Restaurant POS Solutions: Controlling Labor Cost

Aug. 26, 2009 - PRLog -- 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 as quickly as possible when the rush is over.

To effectively make projections of future sales, restaurant manager keeps track of their business' performance for the past couple of weeks and converted those numbers into an staff schedule. The success or failure of those efforts was determined at at night when the store closes, the manager sat down with a stack of time cards and calculated the day's labor percentage.

Today, manual tasks such as this is eliminated by using a restaurant point of sale system where managers can easily do multiple tasks with a few mouse clicks and keystrokes.

And since the minimum wage sets to rise to $7.25 over the next few years, business owners looks for alternatives they can use for controlling 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.

Check out your labor cost every 45 minutes or at any time of the day you want! You'll always get detailed and accurate reports anytime you want it. "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.

Using a restaurant POS system, you can easily 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."

POS as your extra pair of eyes

Some POS reports show labor trends over time, and owners or district managers can track labor cost manager performance shift-to-shift, said Jennifer Wiebe the marketing manager of Speedline Solutions. The system can also produce reports when someone manually edited 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 by the end of the day, a good POS system like Phillips' can generate, export and integrate file reports of your payroll and employee data, store accounting systems or third-party payroll services.

The POS also can assist managers with employee-shift assignments by the forcasted sales report and by generating a schedule from them.

With sales forecasting and labor plans, operators can schedule efficiently to meet their labor targets. Pixel Point's scheduling tool is linked with employee skills and availability that can speed up the scheduling process."

Restrictions on hours and breaks for minor employees can be enforced through schedule- and time-clock alerts. The schedule can also include a built-in time clock that requires a manager override for late clock-ins or early clock-outs.

Most operators set their clock-in and clock-out times very close, within 5 minutes.

"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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The author of this article is the VP for Customer Relations at http://pos-for-restaurants.com - a national organization of retail and restaurant POS systems dealers.

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