Labor Management. NOW Simple.

The TimeForge product began life about 6 years ago, with the vision of a simple, easy to use, online employee scheduling product for the restaurant and retail industries.

We quickly realized that every business owner and manager has their own idea of what a “simple” employee scheduling system must do to help their business , labor scheduling requirements greatly vary by industry and location.   However, saving time and money is important to all business owners …

• Businesses in California, New York, and other areas need to schedule employee breaks (not very important in Texas, New Mexico, and other locales),
• Large organizations need to schedule multiple departments and supervisors (smaller groups only have one department),
• Labor costs need to be accurate, and account for overtime, multiple locations, positions, and job codes (many businesses fly by the seat of their pants, and don’t see the value in this information),
• Employee schedules need to be enforced, making sure employees do not arrive too early or leave too late (locations with full-time employees don’t worry about this requirement),
• And on, and on -.

Over the past several years, TimeForge has evolved to solve all of these problems , in an approachable manner for new and existing customers.

Multiple versions of the TimeForge service are now available, including:

• TimeForge Scheduling, the simple-to-use employee scheduling software, reduces labor scheduling from hours to seconds, improves employee communication (reducing frustration and turnover), and enables staff to check and receive schedules remotely.

• TimeForge Attendance, a full-featured time and attendance program, tracks when employees clock in / out, displays employee timecards, enforces the TimeForge Scheduling work schedule, and exports attendance for payroll calculations.

• TimeForge Daily Log, a powerful communications tool, records daily activities in an organized and searchable manner , removing the need for expensive physical log books.

Each TimeForge product can be used separately, or the products can be combined together to create a powerful labor management tool.   Managing labor with any of the TimeForge products will result in an immediate Return On Investment, but combining the products together will increase your profits in both good and bad economic climates.

The latest release of TimeForge continues to improve on our simple concepts, and continues to make life easy for managers and employees alike.   Read more about our latest release here…

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

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Do you own or operate a retail or restaurant company?   Perhaps your store sells collectibles, health food products, cell phone accessories or curtains and rugs.   Regardless of the goods being offered, tightly controlling your labor expenses in the current economic climate is crucial to generate a profit.   Relevant employee expenses including payroll costs, training, and turnover should be properly managed.   With the proper procedures and a set of tools to assist with the complex chore of managing labor, your business can increase profitability.

One key to managing a labor force properly is to schedule part-time and full-time employees before they are needed for work (a theoretical work schedule), and then track the scheduled work against when employees clock-in and clock-out (the actual worked hours), a process known actual vs. theoretical, or AvT.   Good managers reduce the difference (variance) between the Actual hours worked and the Theoretical schedule, while maximizing the sales for the business.

Improper labor scheduling will lead to one of two circumstances for your business:

1. Too many employees are scheduled to work, increasing payroll costs, and reducing profits.   Alternatively, employees are sent home (or cut from the schedule) without working hours they were promised on the schedule.
2. Too few employees are scheduled to work, decreasing the number of sales that are made, and reducing profits.

Neither option is desirable, and the key to avoiding both situations is to monitor and refine the AvT at your business.

Smart managers constantly balance employee satisfaction against the needs of the business in an effort to keep payroll costs down, reduce turnover, and increase profits.   Turnover is extremely expensive, and a 2004 study by the Employment Policy Foundation found that the average turnover cost of a single full-time employee is $13,355.   To recover from the effects of the turnover of a single full-time employee, a retail store would need to sell more than 3,000 pairs of khakis priced at $35 each.   A restaurant would need to sell more than 7,613 children’s combo meals at $2.50 each.

One way to reduce turnover at your store is to implement a labor scheduling tool such as TimeForge, an online employee scheduling solution.

Peter Edwards, owner of Zeb’s General Store in North Conway, New Hampshire knows that proper employee scheduling is key to managing a retail business, especially a seasonal business.   Peter chose TimeForge to help him manage full-time and part-time shift labor at his store. reducing employee turnover and lowering labor costs.   Peter uses templates in TimeForge to rapidly build schedules for his business, and TimeForge automatically emails and text messages the schedule to his employees on a daily basis , notifying employees of their upcoming work schedule and keeping his staff happy.

Peter had this to say about TimeForge:

I own a retail company.   We employ 15 full time employees, and between 5 and 15 part time employees depending upon our season.   I signed up for the 90 day trial period and have been using the TimeForge program for about 45 days.   I have found the program to be easy to use and it hits the mark with respect to our staff scheduling needs.   The email notification aspect of the program is a great feature that I am sure our employees will like.

The most important aspect of TimeForge is the incredible customer support.   Responses to the help menu item are emailed within 24 hours, and a live person actually answers the phone to respond to your questions.   I look forward to using TimeForge and would be pleased to talk with any prospective user of the scheduling program.

If you would like to see what TimeForge can do for your restaurant, hospitality, or retail business, then please sign up today for a free trial or contact our sales department for more information about TimeForge.

How long does it take to make an employee schedule for your employees? It should take less than 5 minutes! Did you know that TimeForge can minimize costs and increase profits through effective employee scheduling at your pizza, restaurant, hotel, bar, club, or retail business. Sign up today for a free trial!

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Lubbock, TX , May 28, 2008 , Making a great work schedule week after week is often a painful managerial chore for businesses of all sizes. However, the increased store profits, lower turnover, and improved employee morale make employee scheduling software a worthwhile investment. Many operators in the restaurant, retail, and hospitality industries create labor schedules by hand using pen-and-paper methods that can consume up to seven hours a week in managerial time , an expense of more than $12,000 per year in manager time building and managing the labor schedule! Operators using spreadsheets still spend at least two hours a week scheduling labor.

Well-chosen software solutions can help operators control labor and increase profits, without incurring great expense. For example, TimeForge, a web-based labor scheduling product tightly controls employee labor costs and reduces turnover by providing a simple-to-use solution for scheduling employees. The TimeForge software program, available at http://www.TimeForge.com, ensures that managers spend more time “on the floor” and less time in the back office scheduling employees.

The most recent version, released on May 27, 2008 includes a number of improvements to the software and continues to build on TimeForge’s success as a quick, simple, and affordable scheduling solution for businesses of all sizes. According to Michael, the proprietor of Tiara Cafe in California, “The TimeForge scheduling system has not only increased our efficiency tremendously; decreased the errors in what is normally an error prone environment; it has also saved us ten times what it costs us each month.”

TimeForge turns employee scheduling into an automated task that can be performed in a few minutes every week , improving store profits by thousands of dollars every year for the store. Some advantages of the new TimeForge include:

• TimeForge now includes the ability to track employee tips, which can be entered when an employee clocks out, or later by management!
• Schedules and templates can be organized into departments (similar to folders) to easily differentiate between “Front of House” and “Back of House” schedules.
• New attendance reports are available for supervisors and managers.
• Managers can easily see why an employee cannot be scheduled , regardless if the employee is already scheduled at another location or in a conflicting shift, or if the employee is unavailable.
• Locations / stores / units can be organized into a Corporate Hierarchy so that managers can monitor scheduling practices for groups of locations.
• Many other improvements!

Independent and chain operators alike can benefit from the many time saving and profit improving features of labor scheduling systems such as TimeForge. Get back on the floor today!

About TimeForge
TimeForge is the premier employee scheduling software, designed to provide fast ROI benefits to the business, and to meet the growing demands of the work force. TimeForge.com is affordable software that works with both independent and chain operations in retail, hospitality, and many other industries. For more information about TimeForge, and to sign up for a free trial, visit the website at http://www.TimeForge.com

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Do you want to reduce your turnover by at least 5 percent?
Do you want to improve employee satisfaction?
Do you want to build a schedule in just a few minutes?
Do you want to be doing something other than making the labor schedule?

TimeForge labor scheduling software has been upgraded to the latest version, version 1.8, at no charge to our customers, and this release includes a number of new features to make scheduling even more simple. Some of the latest features include:

1. Schedule by Department / Position or by Time. Wok shifts can be grouped together by position, or ordered by time, or both! When using the position / department groups, each group will display the total cost for the group, the number of shifts, and the total number of hours being scheduled. Schedule how you want to!
2. Employees can view the schedules of other employees. To enable this feature, login to TimeForge, click on “Setup“, and then choose “Settings for this Location“. In the “TimeForge Configuration” section, you will see a question which reads: “Do you want to allow your employees to view other employee’s schedules and contact information?” Make sure this option is set to “Yes“, and then save your settings. Any employee who logs into TimeForge.com can click on their “Schedules” tab, and then click on “Other Employee’s Schedules“. Employees can view the times, phone numbers, and assigned employees for all of the published labor schedules at your business.
3. Requests and Availability can be filtered by position or employee. For example, you can view the requests for only “Joe“, or you can look at all of the requests from your “Server” staff. To use this feature, click on the “Employees” tab, and then choose “Edit employee requests / availability“. Once on that screen, you can change the “Requests for:” drop-down to display specific requests, and then click on “Show” to actually see that information.

In addition to these new features, several bug fixes and speed improvements have been added to make TimeForge the premiere online employee scheduling package.

How long does it take to make your labor schedules? 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, bar, club, or business.

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Lubbock, TX , August 10, 2007 , Stop wasting time on employee schedules! Labor scheduling, considered a necessary headache by most restaurant industry professionals, consumes between 3 and 8 hours of management time every week; time that can be better spent managing employees, attending customers, and servicing business needs. Today, the industry’s leading labor-scheduling company, TimeForge.com, announced that version 1.7 of the TimeForge software will be released at the 2007 Western Foodservice & Hospitality Expo.

TimeForge’s latest version of the popular employee scheduling software continues to improve on the company’s conviction that scheduling must be as fast as possible so managers and employees can spend more time on the floor. TimeForge clients report that labor schedules can be built in less than 30 minutes, an 80% – 98% savings for many in the hospitality industry.

Western Food Expo has selected TimeForge for this year’s “Onsite New Product Gallery” and will showcase the new features of the software including an enhanced user interface, requests and availability, shift swapping among employees, significant AutoScheduler™ speed improvements, a superior report interface, as well as new time and attendance features. TimeForge has also improved the core of the product: scheduling and notifications. Managers gain more control of automatic schedule creation, and employees have greater flexibility with availability and schedule requests.

No more sticky-notes and no more scheduling spreadsheets! To be competitive in today’s market, electronic scheduling is a necessity. Visit TimeForge.com at the Western Foodservice & Hospitality Expo, booth #2827, to see what you have been missing!

About TimeForge.com
TimeForge.com is the leading online employee scheduling software product. TimeForge provides immediate ROI benefits to the business while meeting the growing demands of the workforce. TimeForge.com is designed specifically for the hospitality and restaurant industries including restaurants (quick-service and table-service), hotels, catering, and other hospitality markets.

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• Time For a Schedule Change

Tired of pencil-and-paper schedules? Excel Spreadsheets not cutting it? Technology has an easier way to create employee scheduling: electronic employee scheduling.

Lubbock, Texas – February 9, 2007 – Most restaurants and hotels manage employee scheduling with printed schedules posted on a bulletin board. When the schedule is posted, employees race to the board to check their schedule, then squabble with one another and management to swap shifts. When employees forget when they work, management is responsible for routing phone calls from employees with inquiries about the schedule, time-off requests, employees who are late showing up, and other scheduling situations, all while customers are neglected and ignored.

Innovations in technology have created an easier and faster way to manage employee schedules: web applications running over the Internet. Through the use of a protected Internet web site, management can create schedules and employees can check for updates from any location, at any time. There are a variety of websites offering electronic scheduling services.

When shopping for a scheduling application, it is important that it has features that make scheduling easier. For instance, the ability to automatically email employees with the latest schedule is an important capability in any scheduling software package. Service is also an important characteristic, and some companies will ease the transition from paper to online scheduling by transferring your existing schedules into electronic format. A few scheduling applications have features that set them above the competition. For instance, TimeForge.com, a premier online employee scheduling tool, has an option that automatically optimizes the schedule to be the most cost-efficient for your business, while considering employee and manager preferences.

Electronic scheduling services usually require a monthly or yearly subscription and pricing is based on either the number of employees at the establishment or a flat-rate monthly fee.

If you manage employees, electronic scheduling software is a worthwhile investment. Aside from the instant time saving features that online scheduling applications offer, they can also reduce your employee turnover rate. Poor employee satisfaction is an important determination for employees to look for other jobs, which increases your employee turnover rate and causes you to re-invest money into training a new employee. Online scheduling software can improve the employee satisfaction at your business by creating schedules that are based on employee and manager preferences. Scheduling based on employee and manager preferences ensures that employees are always kept in the “loop”, and management does not need to worry about schedule-related disputes.

Print scheduling is a thing of the past; to be competitive in today’s hospitality industry, electronic scheduling is a necessity.

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