Labor Management. NOW Simple.

Employee dissatisfaction is common among businesses in the retail, restaurant and hospitality industries, and will lead to a high turnover rate. High turnover in a business is extremely costly, as new employees need to be recruited, trained and properly certified , each one costing hundreds or thousands of dollars.

To assist with managing the labor requirements of your business, TimeForge offers extensive reports for many tasks including labor costs, breaks, and scheduled labor, among many others. This week, TimeForge introduced several new reports to make labor management more efficient and decrease turnover in your business.

Shift Ranking:

Are your staff happy with their work environment? From the point of view of your staff members, are there problems with certain shifts that need to be addressed? How would you know which shifts are causing issues with your staff, so that you can address the needs of your staff and your business? You’d use TimeForge!

Using TimeForge, employees have the ability to record whether they were satisfied with the shift they just worked. Our new Shift Ranking reports allow managers and business owners to review a comprehensive account of how many employees were happy with their shift , and how many were unhappy , as well as the ratio of satisfied vs. dissatisfied employees, by either position or shift.

These remarkable new reports, an industry first, provide employers the ability to pinpoint problematic shifts and staff positions in order to decrease turnover and maximize profits for the business. Another report displays shift satisfaction among multiple locations to allow multi-unit operators to remotely monitor their business.

Shift Swapping:

Did you start the week with the perfect schedule, but by the end of the week you are paying unexpected overtime and have unhappy staff? One possibility is that staff are making too many shift swaps, changing around the staffing schedule in an unpredictable manner. Use TimeForge to identify heavy shift swapping and make profitable business decisions!

Our latest shift swap reports allow employers to view the shifts that employees are giving up and picking up, during any period of time, as well as the ratios of shifts given up vs. picked up. These reports provide employers the unmatched capability to gain understanding and control over employees’ shift-swapping habits to successfully remedy employee scheduling problems and overtime abuse.

Managing a workforce requires some give-and-take between management and staff members to ensure that the business runs successfully. Use TimeForge to gain insight into the day-to-day labor management at your business. Just look at what TimeForge customers have had to say about our revolutionary product.

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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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Marina managers have plenty on their plates: risk and liability assessment; fire- and emergency-response planning; environmental management; health and safety compliance; dealing with regulations and permitting; marketing, promotion, and pricing; financial management; and employee scheduling, attendance monitoring, and training…the list goes on and on, but the hours in a day do not.

To be successfully in a difficult economy, marina operators have make the time to plan strategically – without compromising the skillful execution of all of those duties.

It’s not easy.

Take, for example, scheduling and attendance monitoring for marina, harbor, and port employees. You have to juggle multiple shifts, part-time employees (each with their own unique scheduling requests), certifications or specific skill sets required on any given shift, PTO accrued, time off and shift swap requests, and labor laws.

All of this tedious minutia needs to coalesce into one efficient employee shift schedule that ensures you have the coverage you need – particularly in your marina’s peak times – without unnecessary labor costs.

But once completed, your work is not done. You have to communicate that schedule to all the employees, field endless inquiries about next week’s schedule (or worse, scramble to fill a missed shift), monitor attendance so that employees don’t punch in early or late or punch in buddies, monitor overtime and labor costs (both in real-time and forecasting), and deal with late or unexpected time off or shift swap requests (re-creating the schedule and communicating the re-worked schedule to all the employees, again).

It’s just one of many headaches a marina operator faces, but it’s an important one. Poor management of employee scheduling and attendance can be costly – not only in terms of hours wasted and employee morale, but in terms of the bottom line.

If you spend hours every week on marina employee scheduling and attendance, you’re not alone. But you are in luck. Timeforge allows marina and boat center operators to cut employee scheduling and attendance monitoring time from hours to minutes (literally).

The ability to manage schedules at one or many locations, schedule those with stronger skills or necessary certifications in the high volume time slots, and monitor and forecast your labor costs makes Timeforge not just a time-saver but a budget-booster. In fact, TimeForge can increase profits by 3-5%.

Add in the ability to integrate simply with POS or payroll systems, to notify employees of upcoming schedules and schedule changes by email or text message (reducing late or absent employees), and the ability to focus your energies on the urgent duties facing a marina manager on any given day (rather than mind-numbing scheduling minutia), you’ll probably find that the time saved first week alone pays for the investment.

With TimeForge, Marina Operators Can …

• Build employee schedules in seconds – no matter how complicated, or how many locations.
• Record staff member availability, employee time off requests, and other key information – as well as record sales and important occurrences during every shift that you can review onsite or remotely,
• Export payroll to many popular payroll providers with a single click.
• Inform employees of schedules or schedule changes by text message or email – eliminating employee confusion and missed shifts.
• 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 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.
• Manage and forecast labor costs to decrease costs and increase profits.
• And much more…

TimeForge is a complete labor management solution for marinas and boat houses, 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.

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

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Building employee schedules can be a time consuming and laborious task, and getting a schedule wrong means higher turnover and lower profits. With TimeForge, managers can quickly and easily review and post labor schedules, approve (or deny) time off, and manage employee shift swaps – all in a few seconds!

TimeForge Scheduling has been designed from the ground up to keep managers on the floor, not stuck in the back room working in Excel or on a clipboard!

TimeForge is a web-based employee scheduling and labor management system that ensures staff stay informed of any schedule changes with text messages, email messages, Facebook, and smart phone access (such as a Blackberry or iPhone) – automatically!

More than 2,500 businesses around the world have used TimeForge to manage their labor – retail stores, restaurants, bars, clubs, pharmacies, valet companies, doctors offices, children’s health clinics, child care centers, churches, and many other businesses!

Build a Schedule in Seconds!

• Ease to Use
  There is no software to install, and includes a fast web-based setup.
• Cost-Effective
  Weekly schedules can be created in under a minute.
• AutoScheduler
  Gives you and other managers more time “on the floor”.
• Balanced Schedules
  Balance staff requests and labor requirements to create a perfect schedule.
• Daily Reminders
  Staff members receive daily reminders about work schedules
• Reduce Turnover
  Automatic labor management keeps staff happy, reducing turnover!
• Automatic Notifications
  TimeForge automatically notifies staff of any schedule changes.
• Control Costs
  Control labor costs with sophisticated reporting
• Instant Return On Investment
  Instant ROI so you can focus on growing your business
• Affordable
  TimeForge provides plans that are affordable for businesses of all sizes!

Employee Scheduling Software is also known as Labor Scheduling Software, and some companies refer to this type of software as Enterprise Employee Scheduling Software. Whatever your organization calls it, TimeForge Scheduling is the most powerful tool available to manage labor and control profits at your business! Read more about the capabilities of TimeForge Scheduling, or Sign Up for a Free Trial.

Download a TimeForge Media Kit, which contains more information about TimeForge Scheduling.

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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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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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In many locales, labor laws for the service industry severely limit the number of hours that a non-exempt employee can work.   Hours worked can be limited by the industry, age, job description (position worked), hourly rate, holiday, length of shift, or even the day of the week.   If your business works with service unions, these rules can become even more complicated, requiring that managers spend time tracking breaks and meal periods and indicating whether or not employees wanted to take their break.   Some states and insurance companies perform regular Labor & Industries audits, imposing heavy fines or insurance premium increases for non-compliant businesses.

Careful managers schedule around these frequently changing and complicated rules, ensuring that their business is compliant with all applicable labor regulations.   However, businesses can inadvertently land themselves in hot-water when employees fail to show up, quit, or are terminated for otherwise legitimate reasons.   Inexperienced managers, overburdened by other areas of schedule creation can forget about these rules, which are not core to the “making money” aspect of their business.   Stiff fines and lawsuits are the result of failing to be in compliance.

In uncertain economic times managers must be able to schedule labor correctly in a consistent manner, keep employees happy, and reduce fines imposed by legislative authorities, such as the Department of Labor.   Businesses should seek to use cost-effective computer systems, such as TimeForge, to ensure that proper scheduling techniques are utilized.   Effective scheduling software will be able to schedule meal and break periods, accurately calculate overtime costs, and archive previous schedules for managerial review.

Labor & Industries (L&I) audits are common in some US states (California, Washington, Oregon, and New York are especially common) in restaurant, food-service, retail, construction, and hospitality-related industries.   These audits are performed by the state or by insurance companies to verify that the business has complied with all applicable regulations.   Audits focus on unpaid overtime, minors working too late or too early, break and meal periods that are not properly documented, and other violations.   Rule infractions can be punished with stiff fines and/or insurance premium increases.

Make sure that all employees are aware of the applicable rules for the city, county, and state / province.   Follow federal / national rules (where applicable), corporate rules, and insurance regulations (if applicable).   Where possible, automated scheduling systems should be utilized to enforce these rules reducing the administrative burden placed on managers – allowing management to work on other pressing issues such as training, customer service, and management tasks which cannot be automated by cost-effective technology solutions.

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Building employee schedules can be a time consuming and laborious task, and getting a schedule wrong means higher turnover and lower profits. With TimeForge, managers can quickly and easily review and post labor schedules, approve (or deny) time off, and manage employee shift swaps – all in a few seconds!

TimeForge Scheduling has been designed from the ground up to keep managers on the floor, not stuck in the back room working in Excel or on a clipboard!

TimeForge is a web-based employee scheduling and labor management system that ensures staff stay informed of any schedule changes with text messages, email messages, Facebook, and smart phone access (such as a Blackberry or iPhone) – automatically!

More than 2,500 businesses around the world have used TimeForge to manage their labor – retail stores, restaurants, bars, clubs, pharmacies, valet companies, doctors offices, children’s health clinics, child care centers, churches, and many other businesses!

Build a Schedule in Seconds!

• Ease to Use
  There is no software to install, and includes a fast web-based setup.
• Cost-Effective
  Weekly schedules can be created in under a minute.
• AutoScheduler
  Gives you and other managers more time “on the floor”.
• Balanced Schedules
  Balance staff requests and labor requirements to create a perfect schedule.
• Daily Reminders
  Staff members receive daily reminders about work schedules
• Reduce Turnover
  Automatic labor management keeps staff happy, reducing turnover!
• Automatic Notifications
  TimeForge automatically notifies staff of any schedule changes.
• Control Costs
  Control labor costs with sophisticated reporting
• Instant Return On Investment
  Instant ROI so you can focus on growing your business
• Affordable
  TimeForge provides plans that are affordable for businesses of all sizes!

Employee Scheduling Software is also known as Labor Scheduling Software, and some companies refer to this type of software as Enterprise Employee Scheduling Software. Whatever your organization calls it, TimeForge Scheduling is the most powerful tool available to manage labor and control profits at your business! Read more about the capabilities of TimeForge Scheduling, or Sign Up for a Free Trial.

Download a TimeForge Media Kit, which contains more information about TimeForge Scheduling.

Related articles or pages

• Employee Scheduling Complicated? Not Anymore!
• Easily Manage Labor with Innovative Staffing Reports
• Spend Less Time Scheduling Labor – More Time Managing Your Business
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• Simple Employee Scheduling – Version 1.8.5 (Part 3)

Managers are More Expensive than Non-Salaried Staff

In many industries including retail, hospitality, food-service, hotels, and manufacturing, salaried management staff are usually several times more expensive than non-salaried staff at the same business. In many cases, one member of the salaried staff can be more expensive than five or six non-salaried staff members. In addition to their hourly-wage, managers are eligible for benefits such as life insurance, health insurance, expensive overtime, or additional perks like free food or discounted merchandise rates.

Schedule Managers to do Management Tasks

Businesses should ensure salaried managers perform managerial tasks while on duty, and leverage non-salaried employees for work-related duties that do not require a manager. Some tasks that managers may be charged with during a regular work day could include performing quality control, placing vendor orders, building employee schedules, training employees, processing payroll, and working with customers. Whatever management does while at work, make sure that it is something that is representative of their cost to the business.

Managers should be able to jump in and work when other non-management staff members do not show up for work or unanticipated spikes in demand require more line workers. This ability implies that the business does a good job of cross training employees, and the business is not overly reliant on any one staff member. However, if it is common practice for managers to mop the floors or clean bathrooms because other staff members do not show up, than a re-evaluation of hiring and staffing practices is recommended.

Managers are routinely asked to create efficient schedules for their business on a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly basis. Accurately scheduling the work force several weeks in advance provides employees with a defined work schedule and allows managers to estimate upcoming expenses (payroll is often the largest expense in retail, restaurant, hospitality, and similar industries). During the process of preparing an accurate schedule, managers will check employee availability, review request logs, consider federal/state/local and corporate regulations, update employee work preferences, revise employee capabilities and training, make overtime considerations, ensure minimum work hours all while maintaining budgets and other business requirements. The entire schedule process commonly occupies a manager for 10% of every week, costing the business at least several hundred dollars each week!

Changing the Employee Schedule Uses Manager Time, Which is Expensive

In addition to creating the schedule, managers often change the schedule on a daily basis. Employees may become available (and want more shifts), suddenly be unavailable (illness or termination) and not able to work, or forget when they need to be at work. Shift swapping is also common in many industries and requires a manager to spend time on each trade , employees give up shifts that were assigned to them originally, or pick up shifts that others cannot work. A shift or request log may be used for employee initiated shift trades. Managers cannot monitor theft, interact with customers, train employees, or perform quality control at the business if they are in the back-office working on a labor schedule.

To ensure that management staff time is spent appropriately, use technology tools to perform tasks that can be done by computers. Software tools such as TimeForge improve staff retention, and decrease the amount of time that scheduling labor consumes. TimeForge includes a number of additional tools that will assist managers in time management, including a daily manager log book, payroll processing, and other similar tools.

Related articles or pages

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Although employee work schedules sometimes appear simple to create, building a “good” labor schedule is extremely difficult using traditional methods such as Microsoft Excel or pen-and-paper.   Managers must build a schedule so that qualified employees are available to meet the forecasted demand for service or goods.   And a good schedule accurately reflects projected sales for the upcoming week or month, providing adequate work hours for employees.

Labor Schedules Take Time to Create

The employee schedule informs employees when to arrive at work, and in some cases, when to leave.   In other cases, employees are “cut” from the schedule based on demand (or volume) at the business.   In almost every case, the labor schedule is created by management staff in the back-office or at home after hours , a point of discontent for most managers who must work longer hours and weekend hours to build schedules.

The steps to create a labor schedule reads like a long list of tasks, occupying several hours of management time every week:

1. First review the manager’s log book and estimate or forecast upcoming sales and the demand for labor.
2. Next check the employee request log and availability sheets as well as individual work preferences while remembering which employees are minors or restricted in working.
3. Look-up required employee certifications; for example, an ABC license is required to serve alcohol at a restaurant or necessary certifications to dispense medications.
4. Identify trustworthy and experienced personnel to open or close the business.
5. Try to fairly distribute shifts while meeting employee minimum hour works, but do not exceed a maximum number of hours.
6. Make sure that employees are not likely to receive overtime if someone fails to show up on the schedule.
7. Identify convenient times to provide break and meal periods for staff members who are required to receive breaks.
8. Calculate the likely cost of payroll, being mindful of budgetary constraints , if the cost is too high, start over.

Juggling all of these factors to create a good schedule for the workforce is a complicated task that can consume more than ten-percent of a manager’s time throughout the week.   In many cases, especially in owner-operator businesses, this schedule is posted late in the week for the upcoming week.   Posting the schedule late causes problems with employees and creates higher turnover and reduces tenure at the business , reducing overall profits!

The final version of the labor schedule, which the manager has likely spent hours creating, may be bulk-emailed out to the employees (if the manager used a tool such as Microsoft Excel and a schedule template to build the schedule), or more commonly, printed and posted on a wall in the back of the business (inside the management office, store room, or kitchen).

Theoretical Labor Schedules are Important for Staff

This posted work schedule is the “theoretical labor schedule” – it is the necessary labor needed to operate the business and meet expected customer demand.   The posted work schedule will change throughout the week as employees fail to show up, swap shifts with other staff members, arrive early or late, or business requirements change and employees are cut or added to the schedule.   The posted schedule should be saved and archived (as it was created by management) for later comparison to worked hours, and for issues arriving from Labor & Industries audits, availability conflicts, labor disputes, or even lawsuits.

Is your scheduling complex?   Are you making the best possible schedule?   How many thousands of dollars do you spend making schedules every year?   Did you know that TimeForge can reduce turnover, increase retention and increase profits through employee scheduling at your business? Sign up today for a free trial!

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