Labor Management. NOW Simple.

TimeForge is an easy to use workforce management solution for your business, and includes many powerful features designed to improve your business. These include:

• Go home early and stop fussing with payroll and time card mistakes with easy time tracking (electronic time sheets and time cards) and staff monitoring.
• No more worrying about break laws and meal management with easy one-click break sheets and meal management.
• Get done with payroll with a single click with our one-click payroll exports to popular provides like SurePayroll, CompuPay, QuickBooks, and more.
• Rest easy with automatic reminders when staff are late, show up early, late, or start approaching overtime.
• And much more…

Here is a brief overview of some of the features of TimeForge Attendance …

TimeForge Attendance is a powerful replacement for your traditional time clock, or the limited punch in / out included with many Point of Sale systems. Use TimeForge Attendance by itself, or combine with TimeForge Scheduling for a powerful workforce management solution.

TimeForge can also integrate with many Point of Sale systems, stopping employees from clocking in early, or leaving too late.

Use TimeForge Attendance to make your life easy! TimeForge easily manages time cards, staff attendance, and payroll exporting.

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• How Do You Manage Labor?
• Grocery Stores
• Track Staff Certifications and Qualifications
• TimeForge Updates for December
• TimeForge Labor Management, a quick background ….

As operations managers and HR professionals know, managing labor is much more than building staff schedules and managing time and attendance for employees.   There are many other aspects of human resources and labor management, including:

• Talent management
• Tracking staff training and continuing education credits
• Skills tracking and ranking
• Onboarding and hiring processes
• Background verification and skill assessments
• Certifications and qualification tracking
• Raise requests and workflow
• And much more …

In many of these HR areas, we recommend that our users utilize a best of breed solution to ensure the best results for our customers.   For example, Corvirtus is simply the best company around to perform skills assessments in the hospitality and restaurant industries, and we recommend our customers look at Corvirtus for any unmet assessment needs.

However, a few of the these HR areas are easily managed inside of TimeForge’s best-of-breed labor management solution.   Historical raise requests, qualifications, skill tracking and ranking, and others are already available in TimeForge, and more will become available in the near future.

Let’s review employee certifications …

Did you know that TimeForge can track certifications for staff members?   Using TimeForge, you can track any number of certifications (staffing qualifications), testing dates, renewal dates, and test scores.   Each certificate can also include a note about the staff member’s qualification.

Specifics of a Certification / Staff Qualification

TimeForge allows savvy managers to set up certifications which are required before the staff member can be scheduled.   TimeForge can then stop you and your management team from scheduling employees who are not qualified for the job position.

For example, in the state of Texas, a server (waiter) that serves alcohol needs to have taken an alcohol awareness and training course.   Serving alcohol, of any kind, without this certification can land the employee and the responsible manager in jail for the evening.   With a single click inside of TimeForge, managers can ensure that staff are only scheduled if they are qualified to be scheduled.

Add a Certificate, Restrict who can be Scheduled

As an added bonus, TimeForge will notify managers and employees 6 weeks before the certificate expires, so that managers and staff members both know that it’s time to renew the qualification.   The certification reminder also appears inside of the Daily Log.

Use certifications to make your life easy!

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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 …

• 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.

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

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Some of the TimeForge staff will be at the upcoming International Restaurant Show in Las Vegas, Nevada. This hospitality trade show is co-located with three other large events, including:

• The Nightclub & Bar Convention and Trade Show
• International Coffee & Tea Expo
• HotelWorld Expo & Conference

The trade show starts February 24, 2008 and wraps up on February 27, 2008 with more than 300 exhibiting companies in attendance. Companies serving the hospitality and food-service industries will be in attendance.

So who should attend? Independent and chain managers, owners, and operators of restaurants, hotels, casinos, resorts, and nightclubs.

Where will we be? Our team will be walking the trade show floor, looking for innovative products and outstanding partners. We intend to meet with a number of vendors at the show, but will also be sitting in several of the educational programs that are being held.

Some of the seminars you might find us in include:

• Hiring, Training, Motivating and Keeping High-Performance Employees by Terry Morey at RestaurantMarketingGroup.org
• Choosing a Restaurant Franchise: Follow Your Heart, But Don’t Lose Your Head by Ken Reimer at Baker Bros
• Ask The Expert by Chris Weinberg at The BarFly Group
• Online Ordering: Pitfalls, Obstacles & Benefits by G.R. Homa at BigHoller

If you are a vendor who will be at the show, a consultant, or an operator who would like to talk with us about our solutions to employee and labor scheduling. temperature monitoring (and HACCP systems), or our patented table management solution …. please contact us!

How long does it take to make your employee 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?

Related articles or pages

• Trade Shows Relevant to TimeForge Users in 2008
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• Workforce Labor Scheduling Updates (Part 1)

Nation’s Restaurant News recently posted a blog worth at least $20 in immediate lost sales, and perhaps several hundred in lost future sales. The picture is reposted here for reference:

We have no idea what occurred to keep the employee away from their customers for 30 minutes. However, based on our experience one of two things happened , and both scenarios can be prevented with a good labor management system such as TimeForge.com

Possible Scenario One: Managers were too busy with other details of the operation and could not oversee the staff and customer interactions. Management could be mopping the floor, paying bills, training new staff, making the schedule, or any number of other tasks. Regardless of the job they were performing, the managers were preoccupied and could not properly manage their store to ensure that customers were being served promptly.

Solution: Regardless of which task occupied the manager’s time, they were not available to manage the store floor. If the store was using TimeForge.com to build their schedule, and manage their labor, management would spend 4 more hours on the floor, not in the back-office making a schedule. A good workforce management solution could give the management team another four (or more!) hours per week “on-the-floor”.

Possible Scenario Two: The manager responsible for the schedule was inexperienced or unable to schedule the workforce correctly. Too many employees may have been scheduled earlier in the day, and too many of those were sent home. Or, perhaps too few were scheduled all day, and those that were scheduled could not keep up with the increased customer demand.

Solution: Inexperienced and experienced managers both benefit from TimeForge.com’s graphical scheduling capabilities, more than 20 labor reports, and many schedule visualization tools. Users of TimeForge.com can quickly see employees that are scheduled or not scheduled, which staff members are “on call” or “extras”, and when employees are available to work.

Regardless of what happened at this restaurant, poor staffing and labor management led to lost sales, and a bad reputation.

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?

Related articles or pages

• Workforce Labor Scheduling Updates (Part 1)
• Track Staff Certifications and Qualifications
• Supercharged Scheduling from Nations Restaurant News
• Schedule Staff the Way You Want!
• Graphical Availability and Requests for Employee Scheduling