The TimeForge team recently improved our proprietary AutoScheduler™ technology to make scheduling large schedules faster. Specifically, TimeForge users who routinely schedule more than 200 shifts per schedule will notice that the AutoScheduler can automatically schedule employees into shifts much faster than previously.

How long does it take to make your employee labor schedule? It should take less than 5 minutes! Did you know that TimeForge can streamline and minimize labor costs through effective employee scheduling at your retail business, restaurant, bar, club, or hotel?

The restaurant, retail, and service industries are plagued by fluctuating labor costs, minimum wage rules, and complex overtime regulations. Although overtime and minimum wage regulations affect each state and country in different ways, several areas stand out with complicated overtime rules (such as California and New York labor laws, or many European countries).

TimeForge now understands many of these complex rules, and makes sure to schedule employees in a manner that minimizes overtime when using our AutoScheduler™ tool. When overtime is likely to occur, you and your management team will receive a warnings while making the schedule, and again before you post your schedule. Additionally, TimeForge calculates overtime for all employee shift swaps, and warns your team if the exchange will create overtime for the employee picking up the shift.

How long does it take to make your employee labor schedule? It should take less than 5 minutes! Did you know that TimeForge can streamline and minimize labor costs through effective employee scheduling at your retail business, restaurant, bar, club, or hotel?

There are many techniques for scheduling employees, and we realize that each organization schedules labor differently. Within TimeForge, managers are able to restrict employee schedules based on minimum and maximum weekly hours (such as: “Alex should be scheduled for more than 20 hours but less than 30 hours a week”) and minimum and maximum daily shifts (such as: “Sarah should not be scheduled for doubles”).

The TimeForge AutoScheduler™ system will do its very best to make sure your needs are met, and if you schedule employees manually, it will warn you when your employees exceed or drop-below your specified values.

However, users of TimeForge can now limit employees to a minimum and/or maximum number of shifts per week (such as: “Joe should receive between 3 and 4 shifts a week”).

Just one more way we are making labor scheduling easier!

How long does it take to make your employee labor schedule? It should take less than 5 minutes! Did you know that TimeForge can streamline and minimize labor costs through effective employee scheduling at your retail business, restaurant, bar, club, or hotel?

As previously mentioned, the team behind the TimeForge employee scheduling software has been working hard on version 1.9.2 of TimeForge - released today, Jan 1, 2008. Happy New Year!

So, what’s new in TimeForge? A lot! Some of our recent improvements include:

• Messages about your schedule are available on all of the schedule views (including the daily, weekly detail, and weekly summary views). You can see which “rules” have been broken by your management team while building the schedule, whether the shifts were created by the AutoScheduler or by management.

• Day Parts are now displayed in the schedule (on the day view), and can be used to segment your day into different parts (for instance morning, afternoon, and evening shifts).

• Day Parts are also visible when looking at employee availability. You can quickly see what shifts employees are available to work.

• When editing an availability request, you can click on the day of the week to make an all-day request.

• A new report: On the report page, there is a new 7-day schedule, called “Condensed 7-day schedule, sorted by position.” This new report is a variation of the Condensed 7-day schedule, where all of the employees are grouped by the position / department.

• Templates have been updated to look like the Daily Schedule View, including graphing and different views of the day (sort by position or employee).

• Additional numerous small improvements were made to the software ….

How long does it take to make your labor schedule? It should take less than 5 minutes! Did you know that TimeForge can streamline and minimize labor costs through effective employee scheduling at your retail business, restaurant, bar, club, or hotel?

Leaving for home early today? You could be if you schedule employees with TimeForge.

With TimeForge’s AutoScheduler, you no longer waste hours checking that every shift has the right employee scheduled. The AutoScheduler understands the many different rules such as minimum and maximum hours for employees, skill levels of employees, whether or not employees can work doubles, labor costs, and when employees are available to work (availability and requests). With this information and without any effort on your part, TimeForge automatically schedules the right employees in the right shifts.

TimeForge’s daily templates make labor scheduling simple! Each daily template can have shifts which are pre-assigned to employees (salaried employees) or they can be assigned to employees when you create the actual schedule (part-time laborers). Many TimeForge users have templates for each day of the week, and additional templates for special occasions. To create Templates, click on the Schedules tab, and then click on Edit Templates.

The TimeForge Availability and Request system helps quickly build accurate schedules that match employees availability and requests. TimeForge assumes that all employees are available by default, so employees only need to enter when they cannot work. Requests can be simple, such as “I need next Wednesday off”, or complex, such as “I cannot work every 3rd Thursday or Friday starting next week.” Requests entered by employees must be approved by a manager or supervisor before the request shows up on the schedule.

Remember, TimeForge requires no contracts and no long-term commitments. There are no additional service contracts, no per-call or per-hour support fees, and you can cancel TimeForge at any time, for any reason. Upgrades are included in the monthly price, and we take care of the data backups. Best of all, 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, or restaurant?

Our team is proud to announce the latest version of simple employee scheduling … TimeForge version 1.8.6! This version includes a number of minor bug-fixes, as well as some major new features – all designed to save you time!

Some of the new features include:

• Split Shifts. TimeForge’s AutoScheduler will try to not assign employees to split shifts. Employees who close your business will not be scheduled to open the next morning, if at all possible. This makes employees and managers happy!

• Reports. The main report which runs when you click on “Print” from the schedule page now prints only scheduled employees (not all employees). This makes the printout more concise, and easier to read! There’s also a new report, which can be found on the Reports page, and is called “Costs by Position”. This report gives managers a quick, graphical summary of where labor dollars are being spent on the schedule.

• Day Parts and Availability. You asked for it, and you got it! One of the most requested features from TimeForge users is to be able to use the request and availability editors with your own “time of day”. For example, your “Morning” shift may run from 6am – 11am, and your “Afternoon” shift may go from 11am – 4pm, and now you can setup requests and availability using “Morning” or “Afternoon” times.Login to TimeForge, and click on “Schedules”, and then choose “Day Parts”. Enter your shifts (such as open, morning, afternoon, evening, or close), and select a start time, end time, and a description. Day part periods cannot overlap. Once you have entered all of your time periods, you can save the Day Parts.

  Once Day Parts are in TimeForge, you can create and edit requests and availability using them. You, and your employees, will have the option of entering a time range, or you can pick a Day Part instead.

Look out for Version 1.9 and Version 2.0! Employee Scheduling will be faster and easier! Spend time doing what you want to do…

How long does it take to make your employee schedules? It should take less than 5 minutes! Did you know that TimeForge can streamline and minimize labor expenses through effective employee labor management at your business, bar, club, or restaurant.

On Sunday night, we released the latest version of TimeForge, the groundbreaking, simple and easy to use employee scheduling software. This new version continues to improve the TimeForge software, adding many new features so you can go home sooner!

What’s New?

Schedule without Wages. Just want a simple scheduling tool? TimeForge can now schedule employees without having any wage information entered into the software. All that is required are the names of your employees and the positions that they can work. That’s it! Of course, TimeForge can do much more …

Turn off the AutoScheduler. For many businesses, the AutoScheduler saves hours of management time by correctly placing the right employee into the right shift on the schedule. However a few of our users would like to do this process themselves, and want to turn the AutoScheduler off. To do so, login to TimeForge.com, and click on the “Settings” tab. Then, click on the “Settings for this Location”, and locate the “TimeForge configuration” section. One of the options is to enable or disable the AutoScheduler. Setting this option to “No” will disable the AutoScheduler.

Double Alerts. If an employee shift swap will result in a double shift (where an employee will work more than one shift that day) … you’ll be notified when you approve or deny the shift!

How long does it take to make your employee schedules? It should take less than 5 minutes! Did you know that TimeForge can streamline and minimize labor expenses through effective employee labor management at your business, bar, club, or restaurant.

As recently reported on Nation’s Restaurant News, “(Sep. 27) Get in, set up an effective staff schedule and move on to the next task: that’s what most restaurateurs want out of their scheduling software. But knowing that doesn’t necessarily make their search for the right software any easier, as the schedulers available today run the gamut from elementary point-of-sale-system modules to high-end workforce management applications.

The trick, some operators indicate, is to find the right system or service for your operation without buying features that will go unused.”

NRN reviewed two products in their article:

• ScheduleAnywhere
• ScheduleWriter

TimeForge.com has all of the features of both of the reviewed products, with an easier to use interface, an integrated AutoScheduler, and better pricing! But then, I suppose we are biased.

You can read the full article at Nation’s Restaurant News. They require registration, but the registration is free.

How long does it take to make your labor schedules? It should take less than 5 minutes! Did you know that TimeForge can streamline and minimize labor costs through effective employee scheduling at your restaurant, bar, club, or business.

Managers Save Hours Making Employee Schedules, Reduce Turnover

Lubbock, TX – October 22, 2007 - Labor is one of two large cost centers in the food-service business, and can account for more than thirty-percent (30%) of the expenses in a well managed restaurant or club. Managers spend hours every week deciding how to schedule their labor force – time that could be spent with guests or managing other aspects of the business. Poorly scheduling the work force can result in severe negative consequences for the business including higher turnover, reduction in morale, and increased payroll expenses. In development for almost three years, the latest version of TimeForge.com provides a quick, simple, and affordable solution for managers to schedule their work force.

According to a recent study performed by TimeForge.com, managers in the restaurant, bar, and club industry spend between one and eight hours every week building their labor schedule. Scheduling employees is a complicated and thankless task, requiring that managers juggle availability sheets, request and manager log books, and sticky notes in addition to memorizing overtime regulations, labor laws, and the staffing needs of the business. With an average salary and benefits package of more than $62,500 per year, managers can cost a restaurant more than $1,000 a month to maintain a basic labor schedule. The latest version of TimeForge.com turns employee scheduling into an automated task that can be performed in a few minutes - saving thousands of dollars every year for the store.

TimeForge.com is an easy-to-use web application that can be accessed remotely by both employees and managers. The software currently assists more than 600 businesses schedule their employees, including many hospitality and food-service establishments such as restaurants, bars, hotels, clubs. However, other companies such as retail centers, health clinics, movie theaters, and realty companies are taking advantage of the easy-to-use and affordable scheduling software. “… I know that it is geared towards restaurants, but we are a real estate company and we love it because it is inexpensive and it is so easy to use.” said Nicole, Managing Administrator for Exit Premier Realty.

The labor scheduling software comes with a number of features designed to make managing a schedule simple:

• Managers can display schedules in list, grid, or graphical formats.
• AutoScheduler™ system builds a complete schedule in seconds.
• Requests and employee availability are stored indefinitely, and automatically appear on the schedule.
• Employees are automatically notified by email and text messages of any posted schedule changes.
• Managers can compare theoretical schedules and actual payroll costs to calculate performance.
• Employees can swap shifts with other qualified employees.
• And much more!

Other users, such as Sherry, a manager at Music Man’s BBQ, enjoy easy employee scheduling with the TimeForge.com AutoScheduler™ system. According to Sherry, “It’s cut my time to make a schedule in half!” The AutoScheduler™ system considers millions of employee combinations based on factors such as availability, labor costs, employee strengths, and overtime regulations. The best schedule available for the business is calculated in seconds, and management can modify it where necessary.

If you manage employees, online labor scheduling software is a worthwhile investment. Properly managing labor saves time and money for the business, and improves the job satisfaction of both employees and managers. For more information about TimeForge.com, and to sign up for a Free Trial, visit the website at http://www.TimeForge.com

About TimeForge.com
TimeForge.com is the premier employee scheduling software, designed to provide fast ROI benefits to the business, and to meet the growing demands of the work force. TimeForge.com is affordable software that works for both independent and chain operations.

How long does it take to make your employee schedules? It should take less than 5 minutes! Did you know that TimeForge can streamline and minimize labor costs through effective employee scheduling at your restaurant, bar, club, or business.