Labor Management. NOW Simple.

Good nursing home managers know that the employee schedule is important. Great nursing home managers know that an efficient employee schedule is the hallmark of excellent management. Any successful nursing home simply must have an employee schedule that ensures that the patients’ needs are met 24/7 without over-staffing or unnecessary overtime.

But labor management can be a headache.

It’s boring, time-consuming, complicated, and mind-numbingly dull. You have to juggle PT and FT staff schedules, the availability, certifications, and particular skill sets of every single employee (not to mention their time-off or shift swap requests, accrued PTO, and training schedule), then coordinate details like employee meetings, meal breaks, and labor law compliance. Tracking down staff with the appropriate skill sets to accommodate shift swaps or cover for time-off requests is a hassle, then you have to reorganize the schedule to find the best use of staff without compromising patient coverage, then consider alternative schedules without wasting any more time.

After finally building a schedule, you need to let your staff know, then field all the questions about the next week’s schedule. Inevitably, one of your employees will have an unexpected illness or time off request and you need to reorganize everything to accommodate the missed shift (then communicate those updates to the entire staff).

TimeForge enables nursing home managers to cut scheduling and attendance monitoring time from hours to minutes, and as help you monitor your labor costs and overtime (in real-time) and more accurately predict potential staffing shortages, payroll costs, and overtime.

Your staff is going to love it. With TimeForge, you can notify employees about schedules, meetings, trainings, and any sort of updates or changes by text message or email. Your staff can easily log in to the employee portal 24/7 to review their shift schedules and time cards, request time off, change their upcoming availability, swap shifts with other employees, and set up daily schedule alerts via text messaging or email.

You are going to love it. You can build an entire nursing home employee schedule in just minutes, easily test “what-if” scenarios (and return to your saved schedule without redoing it), and monitor attendance. All of this can be done on site or remotely using the web, a cell phone, or even Facebook.

The time you save every week can be much more profitably (and enjoyably) spent. TimeForge is powerful, but extremely easy to use.

TimeForge is a complete labor management solution for nursing homes, 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.

If you’re still not convinced, read what other TimeForge users say about the time and money they’ve saved with this easy to use staff scheduling software… or sign up today for your free trial and experience TimeForge for yourself!

Read more about TimeForge Scheduling, TimeForge Attendance, and TimeForge Daily Log.

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The TimeForge Setup Wizard was designed to simplify the process of inputting information that TimeForge needs to most efficiently help you manage your labor.

The Setup Wizard will walk you through setting up basic information about your company and staff, like basic staff information, a list of your positions, etc… It also captures your location information, which is displayed on reports (printables), so you never need to worry about determining what schedule applies to which location.

Your location information is displayed in a header on reports.

The Setup Wizard will also ask you some basic questions about how your store is organized. This information helps TimeForge more accurately customize our systems for your maximum convenience and ease-of-use. You shouldn’t have to re-organize your business just to use our product; TimeForge customizes itself to your business. Our “fill in the blank” format saves you tons of time (money), and makes setting up your account easy and fast.

Choosing your own starting day of the week is one of the many little ways TimeForge minimizes your discomfort when getting used to our scheduling system.

Entering information about the operations of your business has never been more simple.

Information about your employees makes contacting them simple. Just enter their email addresses, and TimeForge automatically emails them with a prompt to set up their account. Once their accounts are set up, TimeForge can notify each employee (according their preferences) via email, facebook notification, and/or cell phone message. We make an automatic audit confirming that the employee received notification of the schedule. Never again will you hear, “I didn’t know I was scheduled”!

Add employees to the account fast using our easy "fill in the blank" format, or simply upload an existing employee list from Excel! Super fast!

After supplying position and employee information, your basic set up is complete – you’re ready to start building a schedule!

If you’d like to try out our industry leading software, simply sign up for a free trial of our staff scheduling software, or take a more in-depth look at our labor management software.

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A salaried staff member is one who is paid a set amount each week, month, or year, rather than being paid per hours worked. Though putting an employee on salary (or declaring them exempt) can have major benefits for both your business and for the employee, there are some analytical problems that are created by having salaried employees.

Labor percentages, which compare the budgeted (scheduled or theoretical) cost of labor to the actual (clock ins/outs or attendance) cost of labor, can be complicated by salaried employees because the amount they get paid each pay period can fluctuate from the scheduled cost (estimate), due to vacation time and other variations in work time. Salaried employees can also make daily labor reports complicated because their fluctuating hourly wage is variable based upon the number of hours that they work.

TimeForge can help you accurately track your labor percentages even if you have salaried employees by simply changing a couple of settings.

Labor Percentages with Salaried Staff

Below is an example of a salaried employee and the analytical problems that are related to salaried employees. Salaried employees can make weekly labor reports complicated because their weekly pay rate can fluctuate. Imagine:

• John gets paid $52,000 annually, which breaks down to $1,000 per week. ($52,000 annually, divided by 52 work weeks in a year, is $1,000 per week.)
• But what if John takes two weeks of vacation this year, so he only works 50 weeks this year? Well, then we can say that John gets paid $1,040 per week. ($52,000 annually, divided by 50 work weeks this year, is $1,040 per week.)

So does John cost $1,000 per work week or does he cost $1,040 per work week? This 4% difference could skew your business’ labor percentage reports.

Salaried employees can especially make daily labor reports complicated:

• So, if John works 52 weeks per year, and he is scheduled for 40 hours per week, we can say that he is paid $26 per hour.
  ($1,040 per week, divided by 40 hours, is $26 per hour.)

• But, what if John is only scheduled for 20 hours one week? Then we can also say that he is paid $52 per hour, for that week. ($1,040 per week, divided by 20 hours, is $52 per hour.)

So how much money should be reported as John’s labor costs? Does John cost $26 every hour he is at work, or does he cost $52 every hour he is at work? This could really skew your daily labor percentages!

You can see why salaries can cause so much trouble with labor percentages. So, how do you deal with these problems, so that you can accurately track theoretical vs. actual labor costs?

Scheduling Salaried Staff

You need to decide whether you want to see John’s hours in your labor percentages. You can choose not to see them at all, or your can modify the way that you see the hours so they aren’t as variable.

Consider whether your salaried employees clock in when they are at work. If they do clock in, you can set their pay rates as hourly rates instead of salaries – regardless of how you pay your staff (that’s a separate function). This way, fluctuating hourly wages would always be a set amount, so you wouldn’t need to worry about a surprise high cost in your labor percentage reports. If your salaried employees don’t clock in, you can set the hourly rates to $0, or change your option settings to automatically copy a salaried employee’s scheduled hours to his or her attendance.

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!

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

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When setting up your TimeForge account, you can use the Set Up Wizard and User Wizard to guide you through the process of entering your employee information.

Input contact information for your employees, and TimeForge will automatically email them with information about creating and logging in to their own TimeForge account. Through their TimeForge account, your staff can make schedule requests, receive messages (like memos) from you, view upcoming schedules, and check on their time sheets / attendance. Of course, if you want to limit their access to any of these features, you can do that in the “Settings” menu for each of your business locations.

Additionally, employees can provide their contact information (like cell phone number and Facebook information), and we will automatically notify them about any upcoming schedules you post that might affect them. When we notify your employees, we record the notification, so that you can run an audit report – ensuring that staff members are receiving and responding to schedule updates. This completely eliminates the “I never got the schedule / memo / note” excuse!

Through our automatic notification system, your employees will always be up to date on the latest schedule, eliminating any confusion about schedule information, improving your staff’s tardiness, and ultimately improving your bottom line!

Read our guide on setting up employee accounts with the User Wizard to get started.

Read our guide on editing your Notification preferences to modify how and when your employees receive TimeForge Notifications.

Sign up for a free trial today to see how TimeForge improves employee satisfaction, reducing turnover and improving your bottom line!

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According to the National Association for the Specialty Food Trade (NASFT)‘s 2004 State of the Specialty Food Industry Report, America’s taste preferences have expanded. Americans buy more ethnic and international foods than ever before, and “ethnic” food has definitely expanded beyond Mexican and Italian. Growing numbers of non-Western-European immigrants have brought diverse flavors like Korean kim-chi, Jamaican jerk dishes, Japanese sushi, Congolese kuku paka, and Middle Eastern baba ghannouj. NASFT also reports that seven out of ten shoppers aged 25 through 39 purchase ethnic foods at least monthly. This number will surely continue to rise as more people immigrate to the United States and the American economy and culture continues to encourage inquisitiveness and exploration. In the past, Americans have not strayed far from their traditional diets, so these statistics are truly remarkable and show how much the United States has changed since the early 20th century.

So What Did People Eat Back Then?
Early twentieth century fare was much more ethnocentric than the modern American person’s diet of diverse flavors, colors, and textures. Around 80% of Americans lived on farms or in rural areas, so their diets were primarily seasonal, local, and strongly depended on their cultural heritage. According to The Food Timeline, “During the early decades of the 20th century, Americans foods reflected the great diversity of people living in our country. What people ate depended primarily upon who they were (ethnic heritage, religious traditions), where they lived (regional food preferences: New Orleans Creole, New England founding father?) and how much money they had (wealthy railroad tycoon? immigrant street peddler?).” So, while diverse flavors were available in the early 1900′s, people simply stuck to what they knew.

So Why The Jump from Ethnocentric Eating to Exploratory Eating?
This rise in culinary exploration could be primarily due to the development of the American economy over the last hundred years. As America became less agriculturally based and more industrially based, people moved from the countryside into big cities to find work. The larger the cities grew, the more diverse urban populations became. While Americans had previously only interacted with their few country neighbors, Americans now found themselves interacting with hundreds or thousands of neighbors, often with varying ethnic and cultural histories. Immigrants from other countries would frequently open restaurants serving their homeland’s fare, which is often how international foods are introduced to Americans. However, many people still did not have the money to eat at restaurants, so the impact of the introduction of ethnic foods was minimal at the time.

During the second half of the 20th century, Americans began to have an increasing amount of disposable income, and much of this was spent on entertainment and eating out, leading ultimately to exploration in dining experience. Additionally, the recent influx of Generation Y kids with disposable income has led to an explosion in consumer “need” to find and follow the latest trends. These trends are often related to “foodie” experiences, and range from health food trends (like vegan and low carb diets) to ethnic food trends (Indian food, sushi, pho, and Hibachi grills).

So Why Do You Care?
Americans are more likely to try new things than ever before, and other cultures offer new things. If you primarily deal in jeans, try to offer a style that has an international cut. If your business primarily sells traditional burgers and fries, you might incorporate curry fries in your menu.

Want to increase your business profits by up to 5% with a product that can offer virtually instant ROI? Sign up for a free trial of TimeForge Labor Management Software!

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Your card is an essential and potentially powerful tool in your business, if you use it correctly. Yuppie competition a la American Psycho   isn’t the game here. The game is networking. You need to utilize every opportunity available to spread the word about your business (especially in this economy), and that is what catchy cards are all about – telling people who you are and what your business does, and showing them how much cooler you are than your competitors.

Scott Ginsberg, author of The Power of Approachability, wrote an article for Business Know How about the importance of business cards and the basics of designing a great one. He suggests that measuring the effectiveness of your card can be done by stacking your card up against other business cards – does your card leave a lasting impression on the people who receive it?

Ginsberg also suggests that you try to incorporate a photo of yourself into your card. Cards with red on them, cards with black backgrounds, vertically oriented cards, and cards with large images on them also catch attention more than plain “ivory” business cards.

The third major tip Ginsberg offers includes several tips on how to make your card creatively unforgettable. He suggests thinking outside the box and using unique sizes, shapes, materials, languages, and multiple functions. Take a look at 51 business cards that will make you look twice for inspiration and ideas.

Ginsberg’s fourth step to awesome business cards is implementation. He admits that card printing can be expensive, but it is money well spent. Only give your perfect card to people you have established rapport with, says Ginsberg. There’s no point in wasting your money on nice cards only to give them to strangers who will only throw them away. All Graphic Design put together a compilation of the coolest business cards… ever! Check it out.

TimeForge labor management software can streamline your business so you can fit awesome business cards into your budget! Sign up for a free trial today!

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Here’s a list of some of the best TimeForge Labor Management Blogs from 2010.   Take a look and see what you may have missed about the restaurant and retail industries, labor management, schedule creation, social media, and being green.

Some 2010 Campaigns and Travels:

• HOPE for Haiti
• National Restaurant Association Trade Show 2010

TimeForge Tells It Like It Is:

• Your Manager’s Log Doesn’t Work
• Andy’s Story
• Dashboard is Awesome

Labor Management and Profits

• Turnover Affects You
• 7 Ways Turnover Costs You Money
• Reduce Turnover
• Four Ways to Be the Best Manager EVER
• Recruiting and Retaining Gen Y
• Listen to Your Staff!
• Are You Michael Scott or Bill Gates?

Marketing and Profits

• Social Media Marketing in 2011
• Market for Loyalty
• Marketing to Gen Y
• How Going Green Will Make You Money
• Two Ways to Boost Sales in a Recession

Haven’t tried TimeForge yet? We’ll give you a free test drive.

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Social media is absolutely at the forefront of marketing in 2011, and marketing via social media is a necessity. The TimeForge team has compiled a list of tips for understand social media marketing and getting your social media marketing on a role.

Why Do I Care? Social Media Marketing does a few things that are good for your business. Like all marketing, it gets your name out there and drives customers to your business. It’s also a great way to let your customers develop a more personal and/or religious following of your business and its personality. The goal is to make your profiles easily found, and to make your content drive people to your site and business.

Why Do I Want Customers to Know What’s Going On? Consumers want to know exactly where their money is going these days and whether that receiver is worthy. If your business is deemed less worthy/interesting/helpful than another, you’re bunk. You have to work harder than ever before to earn and maintain customer loyalty, and social media provides a cheap (or free) way to do that.

Which Social Media Sites Really Matter? If you only have two sites that you decide to have a presence on, they need to be Facebook and Twitter, but to really see the benefits of social media marketing, you have to expand beyond that. Your business should have a presence on Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, WikiHow, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Yahoo! Answers. The more, the better. These will all help drive traffic to your site, and consequently, your business.

Email Marketing Counts, Right? Well, not really. Statistically, the number of emails sent out versus the number of emails opened continues to decline. Email is the new snail mail, and social messaging is the new mail. By no means should you stop creating your newsletters, but you should definitely expand beyond email to reach your customers. Some marketers are combining the two to create a click-able, cyclical campaign. Essentially, the social media message will contain a link to an email newsletter, which will contain a link to another social media site, which will then link to another, all the while encouraging the customer to “Follow Us on Twitter” or “Like Us on Facebook“.

Will This Really Work? Yes. Social media marketing will absolutely help you drive customers to your website and business. People are spending beaucoups of time on social media sites, as illustrated by the massive sales of internet tablets (especially the inexpensive android tablets being released in the United Kingdom) with preloaded applications for major social sites.

So What Do I Say? Your social marketing can consist of updates about new products, sales, new employees and team members, new policies, positive business reviews, industry-specific news articles, etc. To really maximize your social media potential, try to incorporate terms related to your business that people might search for into your posts. For example, if you are a producer of ninja weapons, you might incorporate “ninja”, “weapons”, “throwing star”, “nunchaku”, and “katana” into your posts, or post a link to an article about the rising popularity of urban ninjas. You can also post links to your main website.

How Often Do I Say It? Totally up to you. Often enough to keep your readers interested, without annoying them into unfollowing you. Somewhere between once weekly and twice daily should suffice, but try to keep the intervals between your posts pretty regulated. You don’t want your readers to be accustomed to getting an update daily, then not hear from you for a month. They may assume that you’ve altogether stopped posting and stop following you.

TimeForge can help increase your business profits by 3-5%.

Give our labor management software a test drive for free! Sign up for your free trial today!

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We were recently asked, by a reporter for Women In Business, about some tips for using time tracking and labor scheduling software, and also about the best ways to use the software.   Here’s what we had to say …

3 Tips for Choosing Staff Scheduling and Time Tracking Software

1.   Find software that works the way that your business works.   There are a lot of options, web-based, server-based, cell-phone based, or time-clock based.   The best software will also depend on whether or not you are doing project-based time tracking, or hourly-based time tracking.   Not all software will fit all businesses.   TimeForge, for example, works best with retail and restaurant industries, although it does work well for other groups, including tutoring companies and YMCA’s!

2.   Make sure the time tracking software interfaces with your desired payroll company.   You can always enter hours from a report, but doing this every week or two, combined with the inevitable typos, will quickly add up to a time and profit sink hole.   TimeForge interfaces with many popular payroll products, and we have reports for those that aren’t supported (or call us, and we’ll write that integration for you).

3.   Prepare for the future.   Look for software that can be extended to handle staff scheduling and HR needs, as well as helping with staff communications.   With the combination of Gen X/Y, Baby Boomers, and others in the workplace, the software needs to be able to move with your business direction.   TimeForge provides online scheduling, time card tracking, payroll export, staff messaging, HR management, and a host of additional features.

3 Tips for Best Use of Staff Scheduling and Time Tracking Software

1.   The number one issue will be staff buy-in, especially if your staff is used to what they’ve “been doing”.   Make sure that the staff buy into the benefits, or some employees will continue doing things the old way, causing confusion while getting the new system up and running.

2.   Migrate into the software, starting with the most immediate need, and then adding one or two new features a week from the software.   Doing a complete overnight switch-over of a labor management can be burdensome even for medium and large businesses.

3.   Make sure to track the human factor.   Time tracking systems will produce lots of reports explaining productivity and early / late staff members, or projects that are over budget.   Unfortunately, they don’t account for exceptional customer service, staff members going out of their way, managers making sure that staff get holiday hours, and other human factors that run your business.

You can read the entire article at Women In Business.

Sign up for a free trial of our online scheduling software to see how much more free time you’ll have every week.

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We absolutely love helping customers solve real-world labor management and staff scheduling problems with our products!

Here’s an email from Andy Brown, who works at Benchmark Adventures, an amazing outdoor retailer in Boise, Idaho.   Andy’s working to bring the store online with both employee scheduling and their marketing operations (website, Twitter, and Facebook accounts).

Our initial email from Andy:

“I work for an outdoor retail store that has managed to stay in business for 40 years.   On the owners behalf I have spent a few days to look for software that would replace manually doing the schedule in excel.   The owner has been overwhelmed with accommodating school schedules, swaps, and requested time off.   We are all big outdoor enthusiasts that would prefer to be out playing in the outdoors than working.   Just the other day when the entire staff was pissed off about scheduling outcomes I offered to look into some software that would take the pain out.   I looked at three or four other software programs / services.

The other day I found your software and have been even more impressed with it the more I experiment with it.   I have a few questions for you.

Question 1 – Can I get another 10 day demo period when he is ready to work on the schedule again?

Question 2 – During our weekdays we have Early, All Day, and Late shifts.   On our current calendar all that is listed is E, A, and L respectively.   The whole staff that works here knows what those letters mean.   Can a report be designed that would list 4 two week blocks on the schedule with names on the left and days across the top?   We are looking for the shift names to show up instead of the times people will be working.   This allows 4, two week pay periods to be displayed on a single sheet of paper.

I’m very interested in your product and it is clearly the best I have looked at.   The search for scheduling software is over.“

We were able to extend Andy’s trial another 10 days, as he requested, so that he and the owner could review the software in depth.

And, because our system is extremely flexible, allowing users to schedule they way that they want to schedule, Andy’s second question was also very easy to solve.   We set Andy up with Sections / Stations inside of each Position, and showed him how to export reports to Excel.   He was able to quickly manipulate our reports inside of Excel, and in a matter of minutes had a schedule for several weeks, completed for the staff to review.

We live and breath labor management, and are continuously improving our software to make sure that we take the hassle out of labor management.

Don’t believe us?   Take TimeForge for a spin for your retail employee scheduling needs!

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