Restaurant Management: How to control labor cost?
In the not-too-distant past, controlling labor in a food-service establishment was mostly an instinctive process. Effective labor control meant having just enough people on hand during a rush to keep the operation running smoothly, and then send people home as quickly as possible as the rush died down.
Restaurant managers kept track of business from previous weeks in order to make projections of future sales, and then laboriously 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 will be determined.
Luckily today, these manual tasks are eliminated by using a restaurant point of sale (POS) system where managers no longer need to do things by hand.
With the minimum wage set to rise to $7.25 over the next few years, operators are looking for every tool they can find to keep labor costs under control.
Jim Phillips the general manager of a Pizza Inn restaurant, tracks labor throughout the day via the store’s Point of Sale System. He uses a restaurant point of sale system from Pixel Point.
Check out your labor cost every hour or at any time of the day you want! You’ll always get detailed and accurate reports anytime you want it. Just by simply clicking on a POS terminal, you can easily see where your labor stands or check on your hourly stats.
What’s great about a restaurant POS systems is that is can display 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
Some POS reports show labor trends over time, with this owners or district managers can track labor cost manager performance shift-to-shift, said Jennifer Wiebe the marketing manager of Speedline Solutions. This system also provide detailed reports on manual editing of time clock reports where you can easily spot potential abuse.
Time clock reports and schedules also can provide important documentation for labor board reviews of attendance-related employee terminations, she said.
And at the end of day, a POS system like Phillips’ can generate, export and integrate file reports of your payroll and employee information, store accounting systems or third-party payroll services.
It can also assist managers when assigning staff schedules by the forcasted sales report and by generating schedules from them.
Using sales forecasting and labor planning, restaurant managers can schedule efficiently to meet their labor targets. Pixel Point’s scheduling tool is linked with employee skills and availability speeding the scheduling process.”
Hours and breaks restriction can be done using 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.
So that employees can’t 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 off-duty 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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