The issue: The Scheduler wouldn’t let you switch out of your default view if there were no shifts on the schedule, so if you were just starting to build a schedule from scratch, you couldn’t switch to any other Schedule Views until you added a shift!

The fix: The developers modified this to allow you to go wherever you want to, regardless of whether your schedule has any shifts in it!

Request number 1276 (PTO in Payroll Export)

The issue: There was an unexpected issue with paid time off, where the PTO would be approved but wasn’t showing up in the payroll export.

The fix: The developers got the issue sorted out and now PTO displays appropriately in the payroll export.
Request number 1278 (Enforcement Overrides)

The issue: Manager overrides on schedule enforcement required a username and password at the website level, which can take a few extra seconds to enter if they are long.

The fix: Now, managers can use internal numbers and passwords to do overrides. These are each 4 digits long, and are numbers so they are faster to enter than a username. For example, a username (like “themostawesomemanagerever”) and a password (like “mydogsnameisfluffy1980″) takes longer to type than an internal id (like “2233″) and a password (like “1980″).
Request number 1279 (Sage File Export)

The issue: The Sage export needed double-checked.

The fix: The developers double-checked it!

Request number 1280 (Choose Employee in Edit Attendance)

The issue: When setting the employee in the “Edit Attendance” page, TimeForge was defaulting to the Corporate Owner.

The fix: TimeForge doesn’t default to the corporate owner anymore!
Request number 1285 (Change Department During Shift)

The issue: While an employee was still clocked in, Manager or Supervisors (whoever has the permissions) were unable to change which department that employee was clocked into until after they clocked out.

The fix: Now users with the correct permissions can change which department the employee is clocked into while that employee is still clocked in.
Request number 1275 (Weighted Averages)

The issue: We have been working fiercely to add more functionality to TimeForge’s Sales Forecasting! We now have implemented a Weighted Averages feature to the Sales Forecasting tool,

- Weighted Averages for Forecasting sales! … 1275
- Quickbooks now works with new QB SDK versions 11 and 12 … 1226
- Reports are now emailed out based on the timezone for the location and/or corporation (Alex)

In many cases, TimeForge can exceptionally boost operator competency and lower the number of blunders caused by inadequate scheduling methods. Managers deprived of labor scheduling tools, such as TimeForge, generally spend more than $12,000 a year in management time (based on a national salary average of $62,500) putting together and handling the labor schedule! TimeForge turns employee scheduling into an electronic undertaking that can be carried out in just a few minutes every week, increasing store profits by thousands of dollars annually for the store.

Putting together a superior schedule every week is frequently an agonizing managerial task for all businesses, no matter what size. The heightened store profits, decreased turnover, and bettered worker disposition makes employee scheduling software a beneficial investment. Many hospitality and retail owners have learned first hand how to correctly manage labor. This will save both money and time for your business. Try the TimeForge free trial today!

How long does it take to make a labor schedule for your workforce? It should take less than 5 minutes! Did you know that TimeForge can minimize labor costs through effective employee scheduling at your motel, bank, school, restaurant, bar, club, or retail business.

Related articles or pages

• Manage Like Michael Scott or Bill Gates?
• Workforce Labor Scheduling Updates (Part 2)
• Workforce Labor Scheduling Updates (Part 1)
• What’s New in TimeForge? (Part 1)
• What’s New in Employee Scheduling? (Part 2)

We recently wrote a blog about how to control costs during hard times. This blog emphasizes that operational aspects such as inventory control, portion sizing, reducing turnover, improving employee retention, and training are all import aspects of business that can be forgotten about during good times. Domino’s is recognizing the importance of focusing on these operational aspects, referring to them as “unit-level economics”.

“While the company’s domestic unit count declined a net nine restaurants in the first quarter, Domino’s aim is to set itself up for renewed domestic expansion in the future by shoring up unit-level economics,” said Chief Executive Patrick Doyle.

Doyle continued, “We know that profitable franchisees make for a healthy system, and the goal is to turn those profits into new stores so our domestic store growth rate improves over the long term.”

Domino’s is proof that it is very important for a business to be efficient and cost conscience. TimeForge can immediately improve profitability and is designed to improve cost controls at your business. TimeForge allows you to produce schedules in minutes instead of hours. We have several franchisees that use our product. These franchisees have lower costs, are more efficient, and are more successful than their competitors because of the competitive advantage that TimeForge offers. At the risk of being cheesy here, I think it’s important to state that we are proud to serve small businesses – whether they are franchises or not. We like to think that we are helping our nation’s economy grow one small business at a time.

Can you build a schedule in less than 10 minutes? How many thousands of dollars do you spend making schedules every year? Did you know that TimeForge can minimize costs and increase profits through effective employee scheduling? Sign up today for a free trial today!

Managing theoretical labor costs is a process that quickly becomes a nightmare for both employees and managers at a golf club. Employee availabilities and requirements will collide with managerial requirements, leading to low employee retention, high employee turnover, and a reduction in “the bottom line”.

TimeForge is a best-of-breed labor scheduling and staff management system designed for golf clubs and other hospitality and food-service businesses. Managers using TimeForge stay on the floor, not stuck in the back office working to build schedules or find ways to reduce labor costs. TimeForge monitors and manages time and attendance, produces schedules quickly, and communicates schedule changes directly with staff members, improving employee retention and reducing staff turnover. Your golf club will profit with TimeForge!

Some of TimeForge’s Benefits Include…

• Build staff schedules in seconds with the TimeForge AutoScheduler
• Enforce the labor schedule to prevent employees from clocking in early and clocking out late
• Record employee availability, staff member time off requests, and other important information
• Instant communication among employees and managers
• Control labor costs at one or many locations
• Export payroll to popular payroll providers
• And much more…

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

This could be a real problem for employers when they try to hire Generation Y Millennials. While some managers and recruiters are fed up with the stereotypically whiny and self-entitled “Trophy Kids” Generation Y is predicted to comprise nearly 75% of the world’s workforce by 2025, according to a study by the Business and Professional Women’s Foundation. Companies will eventually be fighting for the best of them, so start using the job description to court talented millennials.

Here are six ways employers can tweak job descriptions to attract Gen Y:

1. Tell them why they should want to work for you. This is your company’s opportunity to make job seekers fall head over heels in love with you and the open position. Millennials don’t just want to crank out work and check off items on a to-do list. They want to love the company they work for, and hiring managers can use the job description to get them excited.

2. Tell them why the position matters. Understanding how my job contributes to the organization is one of the biggest motivators for me and my Gen Y colleagues. Make sure the job descriptions describes where the position falls within the company, how the candidate could make an impact, and where it fits in the grand scheme of things.

3. Talk about what the job could do for them. Aside from a salary and benefits, how would they benefit from the position? What skills might they gain, what professional connections can they make, and why would this position make them more desirable candidates when they start looking for their next jobs?

4. Tell them about your creative benefits. Does your company offer any extra, exciting benefits, like flexible work hours or gym membership reimbursement? Be sure to mention those creative perks (no matter how small) in your job description.

5. Tell them about your vision for the position. While millennials may not envision working the same job for decades, it’s important that we work for a company where we could envision ourselves growing and contributing for several years. We want the job description to reflect that same sort of vision for the candidate who ultimately fills the position.

6. Tell your company story, quickly. Your company has a story. Tell a brief version of that story within your job description to quickly convey your company’s mission and how it came to be as it pertains to the kind of applicant you’re looking for.

What do you think Gen Y talent want in a job description?

Jennifer King is an HR Analyst for Software Advice, a web-based resource that compares and reviews HR and employee evaluation software. Read her full post on her HR blog.

Some restaurants and hotels manage employee scheduling with printed schedules posted on a bulletin board. When the schedule is posted, employees race to the board to check their schedule, then squabble with one another and management to swap shifts. When employees forget when they work, management is responsible for routing phone calls from employees with inquiries about the schedule, time-off requests, employees who are late showing up, and other scheduling situations, all while customers are neglected and ignored.

Innovations in technology have created an easier and faster way to manage employee schedules: web applications running over the Internet. Through the use of a protected Internet web site, management can create schedules and employees can check for updates from any location, at any time. There are a variety of websites offering electronic scheduling services.

When shopping for a scheduling application, it is important that it has features that make scheduling easier. For instance, the ability to automatically email employees with the latest schedule is an important capability in any scheduling software package. Service is also an important characteristic, and some companies will ease the transition from paper to online scheduling by transferring your existing schedules into electronic format. A few scheduling applications have features that set them above the competition. TimeForge.com, the premier online employee scheduling tool, has an option that automatically optimizes the schedule to be the most cost-efficient for your business, while considering employee and manager preferences. Electronic scheduling services usually require a monthly or yearly subscription and pricing is based on either the number of employees at the establishment or a flat-rate monthly fee.

If you manage employees, electronic scheduling software is a worthwhile investment. Aside from the instant time saving features that online scheduling applications offer, they can also reduce your employee turnover rate. Poor employee satisfaction is an important determination for employees to look for other jobs, which increases your employee turnover rate and causes you to re-invest money into training a new employee. Online scheduling software can improve the employee satisfaction at your business by creating schedules that are based on employee and manager preferences. Scheduling based on employee and manager preferences ensures that employees are always kept in the “loop”, and management does not need to worry about schedule-related disputes.

Print scheduling is a thing of the past; to be competitive in today’s hospitality industry, electronic scheduling is a necessity.

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

MikLin had committed unfair labor practices against members of Jimmy John’s Workers Union, most of which were his employees. MikLin fired his employees for taking sick leave. These disgruntled ex-employees created posters to call attention to MikLin’s sick-leave policy.

Here is the poster they created:

The posters were helpful during the case because, “the posters were sufficiently connected to a labor dispute, and thus protected by the act. Not only were the posters connected to the issue of paid sick leave, the NLRB noted, but they also did not stray from the truth so egregiously as to lose the act’s protection (NRN).” The case concluded and MikLin had to reinstate the six fired workers as well as pay them for their sick leave.

This article really made us wish MikLin had called us before this HR nightmare happened. We could have helped him make sure he had the coverage he needed, tracked his employee absences, and cut down his labor costs. Unfortunately, the route he took was unhygienic for his customers and turned into a legal HR nightmare. His business’ reputation and the corporate reputation may take years to recover.

Violating labor laws can have many consequences, TimeForge can help prevent your business from facing an expensive lawsuit. Employers can manage employee leave with TimeForge Human Resources. TimeForge HR automatically calculates Paid Time Off, Sick Leave, Vacation Time and other eligible leave based on the guidelines you set up. Try TimeForge for free today!

If you’re trying to compare us to some others, let me go ahead and save you some web searching:

Restaurant Industry

HotSchedules

TMx

ScheduleFly

General Retail

Kronos

Red Prairie

ADP / eTime

We have competitors who love to issue press releases every time they acquire a client with more than two stores. We have competitors who have closely tied their companies to some of the largest chains on the planet. We have competitors who run R&D think-tanks bigger than our whole company – that’s a lot of thinking! We even have competitors who have stolen our own internal studies and published them as their own on their blog and twitter feeds (yes, we know who you are).

Note: One prominent restaurant scheduling competitor, continues to pepper their own twitter feed with our labor management studies, without providing TimeForge any credit. I get it, really I do – you just don’t want to go to the effort of talking to your customers to see how awesome your own software is. Surely it’s awesome enough that you have your own impressive numbers?

But, since it was our hard working crew that performed the study, using our customers, please start including some attribution in your tweets. Otherwise, we’ll need to call you out by name – and that’s just gonna be embarrassing. We hate it when the lawyers get involved. Thanks so much!

Prospective customers who call us with questions about our competitors get a very frank answer … if you want to play with their software, give it a try. It doesn’t hurt our feelings. No, we don’t keep up to date with the latest features that each of our competitors has. That would take a lot of time – time we would prefer to use listening to our customers, and building our own product to meet our customers needs. If you’d like us to listen to your needs, sign up, and become a customer. That process is dead-simple easy.

I’m sure that these other businesses all have great qualities … they probably do something (or lots of things) really well. After all, if they didn’t, they wouldn’t have any customers.

On the other hand, if you want to use our competitor’s software, please do. Our sales people (and our potential customers) are often astounded by this statement … but I’m always reminded of my grandfather, a very successful entrepreneur, who told me “A man convinced against his will, is of the same opinion still.”

If you don’t think our software rocks – that is ok – please use a different product. And, if you decide down the road you made a horrible decision to go with our competitor, come on back. We’ll gladly give you a big hearty West Texas “Welcome Back”. Heck, we might even hug you!

We do three things well – and those are the only things we’ll ever want to do:

• Make sure staff members stay in the loop on everything the business does.
• Keep managers happy and on the floor – keep them out of the back office.
• Be flexible, so that the software can change as needed for our customers.

That’s it.  That’s all.

Thanks to the systematic method of employee scheduling with online scheduling software, the process of arranging and fixing schedules can take only five or ten minutes (maximum) of a manager’s time. This is a huge improvement from the usual two hour mind-boggling processing of employee information, qualifications, and trainings, abilities, past records, their availability, leave requests, schedule swap requests, and work forecast to fix the week’s schedule.

Because this task demands time and effort from the manager, getting an employee scheduling software is an investment that every company should think about. Imagine a manager who can allot two hours more on managing the effectiveness of his or her workers instead of figuring out the schedule for the coming week. Employee scheduling software minimizes manual data entry and consolidates all information at a single location. One-click dealing and one-click emailing of work schedules puts the manager in touch with their employees instantly.

Good management strategies increases employee job satisfaction, which leads to a more productive workforce and a more successful business. Dedicated managers are an asset to companies in all industries, and so is software that helps them manage effectively and efficiently.

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

Here’s what we’ve been working on:

Request number 1270 (Importing Sales)

The issue: When importing sales, TimeForge was not importing the first row because that is usually the header row. This was causing the import tool to exclude one row of sales for a user who does not include a header row.

The fix: The software now determines whether a header row is present so sales are not missed.

Request number 1260 (On-Screen Keyboard)

The issue: The on-screen keyboard was not available for users when declaring tips, so they were forced to use a keyboard or declare their tips via a manager at a later time.

The fix: The on-screen keyboard is now available to users for declaring tips.

Request number 1254 (ShiftBuilder)

The issue: The date or day in the ShiftBuilder required scrolling, which was inconvenient.

The fix: The ShiftBuilder date or day is now available without scrolling.

Request number 1249 (Corporate On-Screen Keyboard Settings)

The issue: The on-screen keyboard is awesome, but one of our users needed more options to be available at the corporate level, so that the settings applied globally.

The fix: The on-screen keyboard’s settings can now be set globally from the corporate level. Options include a full keyboard, a 10-key keyboard, or no keyboard.

Request number 1248 (Attendance Options for Departments)

The issue: Some users who use TimeForge Departments need employees to be clocked into their “default” departments automatically, while others need their employees to be “unassigned” while clocking in, for managers to “assign” correctly later.

The fix: There is a new setting inside of the Attendance Options which allows each location to decide how employees are added, be it to the employee’s default department, or as “unassigned”. We can also notify managers of employees who are “unassigned” to make sure these employees are properly “assigned” to correct departments so that payroll is processed properly.

Request number 1247 (Future Sales)

The issue: Some TimeForge users, like caterers know their actual sales in advance, but TimeForge would not allow actual sales to be entered for the future, as most industries do not have the ability to know their future actual sales!

The fix: Actual sales can now be entered in for the future.

Request number 1246 (Edits when Switched User)

The issue: When making edits while switched into another user’s account, TimeForge’s audits were recording the wrong person as making the edits.

The fix: TimeForge now properly records the actual person making the edits, rather than the person who had been “switched into”. So, a user can’t switch into another user’s account to make it look like someone else made the edit.

Request number 1239 (ADP Double Overtime)

The issue: The TimeForge ADP payroll export did not support double overtime as a separate column. This is a necessity for TimeForge users in California.

The fix: When exporting overtime and double overtime to ADP, there is a new column with the double overtime, for proper payroll processing.

Request number 1238 (Mobile Attendance Costs)

The issue: The attendance costs were not rounding properly on the TimeForge Mobile App.

The fix: They do now!

Request number 1237 (Sales Forecasting)

The issue: One of our users is finding that his Sales Forecasting is not what he expected.

The fix: TimeForge needs more data to make an accurate forecast. We are building a Restaurant Manager POS Sales Integration to ensure that more Sales data can be pulled into TimeForge.

Request number 1217 (Per Shift Costs)

The issue: Employee pay rates were not calculating correctly when the employee’s pay was “per shift” and was using the TimeClock.

The fix:  Costs are now calculating correctly when a user sets the cost to be “per shift” and uses the time clock.

Other items we solved:

Text message reminders for shifts now have the date on them.

When clicking on “Show employees at the location”, managers can change any employee for any department, even those that they do not belong to.