If you’re like most retailers and restaurant operators, labor scheduling ranks among your least favorite tasks. Slotting staff members into shifts can be extremely time-consuming, and confirming just how many employees are slated to work a particular shift and the roles to which they’ve been assigned often necessitates a significant effort as well. Adding insult to injury, the time wasted performing these jobs could be much better spent on other initiatives with the potential to grow the business—for instance, formulating marketing plans, devising new promotions, and interacting with customers to provide the highly desirable personal touch that differentiates your operation from its competitors.

Integrating a labor scheduling interface into your point of sale system is the best and most effective way to streamline the labor scheduling process. Such an interface permits you to quickly assign employees to shifts without performing any complicated calculations. It also lets you get a handle on which and how many staff members will be working during individual time intervals and aids in confirming who among each crew has been assigned to which function, from ringing up sales to re-stocking inventory and from waiting on diners to serving as host or hostess. You can print schedules for employees, ensuring that everyone is reminded of his or her responsibilities and minimizing the potential that employees show up for work when expected, without any slip-ups. Schedules from a previous week can be automatically imported into the current week’s schedule, eliminating the need to work from scratch and saving additional valuable time.

With some software, such as the Employee Labor Scheduler module that’s part of the new Version 12.5 of Cash Register Express and Restaurant Pro Express from pcAmerica, there’s also a “labor cost percentage” report. This shows labor expenditures as a percentage of sales for a given period, leading to more informed decisions concerning just how much labor to schedule which leads to reduced costs. The benefits of this software is seemingly a long one.

For more information on how a point of sale system can improve your business, contact pcAmerica.