PTO, Sick, Vacation, Overtime, and Other Improvements

Some of the new improvements that are quickly noticeable by TimeForge users:

  • A New Daily View!   TimeForge continues to be the easiest solution for making employee schedules.   You can now add or edit employees or positions directly from the schedule , no need to leave the schedule screen to add new staff members.   This also creates a streamlined sign up process , new users can be up and running and building schedules in under a minute!
  • TimeForge Max customers can now track Sick, Vacation, and PTO requests!   Tracking time off is one of our most requested feature, and is now part of the TimeForge Max software product.   TimeForge Request Types can now be used to calculate sick time, vacation time, or personal time off (or paid time off).   Check back soon for a tutorial on how to use these powerful new features!
  • TimeForge Attendance now goes through an approval process before it is exported.   At the end of each payroll period, managers review and then approve attendance before exporting payroll for the pay period to help reduce payroll errors.
  • Overtime calculations for Canada, or any other country!   TimeForge now supports overtime calculations in the US (including California Overtime rules), Canada (with 40 hours, 44 hours, or 48 hours, depending on the province), or any other number of hours per week.   This can be set on a per-location / unit level , to assist international businesses, and affects both the theoretical labor schedule and the attendance calculations.
  • Weather at your location can be displayed in either Fahrenheit or Celsius.
  • TimeForge has supported exporting payroll information to CompuPay, a premium payroll and HR service, for about a year.   We now support exporting to Heartland Payment Systems payroll product as well.
  • The new TimeForge reporting tool is available for all TimeForge users.   We have been working on releasing the new reporting tool for quite some time, and this new tool is significantly faster than our old reporting system.
    • In addition to being faster (most reports run in less than half a second!), you can now export reports in a number of formats, including Adobe Acrobat (PDF), Rich Text Format (RTF), and Microsoft Excel (EXCEL).
    • Reports too big or too small?   With a single click, you can now change the font size of the reports , fitting more, or fewer, employees onto each report.
    • Most reports now have Grand Totals , including payroll reports and multi-location reports.

We would love to hear your feedback about these features and improvements to TimeForge, and what you would like to see included in future versions of TimeForge.

What else do you want to see added to TimeForge?

How long does it take to make an employee schedule at your retail store? It should take less than 5 minutes! Did you know that labor costs are your #1 controllable expense, and could eating up more than 30% of your monthly expenses? TimeForge will streamline and minimize labor costs through effective employee scheduling at your store.   Start profiting now!

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TimeForge Newsletter , November Edition (Part 3)

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of the November newsletter here.

The TimeForge Daily Log, our newest product offering has received many recent improvements, including:

  • Numeric Analysis is available in the Daily Log, transforming the Daily Log into an extremely powerful trend analysis tool for your business.   Enter values for deposits, sales, or other relevant information, and compare these values for any dates, or date range.   Say goodbye to Excel! Watch the TimeForge Blog for an upcoming tutorial, detailing how to use the TimeForge Daily Log.
  • Weather is automatically recorded on a daily basis for each store location, and is archived in the TimeForge Daily Log.   You can now include weather activity in your day-to-day comparisons of the Daily Log as part of the Numeric Analysis.

Other improvements to the TimeForge products are detailed in Part 1 and Part 2.

Are complicated employee scheduling practices taking up precious time at your business? Are you making the best possible labor schedule? How much turnover is created because of bad, or late, schedules? Did you know that TimeForge can reduce turnover, improve retention and increase profits at your business? Sign up today for a free trial!

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TimeForge Newsletter , November Edition (Part 2)

Read Part 1 of the November newsletter here.

Some of the improvements to the TimeForge products are detailed below.

TimeForge Scheduling – Improvements for Employees
The employee side of TimeForge Labor Scheduling has received a number of improvements over the past few months, including some major improvements this past weekend.   These include:

  • Employees can now delete their own pending requests, without requiring manager approval.   This allows employees to become “available” for work without needing to involve management.
  • Searching for available shifts is now easier than ever.   Employees can view qualified “open” shifts with a single click , or they can search for specific shifts by date and time.   Once a potential shift is found, a shift swap request can be made directly through TimeForge, with a single click.
  • The employee interface has been improved to show shift notes, sections, and make the screens more user friendly.

TimeForge Scheduling – Improvements for Managers
The management side of TimeForge Scheduling has received many improvements over the past few months, including some important improvements this past weekend.   These include:

  • The Schedule Summary screen now includes a number of useful metrics, including the number of variable hours scheduled, non-variable (management) hours scheduled, as well as the hours, labor costs, and the costs of breaks.   A number of other important numbers are recorded on this screen as well!
  • Many of our users have requested the ability to forecast , forecasting for sales, customer counts, inventory orders, schedules, or staffing levels.   Many of you want to be able to compare labor costs, labor hours, or scheduled shifts directly to the projected numbers to see how the schedule stacks up.   In Excel, this is very hard to do accurately.   It’s now available in TimeForge! Managers with TimeForge Scheduling Basic, Pro, and Max can enter daily, hourly, or quarter-hour manager projections (or actual values), and TimeForge will display and enforce labor percentages in the schedule.   Check the TimeForge Blog for an upcoming tutorial on the usage of the TimeForge Forecasting System.
  • Adding and editing schedules has never been easier!   TimeForge automatically adds new shifts as you type, reducing the number of clicks that it takes to create a schedule.   Also, the schedules can now be sorted by position, start time, end time, or employee.

Other information about the TimeForge update can be found in Part 1 and Part 3 of this newsletter.

Are complicated employee scheduling practices taking up precious time at your business? Are you making the best possible labor schedule? How much turnover is created because of bad, or late, schedules? Did you know that TimeForge can reduce turnover, improve retention and increase profits at your business? Sign up today for a free trial!

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TimeForge Newsletter , November Edition (Part 1)

It has been almost six months since the last TimeForge Newsletter went out , and we apologize!   We have been so busy adding new functionality and improving TimeForge that we haven’t taken the time to inform you about all of the new TimeForge features.   As most of you know, we performed a massive update to TimeForge on Thursday and Friday, delivering enhanced functionality just in time for Halloween (or, if you keep up with football, in time for the Texas Tech vs. Texas game)!

We have officially split TimeForge into three distinct products, and each product can be combined together as needed for your business.   These three products include:

  • TimeForge Scheduling, our flagship product continues to be the best labor scheduling tool available , fast, streamlined, and easy to use!
  • TimeForge Attendance, a powerful time and attendance package that can enforce the labor schedule, provide detailed employee time cards, and directly export your payroll!
  • TimeForge Daily Log, a valuable communications tool useful for recording notes and numbers about maintenance, employee problems, deposit logs, sales figures, and much more!

Some of the improvements to the TimeForge products are detailed in Part 2 and Part 3.

Are complicated employee scheduling practices taking up precious time at your business? Are you making the best possible labor schedule? How much does a bad labor schedule cost? Did you know that TimeForge can reduce turnover, improve retention and increase profits at your business? Sign up today for a free trial!

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Scheduling is Simplified and Graphical! – Welcome to TimeForge v1.9.2

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?

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TimeForge Service Restored – Better Than Ever

Over the weekend, we began improving some of the internal systems on TimeForge.com to provide our users with an improved labor scheduling experience.

Demand for our simple scheduling system has increased over the past few months, and it was time to invest in more RAM, faster hard disks, and other improvements to ensure that TimeForge is available when you need it. The upgrade should have been a four – six hour outage, but instead spiraled into a twenty-one hour outage. We apologize for the inconvenience this caused, but really hope that you enjoy the new hardware!

All services have been restored to their normal operating conditions.

If you were affected by the outage, and would like some credit for the pain we put you through, please send an email to support@timeforge.com, and we will credit your account for two free days of usage (48-hours).

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?

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Congratulations TimeForge!

It’s been one day since the release of TimeForge Version 1.9, which introduced a number of new features such as easy-to-use calendar availability, improved multi-location (multiple unit) scheduling, and many other improvements. And we’re excited to announce that more than 800 businesses have signed up for the most simple and powerful labor scheduling tool on the market: www.TimeForge.com

Although we are obviously excited by the number of TimeForge users, we are more excited about the time savings and cost savings that have been provided to our users. For example:

  • On average, managers spend more than 2.64 hours making the schedule, every week with a spreadsheet program such as Excel, by hand, or with an inefficient scheduling system (like most Point of Sale systems).
  • On average, managers spend 15 minutes making the schedule, every week using TimeForge.
  • On average, managers in retail and hospitality businesses receive an annual salary and benefits package equivalent to more than $62,500. That’s more than $31 per hour.
  • TimeForge is directly saving our users more than $59,272 every month! That’s more than $710,000 a year.

Of course, there are dozens of other benefits like reporting, employee notification, reduced employee turnover, less time fragmentation (employees calling your business), etc… which are more difficult to calculate in a direct dollar-to-dollar return on investment (ROI).

Is your business getting the most out of TimeForge?

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?

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Workforce Labor Scheduling Updates (Part 2)

We are pleased to announce TimeForge version 1.9 , the easy-to-use employee scheduling program for food-service (restaurant, bar, club), hospitality (hotel, motel), and retail companies.

Thank you to our users who provide priceless feedback about the software can make their lives easier!

This version provides significant enhancements to all TimeForge users, and includes several dozen new and improved features. Some of our time-saving improvements include:

  • Many areas of the scheduling system, including the creating schedules from templates, publishing a new schedule, and deleting schedules are significantly faster.
  • A new field is available for employees, which allows managers to enter an identifier for tracking the employee (such as an internal employee number).
  • Internationalization! TimeForge now works in Canada, the United Kingdom (England), Australia, Ireland, France, Spain, Scottland, and many other countries. The best labor scheduling system from the US is now available to anyone, anywhere. In fact, if you are a multi-location (or multiple unit) operator, with stores in different countries or locales, TimeForge will appropriately manage notifications for the whole team.
  • Do you schedule more than one location from within your TimeForge account? The improved scheduling system in version 1.9 will automatically disable employees that are already scheduled to work at other locations. TimeForge already disables employees that are scheduled to work on other conflicting schedules.
  • Day parts have been renamed “Work Periods”, which is … simple. More improvements with “Work Periods” and “Day Parts” are coming in Version 2.
  • A number of minor bug fixes, improvements to Internet Explorer 6, and other changes.

Of course, we look forward to your ongoing comments about changes to the TimeForge scheduling system.

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 retail business, bar, club, or restaurant.

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Updated Labor Scheduling … TimeForge version 1.9

As our users know, we continually add new features to our software to make scheduling simple , and we thrive on feedback from our users! Our software updates are released every few weeks (other vendors can take years to release new products), and there is no cost to upgrade to the latest version of TimeForge.

We intended to release our newest version of TimeForge, version 1.9, over the weekend complete with a brand new calendar-style view of requests, much faster editing of schedules, international capabilities, user-interface improvements, and much more.

However, the testing of the new features is taking slightly longer than anticipated, so we have pushed back the release date until later this week. Check back here for updates, and information on what’s coming in version 2.0!

How long does it take to make an employee schedule? It should take less than 5 minutes! Did you know that labor costs could be as much as 30% of your expenses? TimeForge can help streamline and minimize labor costs through effective labor scheduling at your restaurant, bar, or club.

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What's Coming Soon?

As you may be aware, we release improvements to the TimeForge employee scheduling software every few weeks, and our team is hard at work developing version 1.9 of TimeForge. The next version will be released around Thanksgiving.

What can you expect to be in our next version of TimeForge?

  • Improved Availability. You will be able to view availability as you do now, in a list format , but you will also have the ability of adding and viewing availability on a calendar. Two clicks to create a time-off request! Also, Day Parts will be more integrated with the rest of the TimeForge system , so you can schedule around the different parts of your day.
  • Faster. We are aware that TimeForge can slow down occasionally for those of you with a large number of employees. These issues will be resolved in our next release.
  • Improved Templates. Templates will continue to receive upgrades, and you will be able to add and edit shifts with the same ease that you edit schedules.
  • And much more! If you know of something that will make your life simple … let us know!

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?

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