Labor Management. NOW Simple.

The pre-hire and on-boarding processes for bringing on a new hire can cost managers and business owners hours of valuable time. Most businesses must go through the process of collecting resumes and cover letters, applications, assessments, background checks, I-9 and W-4 documents, payroll documentation, insurance forms, staff availability, and other necessary documents such as copies of certifications and previous training verification.

In addition to the time spent collecting these documents and other demographic information, there can be costly legal repercussions for failing to keep records on file and properly documented.

TimeForge HR can reduce all of this paperwork hassle into a simple and fast point and click process. Getting a new employee ready for scheduling or tracking time is as simple as entering the employee’s basic information within TimeForge’s innovative labor management software.

Managers can set up any number of prehire and onboarding documents that must be on file before the new hire is allowed to clock in or be scheduled to work. This innovative process allows you to define a standard employment process for your organization – ensuring that new employees have all of the necessary documents before they are scheduled, or clock in.

TimeForge HR documents can include relevant dates and any employer notes, and you can also scan and upload documents directly into TimeForge – no more searching for relevant paperwork!

Store Documents, Demographics, and HR Information

Additionally, if you enter an employee’s email address into TimeForge, the software will automatically email the employee instructions on how to login to TimeForge, check upcoming schedules, enter requests for time off and much more – greatly speeding up the onboarding process within your organization.

Our easy-to-use online product, TimeForge HR, allows managers and business owners to add an employee, change their availability and submit documents to TimeForge in seconds, making the onboarding of new personnel faster and more convenient than ever. For a free trial of TimeForge, sign up here and see how TimeForge is making labor management woes a thing of the past!

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On May 22-25, TimeForge will be exhibiting at the 2010 National Restaurant Association restaurant, Hotel and Motel Show at McCormick Place in Chicago, Illinois, where we will be showing our latest generation of labor management software for retail, restaurants and hospitality businesses.

The latest version of our TimeForge labor management product encompasses the entirety of labor management, including staff scheduling, attendance tracking, payroll exports, and many aspects of human resources. If you’re going to be at the show, please stop by and pay us a visit to find out how easy it is to save your business time and money!

TimeForge will be occupying booth 5256 at the 2010 National Restaurant Association show, in between FishBowl, Inc. and Eco-Oil Saver.

NRA 2010 is the largest food service and hospitality event in the Western hemisphere. Last year, more that 2,000 exhibitors from 108 countries participated in this global marketplace for the restaurant and hospitality industry.

Highlights of the event include 60+ education sessions, culinary and designer exhibitions and many opportunities for networking. Restaurant owners, operators, chefs, managers, buyers, servers, bartenders, architects, designers, decorators, caterers, and special event professionals will be there exchanging information and ideas.

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

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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.

Sign up for a free trial of our labor management tool today!

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Many of TimeForge’s November and December updates included improvements to scheduling, enhanced multi-unit capabilities, additional Point of Sale capabilities, and new training videos.

We have also been hard at work on many improvements to TimeForge Attendance.  TimeForge Attendance is a labor management software tool that focuses on employee time cards and managing payroll expenses.  Employees can clock in and out using the system, managers can review staff timecards, and then managers can approve the employee time punches for third party payroll processing.

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 most recent improvements to TimeForge Attendance include:

• Several new TimeForge Attendance tutorials are online and available for your review! Don’t get lost or confused about how to edit time cards, modifying clock in parameters, or setting up IP addresses for restricting employee time punches.  Review the TimeForge Attendance manual (videos are coming soon), and read about all of these profit saving topics.

• Quickly identify employee time punches and problematic time cards using the TimeForge Most Different notifications. As you process and approve / export payroll, TimeForge automatically identifies different (or strange) time punches, and ranks each shift based on how different the shift is from the other staff member time punches.  Managers and payroll supervisors can use the “Most Different” field to quickly identify potential problems before cutting checks for staff members.

• Show the last person to edit or change time card data. All time card changes are recorded and can be viewed in the TimeForge Daily Log by qualified managers.  However, you can now easily review which manager (or supervisor) most recently modified any specific time card entry.  Reduce fraud and and identify compliance issues immediately.

View the last manager to edit a time entry

• Identify hours worked on the Clocked-In Employees page. You now have the choice to manage labor by scheduled or actual labor costs, or by the scheduled or actual labor hours while you are reviewing who is clocked in, or which staff members were previously clocked in during the business day.

Review Worked Hours and Total Costs

• Manage attendance and timecards by departments. When you have a large number of staff members, managing your labor can be complicated.  You can now browse and edit staff time sheets based on the department that you are interested in reviewing.

Edit Attendance by Department

Look for more information about recent improvements to TimeForge Attendance very soon.  We continue to improve the software so that you can manage your workforce effectively, and go home early!

You should be using a time and attendance system to make your life easy! TimeForge can quickly and easily manage time cards, employee attendance, and export payroll for processing.  Sign up for a trial today to use TimeForge Attendance to track employee time.

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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.

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Quick service restaurants (fast food businesses) can be very challenging to manage. Three influencing factors directly determine the success, or failure, or a QSR restaurant – customers (sales), inventory, and labor. Of these three items, managers on a day-to-day basis have the most control over the labor – controlling costs, turnover, scheduling, and communications with staff members.

Restaurant managers must make sure that enough staff members are on site during busy hours, but managers must also be careful to cut staff when expected need begins to drop.  Scheduling the right number of employees in a quick service restaurant is a constant challenge.

And with a busy restaurant business, managers don’t have time to babysit the time clock to watch employees clock in or out at the right time.  Riding the clock (staff members who clock out late or clock in early), and buddy punching can both have disastrous effects on the bottom line for the business.

Other common labor management problems for a QSR business include:

• Schedule communications
• Changing availability
• Inexperienced / young staff members
• High turnover
• Buddy punching
• And more …

Over scheduling the restaurant will reduce profits with a bigger payroll. Under scheduling staff might cause customers to go elsewhere – reducing income.

Skillful scheduling of staff members for your QSR restaurant isn’t easy – it can be time consuming and tedious. Luckily, it doesn’t have to be.

TimeForge turns labor scheduling and attendance monitoring into a simple management task, giving you back your weekends and increasing the business profits, while keeping staff delighted and reducing turnover.

Read more about TimeForge employee scheduling and labor management for quick service restaurants.

TimeForge will reduce turnover and improve retention while freeing up manager time and increasing store profitability at your quick service restaurant!  TimeForge employee scheduling and labor management software is used by owners and operators of quick service restaurants, and other hospitality, food-service, retail, and other service-oriented businesses around the world.

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TimeForge is now a member of the Retail Solutions Providers Association (RSPA), and we were at their annual “Retail Now” show this month in Las Vegas.  We spent a lot of time with many of the other members, and were invited to a number of receptions and parties thrown by sponsors of the trade show.  A lot of new and exciting technology was on display for retail, hospitality, convenience store, grocer, and food-service businesses.

Expect some new and exciting announcements from TimeForge in the coming months!

We spent plenty of time with our partners at Dinerware.  If you are in the hospitality or food-service business, and you need a POS package – we encourage you to check out what they are doing, and call your local Dinerware dealer for information about their product, and how they integrate with TimeForge – the best labor management package available.

Also, many thanks to United Bank Card for their amazing party – their announcement of free cash registers for retailers should provide valuable to many small to medium sized retail businesses.  Do you need a cash register for your business?  Check out their new fully-integrated cash register systems (ECR’s) systems, which are now on sale.

TimeForge staff scheduling and labor management software is used by managers, owners, and operators of restaurants, retail stores, bars, clubs, and other service-oriented businesses to increase profitability, reduce turnover, and improve retention.

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Fast casual restaurants can be a very challenging labor management environment.  Restaurant managers must ensure that enough staff are on hand to meet customer needs, but also must take care to not have too many staff on hand.  With a busy restaurant, manager’s don’t have the time to babysit the time clock and must often rely on employees to clock in at the right time.  Clocking in early or clocking out late will cost the business extra money – money that could be allocated for other uses.

In a fast casual concept, many staff members perform more than one job while at work, and may have another job with another business as well.  Cross training and constant communications about the schedule are key to labor scheduling success.

Other labor management problems include:

• Fluctuating school schedules
• Continuous availability changes
• Young / inexperienced staff members
• Buddy punching
• And more …

Over scheduling the restaurant could drain away profits. Under scheduling staff might drain away your customers. Skillful scheduling of staff members for your business isn’t easy – it can be tedious and time consuming. Luckily, it doesn’t have to be. TimeForge turns labor scheduling and attendance monitoring into a simple management task, giving you back your weekends and increasing profits.

Read more about TimeForge employee scheduling and labor management for fast casual restaurants.

TimeForge will reduce turnover, improve retention, free up manager time, and increase store profitability at your business!  TimeForge employee scheduling and labor management software is used by owners and operators of fast casual restaurants, and other hospitality, food-service, retail, and other service-oriented businesses around the world.

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One of our most recent feature improvement requests came from Greg Fong, owner of the Garden View restaurant in Nova Scotia, Canada.  Greg wanted to be able to enforce the employee schedule when employees clock in, so that he knows when employees are riding the clock or are coming in too early.

However, he also doesn’t want to have his managers running back and forth clocking employees in and overriding the schedule – this can fragment the managers time, defeating one of the main reasons he uses TimeForge – keeping the manager on the floor.

Greg proposed to allow his staff members to serve as “witnesses” for each other, allowing staff members to act as a temporary manager when clocking in early, or clocking out late.  This makes his staff accountable to one another and frees up the manager’s time.

Guess what? This is now available inside of TimeForge!  To turn on the Employee Witness capabilities, log in to your TimeForge account, and access the Attendance Options.  You will see an option to enable Employee Witnessing (by choosing Yes or No).

As always, your feedback on this feature is very important to us – what do you think?  Should staff members be allowed to “witness” for each other, taking over some of the responsibility of the manager?

TimeForge employee scheduling and labor management software is used by managers of restaurants, retail stores, and other hospitality and service-oriented businesses around the world. TimeForge will increase profitability, reduce turnover, and improve retention at your business!

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Now available! Managing labor at your business just became even more simple.  TimeForge Mobile recently launched, providing managers and staff members the ability to review employee schedules, check timecards, send and receive online messages, and perform other labor management related items on an iPhone, iPod Touch, Blackberry, or other smartphone.

TimeForge Mobile can be accessed by pointing your favorite web browser or RSS reader at the TimeForge website.  To ensure the confidentiality of the information that is available, the RSS reading program must be able to use both SSL (bank-level encryption and security) and authentication (username and password).  Some of our favorite RSS readers include:

• Viigo on the Blackberry
• NetNewswire and Pro RSS on the iPhone
• Others (mostly for the desktop) can be found here

Accessing TimeForge Mobile is very simple!  Just add the website or URL of:

http://www.TimeForge.com/Scheduler/rss.html

to your RSS program of choice – enter your username and password – and your schedule, timecard, availability, and messages will automatically load into your RSS program.

Managers and supervisors have additional capabilities, and multi-unit and multi-store operators can view additional information (such as which staff members are clocked in, the days labor costs, and gross sales for the day).  A full list of RSS URL’s can be found inside “My Settings” page within TimeForge.

TimeForge staff scheduling and labor management software is used by managers, owners, and operators of restaurants, retail stores, bars, clubs, and other service-oriented businesses to increase profitability, reduce turnover, and improve retention.

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