Labor Management. NOW Simple.

Over the last few months, we have been improving all three of our hospitality and retail labor management products, including TimeForge Attendance.

TimeForge Attendance is a powerful time and attendance software system that for employee time cards and managing payroll.  Using TimeForge Attendance, staff members can clock in and out, managers can review employee time cards, and then management can approve time punches for third party payroll processing.

TimeForge Attendance can perform many other time management duties, including:

• Tip tracking and mileage reporting
• Record staff notes about each shift worked
• Stop buddy punching with biometric fingerprint scanners
• Interface attendance and time punches with your favorite Point of Sale system
• Track time off, sick time, and PTO time for quick processing
• Allow staff to check their time cards using the TimeForge employee portal

If you are using a standard time clock, or are having staff write their arrival, departure, and lunch breaks on a piece of paper, switching to TimeForge Attendance will save you hours of headaches each and every week!

Some of the recent improvements to TimeForge Attendance include:

• Automatically switch positions if an employee is already clocked in. Staff members are occasionally responsible for working back-to-back shifts with different departments or positions.  For example, an employee might be scheduled from 10:00am – 2:00pm as a Cashier, but from 2:00pm – 6:00pm as a Delivery Driver.  To ensure that they remember to clock out as a Cashier, and in as a Delivery Driver, at 2:00pm, TimeForge can automatically do this for your staff members.  This feature can be configured on a per-location or per-department basis.

Automatically Switch the Clocked-In Position for an Employee

• Clock out staff members at a specific time each day. To ensure that staff members are all clocked out by a certain time, you can set a department-level or location-level clock out time. For example, if your business closes at 11:00pm, and no one should be at work beyond 11:30pm, you can set TimeForge to automatically clock out all staff members at 11:30pm.  This feature can be configured on a per-location or per-department basis.

Automatically Clock Out Employees Out At A Specific Time

• Automatically clock employees in based on their posted schedule. Sometimes staff members forget to clock in, even though they are scheduled to work and arrived on time. TimeForge can automatically clock staff members in based on the posted schedule, if they have not yet clocked in.  For example, if an employee is scheduled to work at 8:30am, TimeForge can automatically clock them into the system at 8:30am.  This feature can be configured on a per-location or per-department basis.

Automatically Clock In Employees Based on the Schedule

• Receive an email message during the day showing which staff members are clocked in. If you’d like to know which employees are clocked in at your business during an important part of the day – before a dinner rush, just before closing, or after the first morning shift – you can!  Update your alerts and set the time you’d like to receive notification of who is clocked in.

Receive a Daily Email of Clocked-In Staff

• Automatically clock employees out based on their posted schedule. Sometimes staff members forget to clock out at the end of the day.  TimeForge can automatically clock staff members out based on the posted schedule, if they have not yet clocked out.  For example, if an employee is scheduled to leave work at 8:30pm, TimeForge can automatically clock them out of the system at 8:30pm.  This feature can be configured on a per-location or per-department basis.

Automatically Clock Out Employees Based on the Schedule

Use a time and attendance system to make your life easy and improve profitability! TimeForge can quickly and easily manage staff timecards, employee attendance, and export payroll for accurate processing.  Sign up for a trial today to use TimeForge Attendance.

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Industry analysts say sales at auto supply retailers have been bolstered during the downturn by customers purchasing replacement parts as they maintain older vehicles rather than investing in new models, a cost-saving trend that is likely to continue as the economy recovers. That’s good news for the auto supply industry.

But that doesn’t mean that auto supply store managers can get sloppy about employee scheduling and attendance monitoring. In fact, dealing with an uptick in business in a downturn makes auto parts supply employee scheduling and attendance monitoring even trickier—you need to schedule enough employees to handle your customers, without over-staffing or watching your profits leach into unnecessary overtime. Without careful management, relatively small successes can lead to large failures. 

Even in more normal times, auto parts and supply employee scheduling and attendance monitoring can be a headache. The manager building the schedule has to consider employee abilities/skills, anticipated sales volume, employee availability, individual work requests, accrued PTO, labor laws for employees who are minors, overtime, and overall labor costs.

Make a mistake with any of these details, and the store can lose sales, employees, or be fined. Managers have to communicate the schedule (and every shift swap or schedule update) to all the employees. They have to keep an eye on late or missed shifts, early clock ins and late clock outs, or buddy time punching.

It’s tedious, it’s time-consuming, and it’s crucial.

These are dizzying times for auto parts and supply store managers. The industry—and key players—seem to be changing on a minute by minute basis. Efficient auto parts employee scheduling and attendance monitoring is essential, but there are plenty of other urgent issues vying for a manager’s attention.

That’s where a powerful employee scheduling and attendance software system like Time Forge comes in.

With TimeForge you can…

• Create a schedule in 30 seconds rather than hours.
• Manage schedules at one or many locations.
• Schedule those with particular skills or the most experience in the high volume time slots.
• Notify employees of upcoming schedules and schedule changes by email or text message – eliminating confusion and missed shifts
• Monitor attendance from a remote location using the web, a cell phone, or even Facebook.
• Stop early clock ins and late clock outs or buddy punching to provide immediate labor cost controls.
• Accurately forecast future scheduling needs and labor costs.
• Save hours every day that can be used to solve pressing problems not untangling scheduling snafus.
• Increase profits by 3-5%.
• And much more…

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

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At TimeForge we are continuing to innovate employee scheduling and labor management – always making employee schedules easier to build and maintain.  And we recently introduced Employee Schedule Snapshots … a new and easy way to save, restore, and perform “What If” scenarios on your employee work schedule.

What can you use Employee Schedule Snapshots for?

Schedule Snapshots are useful for performing point-in-time saves.  TimeForge schedules are automatically saved anytime any field is modified, but sometimes it is useful to save the current schedule before making any modifications – so that you may come back to it if necessary.  Schedule Snapshots allow you to archive the current version of the schedule, along with some quick stats about the number of shifts, and the cost of the schedule.

At any point in time, a previous Schedule Snapshot can easily be restored.  Simply choose which snapshot you’d like to restore, and your employee work schedule will immediately roll back to the previously saved Schedule Snapshot.

Employee Schedule Snapshots are available on the Schedule Detail page, and are very useful for:

• Integrating newly hired staff members (Identifying which shifts can be moved around to accommodate the new employees)
• Locating shifts that can be removed or modified to reduce labor costs
• Viewing the effects of a shift swap or drastic schedule change prior to actually “doing it”
• Rolling back to a previous version of the current employee schedule
• And other “What If?” scenarios with the work schedule and staff members

What do you think of our Employee Schedule Snapshots?  We’d love to hear from you!

TimeForge labor management software (employee scheduling software, attendance software, and others) is used by owners and operators of restaurants, retail stores, bars, grills, and other service-oriented businesses to increase profits, reduce turnover, and improve retention.

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Sign up today for a Free Trial of the TimeForge products!  We offer 10-day trials of TimeForge Scheduling, TimeForge Attendance, and TimeForge Daily Log.  Combine the TimeForge products together to create a powerful productivity tool that is just right for you, your staff members, and your business!

Scheduling

Making a great employee schedule every week is an important task for your business. Employee work schedules should do more than notify staff when to work – an employee schedule should add profit to the business without being a painful chore.

• Make Schedules Fast – in Under 30 Seconds!
• Streamline Work Requests and Availability
• Automatic Staff Email and Text Notifications
• Detailed Reporting of Labor Costs (more than 40 reports!)
• Easily Manage Overtime and Double Shifts
• Track sick, vacation, and PTO
• Monitor employee certifications and employee reviews

Sign Up Now or Read About TimeForge Scheduling

Attendance

Employee attendance and timecards are extremely difficult to monitor effectively – buddy punching, early clock ins, employees riding the clock, and forgetful employees are only a few of the issues that managers must confront on a daily basis.

• Monitor labor costs (and who is clocked in), in realtime
• Limit clock ins to specific computers or IP addresses
• Enforce employee schedules, stop early clock-ins
• Biometric fingerprint scanner eliminates buddy punching
• One-click payroll reports – eliminate timecard errors

Sign Up Now or Read About TimeForge Attendance

Daily Log

Businesses lose market share to other successful businesses that are actively communicating with staff members in an effective way. Communication among staff members is a key component to running a profitable business.

• Digital log books can replace multiple paper logs
• Record notes and numbers, and set up todo lists
• Manage equipment maintenance, employee reviews, weekly orders
• Analyze day-to-day or week-to-week performance indicators

Sign Up Now or Read About TimeForge Daily Log

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