Point of Sale Systems: How you can control labor cost for your restaurant

Aug. 26, 2009 - PRLog -- Point of Sale Systems: How you can control labor cost for your restaurant

Before the age of POS systems, 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 an ongoing operation and by sending them home respectively as the rush slowly descend.

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

Luckily today, manual tasks such as this is eliminated by using a restaurant point of sale (POS) system where managers no longer need to do things by hand.

Since the minimum wage sets to rise to $7.25 for a few years to come, business owners looks for tools they can use for controlling labor cost.

Jim Phillips general manager of a Pizza Inn restaurant, tracks down his daily labor record 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 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 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, and 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 POS system just like Phillips' can generate, export and integrate file reports of your payroll and staff 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.

Using sales forecasting and labor planning, 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."

Hours and breaks restriction can easily be done through schedule- and time-clock alerts. The schedule can also include a built-in time clock that requires a manager override for untimely clock-ins and clock-outs.

Many 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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