In a tough economy, a superintendent has even more paperwork than usual, with less time to complete everyday tasks (much less focus on implementing new policies). It’s a complex and competitive field. You need to oversee the turf management, water reduction, pest control, and an irritating influx of Canada Geese. Then, you concern yourself with maintenance, management of finances, relations with customers, hiring and training employees, marketing your course, and balancing maximum cost reduction without reducing quality.

You simply don’t have any time to spare! Though you need several extra hours every week for building and modifying the employee schedule and monitoring attendance, spending unnecessary time in the office is the last thing you want! However, an efficient schedule may be the first thing you need.

Scheduling employees for a golf course can be a headache. After juggling several employees with a wide range of skill sets, varying availabilities, part-time schedules, accrued PTO’s, and your course’s busy times, just to hash out a moderately coherent employee schedule, you have to find staff with suitable skill levels to accommodate shift swaps or cover for time-off requests, reorganize the schedule to find the best use of staff (without compromising coverage), and test out variations of the schedule without wasting any more time. After finally developing an efficient schedule, you’ll need to monitor attendance to prevent time clock abuses.

When the schedule is completed, you need to notify all the employees, deal with questions about the next week’s schedule (or worse, try to fill a missed shift), and sometimes you’ll need to redo the entire process because of an unexpected shift swap, sick day, or time off request.

It can be such a pain, but it’s excruciatingly vital to your course’s success. If you under-schedule, you’ll lose golfers to poor service experiences. If you over-schedule, you’ll lose profits to overspending on staff.

With recent advances in technology, there are tools that can help streamline this time drain. TimeForge can cut your employee scheduling time from hours to just minutes. Really!

In many ways, other than saving you time spent managing, TimeForge can save you money. Using TimeForge’s AutoSchedulerTM, you can have an entire employee schedule at the click of your computer mouse. The employee schedule generated by the AutoSchedulerTM is automatically optimized for maximum profit and efficiency. With TimeForge’s other features, you can determine the shifts that your cart barn is overstaffed and easily adjust schedules, instantly cutting labor costs. You can quickly and easily schedule your most experienced employees during your busiest periods to reduce complaints and backlogs without over-staffing. You can keep an eye on attendance (on-site or remotely) in order to curb time clock abuse and reduce overtime. You can monitor labor costs in real-time, and forecast your future costs and staff requirements. It all adds up: TimeForge can increase course profits by 3-5%.

TimeForge is an essential (and easy-to-use) labor management software for golf courses, but if you are still not convinced, read what TimeForge users are saying here.

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

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• TimeForge for Liquor Stores
• Scheduling Salaried Staff

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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• Scheduling Salaried Staff
• Liquor Stores
• Labor Management for Golf Courses
• Golf Courses

Many liquor store owners make small mistakes that often have major negative effects in their stores. However, these silent profit killers can go undiagnosed for years, often until it’s too late to implement the changes necessary to make a business thrive. So what are these silent profit killers? Lacking an adequate solution for getting rid of dead stock or slow moving items, excessive buying (holding more stock than is necessary for your sales volume), and careless labor management. These three seemingly minor errors have dramatic consequences for the bottom line of liquor stores.

TimeForge can’t do anything about your slow-moving inventory, and we can’t reduce the amount of product you order, but we can definitely help you with labor management. TimeForge can give you the tools to quickly and easily streamline your labor management so that you can see direct benefits emerge in your employee morale, attendance, customer satisfaction, all culminating in an improvement in your bottom line.

Best of all, TimeForge saves you time. We can reduce the amount of time you spend scheduling from hours to minutes. That’s right, you’re not the only manager or owner that spends hours on employee scheduling. You’ve got to coordinate multiple employees with different skill levels and availabilities, accrued PTOs, and time off requests. Once you’ve finally thrown together a decent-looking schedule, you’ll inevitably get a call-in from a sick employee or a last-minute time off request, then you re-notify your employees about the seemingly ever-changing schedule.   Once the schedule had been implemented and everything seems to be going smoothly, you’ll get a few shift swap requests, and reorganize the schedule. It’s no wonder the whole process takes you hours every week.

Consider how important attendance monitoring is, after all of this hard scheduling work. Sometimes it may feel like you’re babysitting, but you’ve got to stop employees from riding the clock or punching others in. A few minutes here and there add up quickly… and you’re paying for it dearly.

TimeForge is a complete labor management solution for the liquor industry, 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. In fact, TimeForge can increase liquor store profits by 3-5%.

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

Related articles or pages

• Liquor Stores
• Scheduling Salaried Staff
• Labor Management for Nursing Homes
• Labor Management for Golf Courses
• Labor Management for Churches and Religious Institutions

While the majority of the impact which turnover has on your business is difficult to measure, some negative factors can be quantified. Consider these costs when estimating the monetary loss turnover accounts for.

Employee costs during application phase

• Advertise to fill position
• Manager reviews various applications instead of being on the floor
• Manager conducts interviews instead of being on the floor
• Drug screens, educational/criminal background checks, and other reference checks
• Various candidate pre-employment skill, aptitude, and value assessment tests

Employee costs during on-boarding phase

• Trainee wages
• Trainer wages
• External training programs
• Certifications
• Mistakes made while learning

Employee costs while leaving

• Unmet deadlines or goals in employee’s absence
• Lost productivity due to employee’s absence
• Potential to lose other employees
• Lost departmental productivity
• Cost to retain lost employee’s customers

Replacement phase

• Advertise to fill position
• Manager reviews various applications instead of being on the floor
• Manager conducts interviews instead of being on the floor
• Drug screens, educational/criminal background checks, and other reference checks
• Various candidate pre-employment skill, aptitude, and value assessment tests

Also consider the cost of managers dealing with turnover instead of dealing with customers.

The best way to reduce turnover costs is to … reduce turnover. TimeForge can help you reduce your turnover (as well as reduce labor costs, often over 3% within the first week of implementing TimeForge) by providing staff and management a superior means of communication, keeping everyone “in the know” at all times. When it comes to staff turnover, TimeForge reduces it by:

• Ensuring that employees are never scheduled at times they are unavailable by allowing staff  to fill out their own availability (which can be overridden by management) and automatic enforcement of these availability requests.
• Making online shift swaps, pickups, time off requests and most non-face-to-face management tasks simple and fast. Managers are kept in the loop as well!
• Online, text message, and Facebook notifications of work schedules and upcoming shift reminders. TimeForge is available to your employees in formats that they are familiar with and frequently use.
• And many other benefits to managers and staff … keeping employee turnover down at your business!

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, or take a look at our other labor management products.

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

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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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• Workforce Labor Scheduling Updates (Part 1)
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• Updates to Employee Scheduling and Time and Attendance Software

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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• TimeForge Scheduling Features List

TimeForge Scheduling provides flexible, powerful and easy-to-use tools to build and publish an employee schedule, communicate with your staff members, and focus on generating revenue instead of paper-work.   TimeForge Scheduling excels at restaurant schedule creation, scheduling for retailers, and building schedules for other hospitality related industries.

Here’s a list of some of our scheduling features (and it doesn’t include everything we can do with time and attendance, human resources, or our other products).

Employee Scheduling Features

“Basic” Scheduling Features include:

Unlimited employees, multiple locations, employee information management, printable schedules (including individual schedules), online access to posted schedules, data import/export capabilities, data restore and backup capabilities, and password protection for employees and managers.

Additionally, TimeForge offers department management, modified leave types, employee age rules for minors and seniors, availability and requests modified by employees with management approval, position/employee skill levels, sales figures and analytics, and a “Daily Log” with messaging capabilities.

“Advanced” scheduling features include:

Schedule setup wizard, ability to assign jobs/projects/assignments, schedule full or part time employees, assign multiple shifts to same employee on the same day, color-coded shifts, defined holidays and week start day, schedule conflict warnings, and monthly, weekly, and daily views.

Additionally, TimeForge Scheduling offers an interactive User Wizard used to input and modify position/employee information, hourly rate information per position, a unique AutoScheduler which automatically creates the most profit and employee friendly schedule possible, employee shift swapping, employee breaks management, schedule template creation, and automatic employee notification via text message, eMail, and/or Facebook notification! Yes , employees can access their schedule information via social networking sites like Facebook, or from any smartphone!

Staff Scheduling Views and Reports include:

Weekly employee hours, shifts per day/employee, employees lists, time off summary, and daily, weekly, and monthly schedules. Additionally, TimeForge offers over 40 different reports, including employee shift satisfaction ratings, listed unassigned shifts, shift swapping reports, employees who missed assigned shifts, employee certification documentation, employee request charts, employee notifications (which lists the date and time that each employee received schedule notifications from TimeForge), schedule versus attendance summaries, extensive schedule views, employee breaks reports and worksheets, cost analysis charts, multiple labor overview summaries, and much more!

Help and Documentation includes:

Phone support, help documentation, manufacturer link, tutorials and a tour, FAQs, eMail, and general contact forms. Additionally, TimeForge offers help forums, help requests, online manuals (including a video manual!), and help text for every page and feature.

TimeForge Scheduling is easily incorporated to interact with your POS/PMS configuration, and works optimally with all other TimeForge products, including TimeForge HR, TimeForge Attendance, and Daily Log.

Sign up for a free trial today to try out these fantastic features!

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• Cell Phone Retailers
• TimeForge for Liquor Stores
• Liquor Stores
• How Do You Manage Labor?

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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• Scheduling Salaried Staff
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• Golf Courses

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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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!

Related articles or pages

• What’s Coming Soon?
• Updates to Employee Scheduling and Time and Attendance Software
• Workforce Labor Scheduling Updates (Part 2)
• Workforce Labor Scheduling Updates (Part 1)
• What’s New in TimeForge? (Part 1)