Point of Sale Systems: How you can control labor cost for your restaurant
In the not-too-distant past, controlling labor in a food-service establishment was mostly an instinctive process. Having an effective labor control meant by being able to manage your staff during a rush to keep the operation up and running, and send them home respectively as the rush slowly descend.
To effectively make projections of future sales, restaurant manager keeps track of their business’ performance for the past weeks and converted those numbers into an employee schedule. And when the day is done, the manager sits down on his desk calculating time cards for the day’s labor percentage where success or failure of those efforts will be determined.
It’s a good thing that those days are no longer with us thanks to a restaurant point of sale system which has taken over many of the functions a restaurant manager used to do manually.
Since the minimum wage sets to rise to $7.25 for a few years to come, business owners looks for restaurant tools they can use to control labor cost.
The general manager of a Pizza Inn restaurant, Jim Phillips, uses his restaurant POS system from Pixel Point for tracking labor throughout the day.
“I check my labor cost every 45 minutes when I’m in the restaurant,” said Phillips. “I can pull it up on the terminal, hit labor cost and it tells me where my labor stands, or if I want to I can go into my hourly stats and look at those,” says Phillips.
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 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 easily makes tracking of labor cost manager performance per shift, according to the marketing manager of Speedline Solutions Jennifer Wiebe. This system also provide detailed reports on manual editing of time clock reports where you can easily 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 POS system just like Phillips’ can generate, export and integrate file reports of your payroll and employee information, store accounting systems or third-party payroll services.
The POS also can assist managers with employee-shift assignments by forecasting sales and generating a schedule based on those sales.
Restaurant Managers 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 speeding the scheduling process.”
Hours and breaks restriction can be done through schedule- and time-clock alerts. The schedule also can be linked to 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 very close, within 5 minutes.
There would be no way that an employee can clock in until 5 minutes before their scheduled shift or clock out late without a manager override using this system. It tells if an employee is supposed to be on day-off but he is still on the clock.
This article’s author is the Vice President of Customer Relations at POS-FOR-Restaurants.com – a national organization of retail and restaurant POS systems dealers.
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