Alerting and Reporting with TimeForge automatically staggers employees breaks when you add them to the schedule, so your business is always covered by capable staff.

Because the reality (attendance) is often different from the scheduled breaks, you can also see a display of employee breaks based on the employee’s scheduled hours with our Break Report, and track breaks that employees have taken, or should take, based on the employee’s scheduled work hours with our printed Break Worksheet Report. Our detailed and comprehensive reports make it simple and organized to view employee habits and work histories.

You can opt to be alerted via text, e-mail, or TimeForge message if staff members do not take their scheduled breaks after a certain number of minutes. For example, if you set the alert to notify you after 15 minutes of a missed break and an employee was scheduled to take a break at 1:00 pm, but has not taken a break at 1:15 pm, you’ll receive a notification via e-mail or text message directly to your phone or computer.

TimeForge is a best-of-breed employee management system, and our online application of the program allows for constant software updates and improvements live to your system. With TimeForge’s innovative online management software, you are always at the top of your game. TimeForge completes tasks like managing breaks in a matter of minutes – saving your company valuable capital.

TimeForge’s do-it-all program makes the headache of managing employee breaks a thing of the past. Sign up for a free trial today!

Related articles or pages

• TimeForge Updates for December (2)
• Dinerware (0)
• TimeForge Improvements (0)
• TimeForge Breaks Make Your Life Simple (0)
• Time and Attendance Tracking Overview (0)

We are so excited about our new human resource management product, called TimeForge HR! This software streamlines the application and on-boarding processes, and keeps up with employee certification documents so you don’t have to. Perhaps most importantly, TimeForge HR prevents “The Stack” – that ominous heap of poorly organized applications and certifications that has been sitting in your office for months with only a brief frantic sifting once in a while. With TimeForge HR, all employee certifications and other important documents are compiled online into a single employee folder so you can access them any time, any place … eliminating The Stack!

When it comes to the food service and retail industries, it is imperative that management keep track of the certifications necessary for food handling and serving alcohol. Failing to properly monitor and document relevant employee certifications could lead to costly, reputation-damaging legal repercussions. For example, in many states, if the ABC (Alcoholic Beverage Commission) catches an employee with an expired certification serving alcohol, the location could be shut down, and the employee and manager at fault can be fined or even jailed – a heavy cost to the business.

After uploading important documents into TimeForge HR, management can easily track certifications, qualifications, and training performed by staff members with TimeForge’s automatic reminders. When a certification is nearing expiration, management will receive notifications informing them that necessary certifications or training are nearing expiration and need to be renewed.

TimeForge HR allows managers to create documentation requirements specific to each position (or for each staff member) and when combined with our other products (such as TimeForge Scheduling or TimeForge Attendance), TimeForge HR will prevent unqualified staff members from being scheduled or clocking in without the necessary documentation being submitted to TimeForge (and management) first.

Sign up for a free trial of TimeForge today and let us handle your stack of paperwork, so you don’t have to!

Related articles or pages

• On-boarding is Simple with TimeForge HR (0)
• New Labor Management Reports (1)
• Is Employee Scheduling Complicated? Not Anymore! (0)
• Free 10 Day Trials (0)
• Employee Scheduling Complicated? Not Anymore! (0)

The pre-hire and on-boarding processes for bringing on a new hire can cost managers and business owners hours of valuable time. Most businesses must go through the process of collecting resumes and cover letters, applications, assessments, background checks, I-9 and W-4 documents, payroll documentation, insurance forms, staff availability, and other necessary documents such as copies of certifications and previous training verification.

In addition to the time spent collecting these documents and other demographic information, there can be costly legal repercussions for failing to keep records on file and properly documented.

TimeForge HR can reduce all of this paperwork hassle into a simple and fast point and click process. Getting a new employee ready for scheduling or tracking time is as simple as entering the employee’s basic information within TimeForge’s innovative labor management software.

Managers can set up any number of prehire and onboarding documents that must be on file before the new hire is allowed to clock in or be scheduled to work. This innovative process allows you to define a standard employment process for your organization – ensuring that new employees have all of the necessary documents before they are scheduled, or clock in.

TimeForge HR documents can include relevant dates and any employer notes, and you can also scan and upload documents directly into TimeForge – no more searching for relevant paperwork!

Store Documents, Demographics, and HR Information

Additionally, if you enter an employee’s email address into TimeForge, the software will automatically email the employee instructions on how to login to TimeForge, check upcoming schedules, enter requests for time off and much more – greatly speeding up the onboarding process within your organization.

Our easy-to-use online product, TimeForge HR, allows managers and business owners to add an employee, change their availability and submit documents to TimeForge in seconds, making the onboarding of new personnel faster and more convenient than ever. For a free trial of TimeForge, sign up here and see how TimeForge is making labor management woes a thing of the past!

Related articles or pages

• TimeForge Breaks Make Your Life Simple (0)
• Easily Manage Labor with Innovative Staffing Reports (0)
• Your Manager’s Log Doesn’t Work (1)
• Track Staff Certifications and Qualifications (0)
• TimeForge Improvements (0)

Employee dissatisfaction is common among businesses in the retail, restaurant and hospitality industries, and will lead to a high turnover rate. High turnover in a business is extremely costly, as new employees need to be recruited, trained and properly certified – each one costing hundreds or thousands of dollars.

To assist with managing the labor requirements of your business, TimeForge offers extensive reports for many tasks including labor costs, breaks, and scheduled labor, among many others. This week, TimeForge introduced several new reports to make labor management more efficient and decrease turnover in your business.

Shift Ranking:

Are your staff happy with their work environment? From the point of view of your staff members, are there problems with certain shifts that need to be addressed? How would you know which shifts are causing issues with your staff, so that you can address the needs of your staff and your business? You’d use TimeForge!

Using TimeForge, employees have the ability to record whether they were satisfied with the shift they just worked. Our new Shift Ranking reports allow managers and business owners to review a comprehensive account of how many employees were happy with their shift – and how many were unhappy – as well as the ratio of satisfied vs. dissatisfied employees, by either position or shift.

These remarkable new reports, an industry first, provide employers the ability to pinpoint problematic shifts and staff positions in order to decrease turnover and maximize profits for the business. Another report displays shift satisfaction among multiple locations to allow multi-unit operators to remotely monitor their business.

Shift Swapping:

Did you start the week with the perfect schedule, but by the end of the week you are paying unexpected overtime and have unhappy staff? One possibility is that staff are making too many shift swaps, changing around the staffing schedule in an unpredictable manner. Use TimeForge to identify heavy shift swapping and make profitable business decisions!

Our latest shift swap reports allow employers to view the shifts that employees are giving up and picking up, during any period of time, as well as the ratios of shifts given up vs. picked up. These reports provide employers the unmatched capability to gain understanding and control over employees’ shift-swapping habits to successfully remedy employee scheduling problems and overtime abuse.

Managing a workforce requires some give-and-take between management and staff members to ensure that the business runs successfully. Use TimeForge to gain insight into the day-to-day labor management at your business. Just look at what TimeForge customers have had to say about our revolutionary product.

Related articles or pages

• Part Two: Recruiting and Retaining Gen Y Employees (0)
• Is Employee Scheduling Complicated? Not Anymore! (0)
• Employee Scheduling Complicated? Not Anymore! (0)
• Labor Management Software Update Simplifies Employee Scheduling (1)
• Generation Y Part One: Marketing (2)

In many states/localities, employees receive paid and/or unpaid break periods and possibly meal periods according to the law. Our Breaks feature allows management to set up rules which govern these employee breaks and meal periods, letting managers know when to grant breaks to on-duty or scheduled employees.

Scheduling Breaks

With our revolutionary Breaks module, employers can add their state or company’s “Break Rules” or “Meal Period Rules” and delegate whether the break is paid or unpaid, optional or required. After adding the necessary breaks, TimeForge can automatically place them on the schedule, and will stagger the breaks to keep employees from all taking the breaks at the same time.  Alternatively, managers can specify each break individually.

Using TimeForge Breaks, with TimeForge Scheduling, business owners and management can:

• Specify breaks based on hours worked, position, or duration of work scheduled.
• AutoScheduler™ can quickly stagger breaks for each scheduled shift.
• Schedule and manage both paid and unpaid, and optional and required breaks.
• Print break reports and worksheets to track employee signatures.

Taking Breaks:

Employees can begin or end their break with the touch of a button inside of TimeForge.  Managers can set options to allow to employees to take breaks based on the scheduled break settings, or staff can select what kind of break they will be taking, (paid / unpaid, required / optional).  If preferred, management can print out the break worksheet and capture employee signatures for any waived or new breaks.

Using TimeForge Breaks, with TimeForge Attendance, business owners and management can:

• Track employees’ breaks (paid, unpaid, optional, required, etc.) for labor reporting.
• Automatically take breaks based on the schedule if staff forget to break in or out.
• Simple one-click conversion of unpaid breaks to paid breaks (and vice versa).
• Real time web and mobile view of labor and which staff members are on break.

Alerting/Reporting:

TimeForge can automatically stagger staff member breaks when you add them to the staffing schedule, ensuring that the front of the house is never left empty and customers without service.

Because attendance breaks (time tracking and time punches) are often different from the scheduled breaks, TimeForge allows you to also see a display of employees’ breaks based on the scheduled hours with our Break Report, and track breaks that employees have taken, or should take, based on the staff members scheduled work hours with our printable Break Worksheet Report. Our detailed and comprehensive reports make it simple and to view employees’ habits and work histories.

Managers and business owners can opt to be alerted if staff members do not take their scheduled breaks on time.  For example: If an employer set TimeForge to alert after 15 minutes of non-compliance with the break rules, and an employee is scheduled to take a break at 1 pm, TimeForge will send an alert at 1:15pm if the staff member has not yet taken the schedule break.

These reminders and alerts will ensure compliance with state and union required break rules – potentially circumventing costly fines and lawsuits.

Use the TimeForge Breaks module with our online labor management programs – Scheduling, Attendance, and Human Resources, to easily manage your staffing needs.  With TimeForge’s innovative online software, business owners and management are always at the top of their game. TimeForge makes quick work of painful tasks, like break management – saving business owners valuable time and effort.  Try TimeForge today!

Related articles or pages

• Building a Labor Schedule is Complicated. Use Tools to Keep Managers and Employees Happy. (3)
• TimeForge Updates for December (2)
• TimeForge Improvements (0)
• On-boarding is Simple with TimeForge HR (0)
• Efficient Labor Management with the New TimeForge Today Page! (0)

TimeForge has released another ground breaking feature in our labor management software – making TimeForge easier to use than ever!

Now, our customers can import data directly into the Web site to upload employees, positions, departments, and much more!  All new and existing clients now have the ability to upload a spreadsheet, such as those created on Microsoft Excel, directly into their TimeForge account online.  With this ability, business owners can import entire spreadsheets of employee information, such as names, positions, hourly wages, departments, pay rates, and more for immediate integration into our revolutionary labor management program – saving business owners time and money!

Import Staff, Positions, and More Using a Spreadsheet

Get back to managing your business, not sorting spreadsheets!

Anthony Presley, founder of TimeForge, understands the importance of easy to use employee management software:

“One of the biggest hurdles with any new software product is getting data into the software so it performs. With our CSV uploads and Point of Sale integrations, business owners can use TimeForge in minutes. Importing staff members, departments, pay rates and payroll codes is a point and click process with our upload capabilities.”

Sign up for a  free trial of our labor management tool today!

Related articles or pages

• Workforce Labor Scheduling Updates (Part 2) (0)
• Workforce Labor Scheduling Updates (Part 1) (1)
• What’s New in TimeForge? (Part 1) (0)
• What’s New in Employee Scheduling? (Part 2) (0)
• What’s Coming Soon? (1)

One of the features that makes TimeForge easier to use and more efficient than other labor management platforms is our newly released, visually-demonstrated weekly schedules. The new weekly schedule charts allow business owners and managers in the retail, restaurant and hospitality industries to save time and capital when scheduling staff, keeping businesses ahead of their competition.

While building an employee schedule, a comprehensive daily graph is visible to demonstrate an interactive version of the day’s schedule. While managers are building their staff schedule they can view a weekly staffing chart to see a visual representation of employees’ schedules, by position and times, in an organized, color-coded chart to make scheduling staff members easier than ever.

Easily Schedule Staff by Looking at the Weekly Schedule

TimeForge founder Anthony Presley sought to solve some of the problems business owners often experience with employee scheduling:

“TimeForge has had daily staffing graphs and visualization for years, allowing managers and owners to quickly and easily visualize their staffing load throughout the day. Our new weekly graph extends this one step further, providing one click schedule validation and visualization. Managers can spot holes in the schedule where their business may be under or over-staffed.”

Take a look at our press release about the latest TimeForge features.

Sign up for a free trial of our labor management tool today!

Related articles or pages

• Part Two: Recruiting and Retaining Gen Y Employees (0)
• Easily Manage Labor with Innovative Staffing Reports (0)
• Generation Y Part One: Marketing (2)
• Workforce Labor Scheduling Updates (Part 2) (0)
• Workforce Labor Scheduling Updates (Part 1) (1)

TimeForge is an easy to use workforce management solution for your business, and includes many powerful features designed to improve your business. These include:

• Go home early and stop fussing with payroll and time card mistakes with easy time tracking (electronic time sheets and time cards) and staff monitoring.
• No more worrying about break laws and meal management with easy one-click break sheets and meal management.
• Get done with payroll with a single click with our one-click payroll exports to popular provides like SurePayroll, CompuPay, QuickBooks, and more.
• Rest easy with automatic reminders when staff are late, show up early, late, or start approaching overtime.
• And much more…

Here is a brief overview of some of the features of TimeForge Attendance …

TimeForge Attendance is a powerful replacement for your traditional time clock, or the limited punch in / out included with many Point of Sale systems. Use TimeForge Attendance by itself, or combine with TimeForge Scheduling for a powerful workforce management solution.

TimeForge can also integrate with many Point of Sale systems, stopping employees from clocking in early, or leaving too late.

Use TimeForge Attendance to make your life easy! TimeForge easily manages time cards, staff attendance, and payroll exporting.

Related articles or pages

• Grocery Stores (0)
• Dinerware (0)
• Track Staff Certifications and Qualifications (0)
• TimeForge Updates for December (2)
• TimeForge Provides Labor Management and Online Employee Scheduling to Dinerware Customers (0)

As operations managers and HR professionals know, managing labor is much more than building staff schedules and managing time and attendance for employees.  There are many other aspects of human resources and labor management, including:

• Talent management
• Tracking staff training and continuing education credits
• Skills tracking and ranking
• Onboarding and hiring processes
• Background verification and skill assessments
• Certifications and qualification tracking
• Raise requests and workflow
• And much more …

In many of these HR areas, we recommend that our users utilize a best of breed solution to ensure the best results for our customers.  For example, Corvirtus is simply the best company around to perform skills assessments in the hospitality and restaurant industries, and we recommend our customers look at Corvirtus for any unmet assessment needs.

However, a few of the these HR areas are easily managed inside of TimeForge’s best-of-breed labor management solution.  Historical raise requests, qualifications, skill tracking and ranking, and others are already available in TimeForge, and more will become available in the near future.

Let’s review employee certifications …

Did you know that TimeForge can track certifications for staff members?  Using TimeForge, you can track any number of certifications (staffing qualifications), testing dates, renewal dates, and test scores.  Each certificate can also include a note about the staff member’s qualification.

Specifics of a Certification / Staff Qualification

TimeForge allows savvy managers to set up certifications which are required before the staff member can be scheduled.  TimeForge can then stop you and your management team from scheduling employees who are not qualified for the job position.

For example, in the state of Texas, a server (waiter) that serves alcohol needs to have taken an alcohol awareness and training course.  Serving alcohol, of any kind, without this certification can land the employee and the responsible manager in jail for the evening.  With a single click inside of TimeForge, managers can ensure that staff are only scheduled if they are qualified to be scheduled.

Add a Certificate, Restrict who can be Scheduled

As an added bonus, TimeForge will notify managers and employees 6 weeks before the certificate expires, so that managers and staff members both know that it’s time to renew the qualification.  The certification reminder also appears inside of the Daily Log.

Use certifications to make your life easy!

Related articles or pages

• Your Manager’s Log Doesn’t Work (1)
• Improper Labor Staffing (0)
• Grocery Stores (0)
• Going Green is Good for Profits (0)
• Dinerware (0)