Controlling labor costs with your restaurant POS system

Aug. 26, 2009 - PRLog -- Before, controlling labor cost for food-service establishments was done by just going with the flow. Effective labor control meant having just enough people on hand during a rush to keep the operation up and running, and by 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, with extreme effort, converted those numbers into an employee schedule. The success or failure of those efforts was determined at at night when the store closes, the manager sat down on his desk with a stack of time cards and calculated the day's labor percentage.

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

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 general manager of a Pizza Inn restaurant, tracks labor throughout the day via the store's POS system. He uses a restaurant POS system from Pixel Point.

"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.

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 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

Some POS reports show labor trends over time, with this owners or district managers can track labor cost manager performance shift-to-shift, said the marketing manager of Speedline Solutions Jennifer Wiebe. This system also provide detailed reports on manual editing of time clock reports so 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 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 and by generating a schedule from them.

With sales forecasting and labor plans, restaurant managers can schedule efficiently to meet their labor targets. The Pixel Point scheduling tool is linked with employee skills and availability speeding the scheduling process."

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

Mostly, operators will 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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