Not so long ago, controlling labor cost for food-service establishments was done mostly by natural process. Having an effective labor control meant by being able to manage your staff during a rush to keep an ongoing operation and send them home as quickly as possible when the rush is over.

Restaurant managers kept track of business from previous weeks in order to make projections of future sales, and then, with great expenditure of effort, converted those numbers into an employee schedule. And at night when the restaurant closes, the manager sits down with a sack of time cards, calculating for the day’s labor percentage where success or failure of those efforts is going to be determined.

However, those days are no longer with us and a restaurant’s point-of-sale system has taken over many of the functions a restaurant manager used to do by hand.

Since the minimum wage sets to rise to $7.25 for the next few years, business owners looks for business tools they can use to control labor cost.

At a Pizza Inn restaurant, their general manager Jim Phillips uses his restaurant POS system from Pixel Point to track labor throughout the day.

“I check my labor cost every 45 minutes when I’m in the restaurant,” Phillips  said. Just by simply clicking on a POS terminal, you can easily see where your labor stands or check on your hourly stats.

With a restaurant POS system, you can view forecasted sales, actual sales and a variance between the two. It can even show scheduled hours versus actual hours for added convenience.

“The system tells me everything I need to know,” Phillips said. “I can look at the POS and see the number of pickups for any given hour; the number of dine-ins and the number of buffets. It gives me my supervisor hours, my kitchen hours and my assistant’s hours all in a breakdown.”

An extra pair of eyes

There are POS reports that shows trends over time which provides ease for tracking labor cost manager performance per shift, according to Speedline Solutions marketing manager Jennifer Wiebe. The system can also produce reports when someone manually edited time clock reports that can help spot potential abuse.

You can even use the detailed information provided by time clock reports for labor board reviews of attendance-related employee terminations.

And at the end of day, a system such as Phillips’ can generate payroll- and employee-information export files to integrate with above-store accounting systems or third-party payroll services.

It can also assist managers when assigning staff shifts by the forcasted sales report and by generating schedules from them.

Operators can efficiently schedule to meet their labor targets using sales forecasting and their labor plans. Pixel Point’s scheduling tool is linked with employee skills and availability which can speed up scheduling process.”

Hours and breaks restriction is easily done with schedule- and time-clock alerts. The schedule can also include a built-in time clock that requires a manager’s access to override late clock-ins or early clock-outs.

Mostly, operators will set their clock-in and clock-out times within 5 minutes before or after the actual time.

“Employees can’t clock in until 5 minutes before their scheduled shift or clock out late without a manager override. The system tells me if an employee is supposed to be off but he is still on the clock.”

This article’s author is the VP of Customer Relations at POS-FOR-Restaurants.com - a national organization of retail and restaurant POS systems dealers.

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