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Delivering labor
With a minimum-wage increase on the horizon, operators need more tools to keep costs down.
June 10, 2007
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 from going over the cliff, then sending 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. The success or failure of those efforts was determined at the end of the night, when the manager sat down with a stack of time cards and calculated the day's labor percentage.
However, those days are long gone and a restaurant's point-of-sale system has taken over many of the functions a restaurant manager used to do 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.
Steve Grennell, general manager of a Pizza Inn restaurant in Brunswick, Ga., tracks labor throughout the day via the store's POS system. Grennell uses a POS from Lynden, Wash.,-based Speedline Solutions Inc.
"I check my labor cost every 45 minutes when I'm in the restaurant," Grennell said. "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."
Grennell's system can display forecasted sales, actual sales and a variance between the two, as well as scheduled versus actual hours.
"The system tells me everything I need to know," Grennell 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
Other POS reports show labor trends over time, and owners or district managers can track labor cost manager performance shift-to-shift, said Speedline Solutions marketing manager Jennifer Wiebe. The system can also produce reports detailing manual editing of time clock reports to help 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 system such as Grennell's can generate payroll- and employee-information export files to integrate with above-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.
"With sales forecasting and labor plans, operators can schedule efficiently to meet their labor targets," Wiebe said. "SpeedLine's scheduling tool is linked with employee skills and availability to speed up the scheduling process."
Restrictions on hours and breaks for minor employees can be enforced through schedule- and time-clock alerts, Wiebe said. The schedule also can be linked to a built-in time clock that requires a manager override for late clock-ins or early clock-outs.
"I set my clock-in and clock-out times very close, within 5 minutes," Grennell said.
"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."
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