Restaurant POS System: Labor Cost Control

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 respectively when the rush slowly shrinks.

Restaurant managers kept track of business from previous weeks in order to make projections of future sales, and then, with great expenditure of 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 with a stack of time cards and calculated the day's labor percentage.

It's a good thing that those days are no longer with us thanks to a restaurant point of sale system which has taken over many of the functions a restaurant manager used to do manually.

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.

At a Pizza Inn restaurant, their general manager Jim Phillips uses his restaurant point of sale 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.

What's great about a restaurant POS systems is that is can display forecasted sales, actual sales and a variance between the two. It can even show scheduled hours versus actual hours for convenience.

Since the system can tell you everything you needed; the number of dine-ins or buffets, you will have more time making future plans. It can even give your supervisor, kitchen staff and assistant's hours all in a breakdown.

POS as your 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 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 staff information, store accounting systems or third-party payroll services.

It can also assist managers when assigning staff shifts by the forcasted sales report and by generating schedules from them.

Operators can efficiently schedule to meet their labor targets using sales forecasting and their labor plans. Pixel Point's scheduling tool is linked with employee skills and availability for quick scheduling process."

Hours and breaks restriction can be done through schedule- and time-clock alerts. 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.

Operators usually 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."

----------------------------------

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.

----------------------------------

# # #

Searching for the best Restaurant POS System Solution for your business?
We're a National network of POS System Solution Experts who offer better value and features than most "Major National Suppliers"!