Labor Management. NOW Simple.

August 21, 2008 , Lubbock, TX , It happens on every Friday of every work week in hospitality, restaurant, and retail businesses around the world. Employees call and want to know when they are scheduled to work during the upcoming week, but the manager hasn’t posted the schedule. Staff members are not able to plan their personal lives without the work schedule which creates conflicts and leads to employee terminations and resignations as soon as the schedule is posted. With labor scheduling software tools, management can reduce schedule conflicts, minimize turnover, and improve profitability at their business.

Managing a labor force requires scheduling part-time and full-time employees properly before they are needed for work and also tracking when employees clock-in and clock-out. Good managers reduce the difference between the theoretical work schedule and the actual hours worked while maximizing sales at the business. Improper employee scheduling leads to one of two circumstances:

1. More employees are scheduled to work than are necessary – increasing payroll costs and reducing profits. Employees may be cut from the schedule without working their scheduled hours.
2. Not enough employees are scheduled to work – decreasing sales and reducing profits. Employees must be called in to work, creating frustration and high turnover among personnel.

Neither option is desirable and the key to avoiding both situations is to monitor and refine the schedule at your business. As experienced managers know, building an accurate schedule takes several hours a week and must consider all of the following items:

• Availability sheets
• Communication and request log books
• Shift swaps and trading
• Minor rules
• Scheduled breaks
• Lunches
• Employee notifications
• Training and certifications
• And many other factors …

Using TimeForge, a web-based labor management system, managers quickly build accurate schedules while reducing turnover, enhancing communication, and improving retention. The recently updated TimeForge provides more time saving features, new pricing plans, and now includes a powerful Daily Log.

With a comprehensive labor management tool, payroll expenses are reduced and employee turnover is continually monitored. TimeForge keeps managers out of the back office and puts them back on the floor where they can directly influence the profits of the business.

About TimeForge
TimeForge, www.TimeForge.com, develops easy-to-use software products to manage employee scheduling, time and attendance, and communication logs. TimeForge’s web-based product suite is designed to meet the demands of the retail and restaurant industries, providing solutions for both independent and chain operators.

Related articles or pages

• Congratulations TimeForge!
• Workforce Labor Scheduling Updates (Part 2)
• Workforce Labor Scheduling Updates (Part 1)
• Spend Less Time Scheduling Labor – More Time Managing Your Business
• Schedules are Theoretical Time, Time and Attendance is Paid Time , Manage Both

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

Related articles or pages

• Off Topic: Inventory Managment for Restaurants
• Employee Labor Scheduling: Interview with TimeForge.com's Anthony Presley
• TimeForge Labor Management, a quick background ….
• Reduce Turnover with Shift Scheduling Software
• Increase Profits with Improved Cost Controls

As previously mentioned, our team at Resolution Systems has been hard at work developing the latest version of our ground-breaking employee scheduling software, www.TimeForge.com

Version 1.4 went live yesterday (Sunday), with more than two dozen new features and improvements (and a reporting bug which we quickly fixed this morning).

We’re calling this release:

Some notable improvements in the software include:

1. Improved “User Wizard” will streamline your data entry the first time you use TimeForge.com
2. Multiple Managers! Now, your business can have managers for the Back-of-House (BOH) and Front-of-House (FOH), for the bar, for catering, or however you setup your business. Each manager can build their own schedules, and they have access to the other schedules as well!
3. With Multiple Managers …. we now detect schedule conflicts, and warn your managers before they publish the schedule.
4. Many improvements were made to Employee Requests …. including the ability for you and your managers to dictate how early employee requests must be made. IE, if day-off requests should be made at least 3 days before they occur, TimeForge will enforce your business practices.
5. Employee Requests that are approved or denied are now emailed directly to the employee, in addition to appearing on the employee’s own web page.
6. Employees who are scheduled for a shift cannot be double-scheduled into another shift that conflicts. Although our AutoScheduler™ has always done this, our manual scheduling tool now enforces these rules as well, resulting in faster schedule creation and fewer data-entry errors.

Of course, there’s been many under-the-hood improvements and the website and other pages should now load up to twice as fast (this will depend a lot on your own connection to the Internet).

Let us know if you experience any problems / bugs with the latest updates, or if you have any ideas for improvements. We take user-suggested improvements seriously, and are in the habit of handing out years of free service to users who are as excited as we are about TimeForge.com as we are.

How long does it take to make an employee schedule? It should take less than 5 minutes! Did you know that labor costs could be as much as 30% of your expenses? TimeForge can help streamline and minimize labor costs through effective employee scheduling at your restaurant, bar, or club.

Related articles or pages

• TimeForge v2.4.5
• Increase Profits with Improved Cost Controls
• Why Schedule Labor Properly? – Part Two
• TimeForge v1.9.2 , Scheduling is Simplified and Graphical!
• Support Blooper