Labor Management. NOW Simple.» employee scheduling

Messaging with TimeForge

marketing — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 17:53:25 +0000

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.

NRA Show 2010

marketing — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 04:25:58 +0000

The TimeForge crew travelled to Chicago to attend the 91^st National Restaurant Association trade show, which offered more exhibits and information than we could have possibly hoped to absorb during our four day trip. Every year, Chicago hosts over 75,000 food professionals who gather to share and learn about trends and innovations in the service industries. We went to spread the word about our employee scheduling software, tell people how much time and money it can save them, learn about cool new things that affect restaurants, and well – mostly we went to eat! With revolutionary new marketing practices, award-winning equipment, exciting advances in “Green” technologies, and tables overflowing with culinary delights, the 2010 NRA show continued its annual tradition of overwhelming our taste buds and tickling our gadget-crazed fancies.

This show had an eight and a half percent increase in the number of exhibitors compared to last year, so 2010′s show was even more packed with information than usual. The sharing of information did not fall on deaf ears, as there was also a more than eleven percent increase in the number of attendees – which came from over 120 countries!

Perhaps most importantly, the food was awesome! One of our favorite products that was introduced at this year’s show is Chipstix, which are potato chips on a stick… a simple, yet truly revolutionary concept! We hope the chipstix trend spreads like wildfire! The Chork, a disposable chopstick-fork hybrid, is another of our favorite new products! A fork on one end and chopsticks on the other, the Chork looks like it could actually prevent chopstick-challenged folks from looking silly while eating Asian fare. Our technology itch was scratched by the YWaiter iPhone application, a mobile app which acts as your waiter at participating restaurants. With YWaiter, customers can place drink orders and check out at their own convenience! If this trend catches on, it could revolutionize the entire service industry!

Perhaps our favorite part at this year’s show was the very spontaneous NRA flash mob dance, which really exemplified the humor and camaraderie found in few other industries. Overall, we were entirely pleased with our trip to Chicago and look forward to next year’s show! We hope to see you at the 2011 NRA show!

Easily Manage Labor with Innovative Staffing Reports

apresley — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 22:02:14 +0000

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.

Software Update Allows for Spreadsheet Importing and Easy Integration

apresley — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 14:45:11 +0000

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.”

Labor Management Software Update Simplifies Employee Scheduling

apresley — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 23:59:05 +0000

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.

New Schedule Demo

apresley — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 15:49:19 +0000

Haven’t quite gotten started with TimeForge yet? Want to see some of what TimeForge can do for your business? Ready to see how fast TimeForge can build a schedule for you?

Please take a look at our latest demo video … in 4 minutes and 30 seconds we can show you the power of TimeForge as we add positions, create employees, build a schedule, and send the schedule to our staff members using email and text messages.

Get the Flash Player to see this movie.

You should be using an employee scheduling product to make your life easier! TimeForge can quickly and easily build your employee schedules, manage attendance, reduce labor costs, and streamline labor management. Sign up for a trial today!

Convenience Stores

apresley — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 17:13:52 +0000

In a time of tight cost controls, workforce optimization for convenience stores is more important than ever. It’s complex, it’s time consuming, and it’s tedious. And it’s essential. Over-staff and you lose money. Under-staff and you lose customers.

Luckily, TimeForge can cut the time spent doing routine but time-consuming tasks like building a convenience store employee schedule from hours to seconds. And it gives you the tools you need to fine-tune your work force and reduce costs with attendance management controls.

Here’s an example: many convenience store managers spend hours just creating an employee schedule. You have to take a huge number of factors into consideration – your employees’ availability, skill levels, accrued PTO, time off or shift swap requests, the need for 24/7 coverage, and the busy (and not so busy) times in your store. Then you have to communicate the schedule to all your employees, redo it in the event of an unexpected illness or time-off requests (and find someone to fill in for the absent employee), and then communicate the updates to all the employees.

And that doesn’t even take into account attendance monitoring or labor forecasting – vital steps in this economy for optimizing your convenience store workforce and reducing costs.

Some of TimeForge’s Benefits for Convenience Store Operators Include…

Build efficient employee schedules for one or more locations – in seconds.
Record staff member availability, employee time-off requests, and other key information.
Export payroll to many popular payroll providers – such as Quickbooks, SurePayroll, ADP, Paychex, and CompuPay – with a single click.
Notify employees of schedules or schedule changes by text message or email – eliminating employee confusion and missed shifts while reducing turnover.
Stop early clock ins and late clock outs or buddy punching to provide immediate labor cost controls.
Remotely check on employees that are clocked in – using the web, Facebook, or a cell phone.
Provide remote access for employees to view work schedules, review timecards, request time off, change work availability, swap shifts with other staff members, and receive daily schedule alerts via email or text messages.
And much more …

TimeForge does more than build effective, efficient employee schedules quickly for your convenience store. TimeForge is also a powerful tool in workforce optimization for c-stores. With TimeForge you can also:

Automatically schedule employees with the strongest skills during your busiest times.
Be notified of potential labor shortages automatically for your c-store.
Monitor your labor costs – in real time on the computer, Facebook, iPhone, or Blackberry.
Utilize more than 3 dozen different reports to monitor labor costs and scheduling trends.
Avoid layoffs – or unnecessary hiring – by using your current staff more efficiently.
Try out various “what-if” scenarios to visualize staffing changes – without losing your original schedule.
Increase convenience store profits by 3-5%.

TimeForge is a complete labor management solution for convenience stores, providing one-click seamless access to employee scheduling, time and attendance, and payroll reports. Use the whole TimeForge product suite, or only the parts that your business requires.

Time is money. If you’re still not convinced, read what other TimeForge users say about the time and money they’ve saved with this powerful labor management software here. Or sign up today for your free trial and see for yourself.

TimeForge is a complete labor management solution for the restaurant and hospitality industry, providing one-click seamless access to employee scheduling, time and attendance, and payroll reports. Use the whole TimeForge product suite, or only the parts that your business requires.

Grocery Stores

apresley — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 04:18:50 +0000

Grocery management sometimes feels like juggling cats – there is a lot to do, only a few hours to do the necessary tasks, and a simple task, such as getting staff and vendors to cooperate, is tedious by itself. Labor management is only one aspect of your day, but it’s an important – and time consuming – one. Over-staff and you could lose a lot of money. Under-staff and your customers will go to another grocer.

TimeForge can cut the time spent doing routine but tedious tasks like building a grocery employee schedule or monitoring attendance at your grocery from hours to minutes. And TimeForge gives you the tools you need to painlessly do the less routine, but vitally important, tasks like fine-tuning your work force and monitoring and forecasting labor costs.

If you spend hours just creating an employee schedule, you’re not alone. It’s not easy. You have to take a huge number of factors into consideration – your employees’ specific availability, skill levels, accrued PTO, time off and shift swap requests, and the busy (and not so busy) times in that particular store.

Once the staff schedule is complete, you have to communicate the schedule to all your employees, redo it in the event of an unexpected illness or time-off requests – and find on-call employees to fill in for absent staff members. All affected staff members need to be reminded of the schedule changes, again. Small mistakes can result in missed shifts, unhappy employees (and increased turnover), or even labor fines.

With TimeForge you can …

Build efficient employee schedules for one or more locations, in just a few minutes for each store.
Export payroll to many popular payroll providers – such as ADP, SurePayroll, Paychex, Quickbooks, and others – with a single click.
Notify employees of schedules or schedule changes by text message or email – eliminating employee confusion and missed shifts and reducing turnover.
Record staff member availability, employee time-off requests, and other key information.
Stop early clock ins and late clock outs or buddy punching to provide immediate labor cost controls.
Remotely check on employees that are clocked in – using the web, Facebook, or a cell phone.
Provide remote 24/7 access for employees to view work schedules, review timecards, request time off, change work availability, swap shifts with other staff members, and receive daily schedule alerts via email or text messages.
And much more …

Your time is money. But in both flush and tight economic periods, grocery managers need to do more than manage day-to-day activities quickly and efficiently. In addition to saving manager and staff hours on scheduling and attendance monitoring, with TimeForge you can cut costs by:

Scheduling employees with the strongest skills during your busiest times.
Receive notifications of potential labor shortages automatically.
Monitoring your labor costs – in real time.
Take advantage of nearly 3 dozen different reports to keep an eye on labor costs and scheduling trends.
Using your existing staff more efficiently in order to avoid layoffs or unnecessary hiring.
Trying out various “what-if” scenarios to visualize staffing or schedule changes—without losing your original schedule.

In fact, TimeForge can help you increase grocery store profits by 3-5%

Our New Employee Scheduling System!

apresley — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 15:45:46 +0000

If you are a long-time TimeForge user, you are probably familiar with our system, and how it continues to evolve to take advantage of new technology, faster computers, and easier ways to manage employee schedules and track time and attendance. If you haven’t burned, thrown away, or otherwise destroyed all of your Excel labor spreadsheets – now is the time!

On July 11th, at the Retail Solutions Provider Association (RSPA) trade show held in Las Vegas, we debuted our brand new scheduling system. New users of TimeForge are already using the new scheduling system, and the feedback has been tremendous so far (keep it coming!). The new system looks similar to Microsoft Excel, but includes many enhancements necessary to build a schedule.

Some of the new features include:

The ability to see (and change) the entire schedule from a single screen. Up to seven days can be shown at a time on the screen, and the schedule can be displayed by staff members, or by position – whichever you want to use!

Add a shift to multiple days with a single click. For example, if “Joe” works on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday – there is no need to create four separate shifts. Simply create one, and “check” all of the other days to add the shift to them.

When adding or editing shifts, you can now view all of the other shifts that the employee is working, and can also see their availability. No need to switch screens!

Display shifts by times, hours, or expected labor costs.

View employee totals (such as the number of hours worked by an staff member), and daily totals (such as the expected labor cost for the day) on the same screen.

Drag and drop scheduling! Schedule one employee, and then copy or move their shifts to another employee.

Build Employee Schedules by Employee

TimeForge still includes all of the scheduling features that continue to make us a leader in employee scheduling:

The one and only TimeForge AutoScheduler™ learns about your scheduling patterns, and can build a complete employee schedule in just a few seconds – or use schedule templates to quickly build schedules.

Our proprietary Daily View, providing instant verification of your schedule – do you have too many cooks, or not enough staff members? – and staffing charts (gantt / bar charts). See where your schedule is too heavy, or insufficiently staffed.

Build schedules by department, or for any time range! Divide up responsibility for scheduling among several responsible managers or supervisors.

Compare the schedule to forecasted sales, table turns, guest counts, parked cars, full-time equivalents (FTE), or any other metric – and receive alerts when the schedule is out of line.

Schedule SnapShots allow you to perform what-if scenarios, and the ability to jump back to a previous snapshot at any time.

And much more …

Add or Edit a Shift with Insight About the Employee

If you are currently using the “old” TimeForge scheduling system, that’s ok, you can continue to use it. However, please use and become familiar with the new scheduling system – we will be phasing out the “old” system in the future. To try out the new system, follow these steps:

Go to one of your schedules (or build a new one).
On the “Schedule Detail” screen, click on the “Switch to the new TimeForge scheduling system” link (if you don’t have this link – congratulations! you are already using the new scheduling system).
Play with the new staff scheduling system.
If you want to switch back to the “old” system, simply click on the “Switch to the old scheduling system” link within your schedule.

Build Employee Schedules by Position

As always, we’d love to hear your feedback on the new scheduling system.

How long does it take to make an employee schedule for your workforce? 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, hotel, bank, school, bar, club, or retail business. Sign up for a trial today!

Support for Salaried Employees from within Dinerware

apresley — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 14:15:32 +0000

Do you want to be able to track salaried staff members from within Dinerware Point of Sale? TimeForge now supports employees who are salaried / full-time from within Dinerware – so you can track full-time employees, as well as hourly / part-time staff.

To enable support for salaried staff members, first make sure you are running the latest TimeForge-Dinerware Bridge software. Then, while inside of Dinerware, open the employee, and edit their positions / job codes. Set the hourly payrate and the overtime payrate to be $0 / hour, and then save the information. Run “Synchronize Now” in the TimeForge Translator, as well as the TimeForge Connector (or, just wait for the two systems to automatically synchronize themselves).

Now, you can log in to TimeForge, and go to the employee list. Find the staff member you modified, and edit their account. Scroll down to the list of employee positions, and you will see that you can change the payrate / payscale for this employee – it is no longer controlled by Dinerware. You can now set TimeForge to export a fixed rate, or fixed hourly amount, when the payroll export is run – regardless of any timepunches within the Point of Sale system.

These employees will still need to clock in / out inside of Dinerware, but these time punches will be ignored for the purposes of running payroll reports on TimeForge.

TimeForge reduces turnover and improves retention while freeing up management time and increasing store profitability at your business! TimeForge employee scheduling and labor management software is used by owners and operators of hospitality, food-service, retail, and other service-oriented businesses around the world.

Labor Management. NOW Simple.» employee scheduling

Messaging with TimeForge

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NRA Show 2010

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