While the majority of the impact which turnover has on your business is difficult to measure, some negative factors can be quantified. Consider these costs when estimating the monetary loss turnover accounts for.

Employee costs during application phase

• Advertise to fill position
• Manager reviews various applications instead of being on the floor
• Manager conducts interviews instead of being on the floor
• Drug screens, educational/criminal background checks, and other reference checks
• Various candidate pre-employment skill, aptitude, and value assessment tests

Employee costs during on-boarding phase

• Trainee wages
• Trainer wages
• External training programs
• Certifications
• Mistakes made while learning

Employee costs while leaving

• Unmet deadlines or goals in employee’s absence
• Lost productivity due to employee’s absence
• Potential to lose other employees
• Lost departmental productivity
• Cost to retain lost employee’s customers

Replacement phase

• Advertise to fill position
• Manager reviews various applications instead of being on the floor
• Manager conducts interviews instead of being on the floor
• Drug screens, educational/criminal background checks, and other reference checks
• Various candidate pre-employment skill, aptitude, and value assessment tests

Also consider the cost of managers dealing with turnover instead of dealing with customers.

The best way to reduce turnover costs is to … reduce turnover. TimeForge can help you reduce your turnover (as well as reduce labor costs, often over 3% within the first week of implementing TimeForge) by providing staff and management a superior means of communication, keeping everyone “in the know” at all times. When it comes to staff turnover, TimeForge reduces it by:

• Ensuring that employees are never scheduled at times they are unavailable by allowing staff  to fill out their own availability (which can be overridden by management) and automatic enforcement of these availability requests.
• Making online shift swaps, pickups, time off requests and most non-face-to-face management tasks simple and fast. Managers are kept in the loop as well!
• Online, text message, and Facebook notifications of work schedules and upcoming shift reminders. TimeForge is available to your employees in formats that they are familiar with and frequently use.
• And many other benefits to managers and staff … keeping employee turnover down at your business!

TimeForge Labor Management can improve your profits by 3-5%, often paying for itself in the first week alone, offering instant ROI for your business! Sign up for your free trial of our employee scheduling software today, or take a look at our other labor management products.

Still not convinced? Read what other TimeForge users are saying!

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TimeForge Scheduling provides flexible, powerful and easy-to-use tools to build and publish an employee schedule, communicate with your staff members, and focus on generating revenue instead of paper-work.   TimeForge Scheduling excels at restaurant schedule creation, scheduling for retailers, and building schedules for other hospitality related industries.

Here’s a list of some of our scheduling features (and it doesn’t include everything we can do with time and attendance, human resources, or our other products).

Employee Scheduling Features

“Basic” Scheduling Features include:

Unlimited employees, multiple locations, employee information management, printable schedules (including individual schedules), online access to posted schedules, data import/export capabilities, data restore and backup capabilities, and password protection for employees and managers.

Additionally, TimeForge offers department management, modified leave types, employee age rules for minors and seniors, availability and requests modified by employees with management approval, position/employee skill levels, sales figures and analytics, and a “Daily Log” with messaging capabilities.

“Advanced” scheduling features include:

Schedule setup wizard, ability to assign jobs/projects/assignments, schedule full or part time employees, assign multiple shifts to same employee on the same day, color-coded shifts, defined holidays and week start day, schedule conflict warnings, and monthly, weekly, and daily views.

Additionally, TimeForge Scheduling offers an interactive User Wizard used to input and modify position/employee information, hourly rate information per position, a unique AutoScheduler which automatically creates the most profit and employee friendly schedule possible, employee shift swapping, employee breaks management, schedule template creation, and automatic employee notification via text message, eMail, and/or Facebook notification! Yes , employees can access their schedule information via social networking sites like Facebook, or from any smartphone!

Staff Scheduling Views and Reports include:

Weekly employee hours, shifts per day/employee, employees lists, time off summary, and daily, weekly, and monthly schedules. Additionally, TimeForge offers over 40 different reports, including employee shift satisfaction ratings, listed unassigned shifts, shift swapping reports, employees who missed assigned shifts, employee certification documentation, employee request charts, employee notifications (which lists the date and time that each employee received schedule notifications from TimeForge), schedule versus attendance summaries, extensive schedule views, employee breaks reports and worksheets, cost analysis charts, multiple labor overview summaries, and much more!

Help and Documentation includes:

Phone support, help documentation, manufacturer link, tutorials and a tour, FAQs, eMail, and general contact forms. Additionally, TimeForge offers help forums, help requests, online manuals (including a video manual!), and help text for every page and feature.

TimeForge Scheduling is easily incorporated to interact with your POS/PMS configuration, and works optimally with all other TimeForge products, including TimeForge HR, TimeForge Attendance, and Daily Log.

Sign up for a free trial today to try out these fantastic features!

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For many businesses, the TimeForge AutoScheduler saves hours of manager time by correctly placing the right employee into the right shift on the schedule.

The AutoScheduler is great because it automatically optimizes your schedule for maximum revenue, efficiency, employee satisfaction, and managerial satisfaction. However, a few of our users would like to do this process themselves, and want to turn the AutoScheduler off.

Here’s how to disable the Autoscheduler:

• Log in to TimeForge.com, and click on the Setup Tab.

Click on the Set Up Tab after you log in.

• Click on Settings.

Click on Settings under the Setup tab.

• If you have multiple locations, click on the Locations link and select the location for which you would like to deactivate the AutoScheduler. If you only have one location, go to the next step.

• Scroll down to the section that reads “TimeForge Configuration”.

Find the Configuration Panel toward the bottom of the page.

• Find the option to enable or disable the AutoScheduler. Set this option to “No“, and the AutoScheduler will no longer be activated.

To turn off the AutoScheduler, select "No" when TimeForge asks if you want it enabled.

Want to give TimeForge Labor Management Software a try?

Sign up for your free trial today to instantly see what TimeForge can do for your business.

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Our TimeForge labor management software is truly top-of-the-line.   If you don’t believe us, you can always take it for a test drive … no strings attached.   Here is a quick run-down of your labor management options, and why you should choose us to manage your labor needs:

Option One: No software

This is a great option if …

• You like to make charts with pencil and paper
• You don’t have a POS (point of sale) software system
• You like to spend a lot of time with a calculator
• Optimizing your workforce and profit is of absolutely no importance to you, and making a profit at your business isn’t a priority
• You don’t mind if employees are late, and no-shows are sometimes acceptable
• You like to talk to employees on the phone to give them their schedule. If they forget and call back a few times it’s fine, because you don’t mind repeating yourself and you have plenty of time to spare.

Option Two: Offline software.

Offline software is a great option if …

• You enjoy making spreadsheets. It’s a hobby of yours.
• You like to buy software frequently, and like paying annual support fees for the latest version (your version will quickly be outdated, and since it’s offline, you’ll need to purchase the latest version when it comes out … and probably re-enter all of your information)
• You don’t have a POS (point of sale) software system, or integrating with your POS isn’t important to you
• Optimizing your workforce and profit is of little importance to you

Option Three: Online software.

Online software is a great option if …

• You don’t want to spend hours scheduling
• You don’t want to worry about buying software when yours is out of date (although some companies will charge you to get updates)
• You demand the highest profit possible
• You want the happiest employees possible

Option Four: TimeForge.

TimeForge is the best option for you because …

• The AutoScheduler^TM automatically creates the most profit-optimized and employee-friendly schedule instantly , no more spreadsheets!
• You will never, ever be charged to update to the latest version of our software. Updates are free and automatic for all of our customers.
• We can integrate our software with your existing POS software for the most profit-efficient solution.
• Employees can use our staff portal, and don’t need to call you about their schedule, or time off – ever!
• TimeForge’s built-in analytics will show you labor costs, ratios, blown budgets, and a slew of graphs and statistics.
• Labor calculations are done automatically, with no calculator needed by you and your staff.

Dollar-for-dollar, you get a heck of a lot more features from TimeForge than from our competitors. Check out our top products:

• TimeForge Scheduling
  
• TimeForge Attendance
• TimeForge Daily Log

Sign up for a free trial of TimeForge today and see how our system is customized to fit your business!

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Building an employee schedule can use hours of your time each week. Unfortunately, after investing extensive periods of frustrating work and paid management time, costly errors and dissatisfied employees are often still the result. Thanks to our most highly celebrated product, TimeForge Scheduling, developing an employee schedule becomes one of the fastest and easiest aspects of your labor management routine!

TimeForge Scheduling gives you four options to find the best employee for the shift. You can leave a shift “Open“, up for “Bid“, use the “AutoScheduler™“, or manually select a particular employee for a shift.

1. “Open” Shifts are not visible to non-management staff members and require fulfilment by a manager. Open shifts are place holders for work to be done by an employee and are best used when you haven’t decided which employee to assign yet.

Use Open Shifts as place holders when creating a schedule.

For example, an Open shift can be created on your schedule and assigned to a position (such as a Restaurant Waiter or Bank Teller). The schedule can then be posted and sent out to staff members without filing this Open shift. At any time, when you decide which employee should work the Open shift, you can come back to the schedule and assign the appropriate staff member, automatically triggering TimeForge to notify the newly assigned staff member. Open shifts allow management to plan for capacity and unknown scheduling circumstances.

2. Bid Shifts give you the ability to make the allotted shift visible to all qualified staff members, who can then bid on the shift, like an auction. TimeForge Bid shifts are a way to allow staff members to build their own schedule, saving you the hassle of needing to assign staff members to every shift.

Use Bid Shifts to let employees choose when they want to work.

For example, a Bid shift can be picked up by several qualified staff members, providing you with a list of multiple employees to choose from who want to work the Bid shift. After employees bid on the available shift on the shift-swapping page, management will be notified who has bid on it and can then make a selection from those staff members. Once the manager has chosen an employee to work the shift, TimeForge automatically notifies them according their customized notification preferences – TimeForge can contact your employees through Facebook, email, or text message!

3.   AutoScheduler™ is an automated solution to solve your scheduling problems. The AutoScheduler™ feature lets you sit back, relax and watch the software do the scheduling for you. All you have to do is select the shift time that needs to be filled, and TimeForge will automatically assign the shift to the best staff member for the job.

Autoschedule shifts to have the best employee for the shift automatically assigned.

The AutoScheduler™ will assign shifts based on a number of factors including historical scheduling patterns, fairness, seniority, availability, labor costs, scheduling practices, skill levels, weekly hours, overtime, and a number of other factors that optimize your schedule to be the most effective and budget-friendly schedule possible.

4. Assign the employee yourself if there is a specific employee you prefer to work that shift. When building the schedule, TimeForge will give you a list of all employees who are available to work the shift, so you can just click on their name to schedule them!

Select from the list of available employees if you want someone specific to work a particular shift.

Assign employees yourself, use Open, Bid, or AutoScheduled shifts, or use any combination while scheduling!

TimeForge makes quick work of your labor management needs so you can focus on running the floor and motivating employees!

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

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The reach of turnover’s negative impact on businesses is often underestimated by management and is frequently accepted as “part of the industry”. You should never accept any unnecessary employee turnover, especially in service industries. To see how turnover affects your business, think about how often the following effects show themselves at your business.

Lost productivity – Other staff members will have to pick up the slack of a missing employee, which reduces everyone’s overall productivity and your bottom line.

Temporary cost of replacement (i.e. contractor wages) – Some positions can be filled by others picking up the slack, resulting in no immediate incremental expense. However, if this is a frequent occurrence, morale can suffer, leading to more turnover. Other positions will need to be filled with temporary or contract workers, which results in additional cost.

Recruiting/hiring expense – This is the literal cost of filling the position and can include search fees paid to agencies or headhunters, referral fees paid to employees, ads in newspapers, or job board posting fees.

Management time – The time that management has to spend going over resumes, scheduling and conducting interviews, evaluating candidates, and making job offers not only costs the business more wages, but also means that the business is losing productivity because the manager is not on the floor.

Training costs – This includes all the costs associated with ensuring that new staff members have all the skills and tools they need to do the job, like the wages of a trainer and time spent assessing the new hire.

Learning curve – The time it takes the new employee to perform at an optimal performance level. During the training phase, an employee’s productivity and skill set is obviously less than a fully trained employee, and it will take different amounts of time for different new hires to catch up.

Knowledge replacement – Much like the cost of the training phase, your new hire lacks the refined skills that come with months or years of practice. Seasoned employees are extremely valuable to your business, and the cost of losing one has far reaching consequences.

As a rule of thumb, research has shown that calculated turnover costs can run anywhere from 25% to 150% of the position’s salary and benefits, depending on how many of the above costs are applicable to the position.

Reduce your turnover by letting TimeForge handle the stressful parts of your job! TimeForge makes scheduling, payroll, time attendance, and other daily hassles simple and fast!

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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!

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The number one reason managers quit a restaurant job is because of frustration associated with scheduling. After dealing with all the employee requests and working around personal schedules, managers invest large amounts of time and effort into a schedule which inevitably fails to make everyone happy. Some managers employ a “if the schedule doesn’t work for you, too bad” attitude to reduce their frustrations. This definitely reduces a manager’s stress, but according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, this directly increases turnover rates, which cost your business money. Whether managers are accommodating to employees or not, the frustration of scheduling reduces managerial job satisfaction, ultimately resonating through the ranks to all employees.

According to retensa, 94% of turnover is preventable, so money spent proactively on employee  training, staff morale, career development, and staff-management communication can have significant return on investment by resulting in reduced turnover. TimeForge reduces the time and cost associated with accomplishing these vital employee hiring and retention tasks. TimeForge makes building schedules, tracking attendance, exporting and approving payroll and most other management duties fast and simple, which makes managers and staff happy!

Instead of dealing with inefficient and cumbersome Excel spreadsheets and paper logs, managers who use TimeForge are less inclined to feel negatively about scheduling. TimeForge saves management hours and eliminates errors. TimeForge handles HR duties, including document and certification storage, schedule construction, and most labor management tasks.

With TimeForge, your staff will communicate better, work more efficiently, and eliminate costly mistakes associated with human error. Additionally, TimeForge helps make your business more green by drastically reducing paper usage.   Being a green business has been shown to elevate staff morale and improve employee retention rate – staff members (especially Gen Y employees) feel good about being associated with a company that’s environmentally conscious.

Click here to sign up for a free trial of TimeForge and start improving your bottom line today.

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TimeForge is both powerful and flexible!   We provide a stable and simple labor management platform that gives you, the user, the power you need to manage your workforce.

One way that TimeForge provides simple labor scheduling is by providing you, the user, with the ability to schedule staff any way you want to.   That’s right – schedule your labor based on the requirements of your business!

TimeForge supports building schedules in many different ways, and provides flexible, powerful, and easy to use tools to make sure you can get done building the schedule, communicate with your staff members, and go home early!   For example, you can build schedules:

• One shift at a time, using day parts (Work Periods) or specific time periods
• Bulk copying of shifts from one day to another
• Copying work shifts from one employee to another
• Using daily templates with predefined shifts
• Utilizing weekly templates with dozens or hundreds of shifts
• Bid shifts, which allow staff members to help build the schedule
• Copying a previous schedule to create a new schedule for next week
• Daily, using a gantt chart to oversee your exact staffing needs
• Weekly, using an Excel-like interface to quickly and easily schedule staff

And all of these staff scheduling options can use “fixed employee” scheduling … where you, the manager, choose the employee you want to work.   Alternatively, you can build labor schedules using the automated power of the TimeForge AutoScheduler.

Edit a Shift in the Detail View

In addition, you can build schedules using departments, where you can appoint a supervisor to oversee the schedule, availability changes, and staff communication.

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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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