Restaurants need to have all hands on board if they want to survive the winter, but sometimes it’s still a struggle. The restaurant industry can be merciless: it’s well known that half of all restaurants that open close within their first year, and many that survive this milestone are in a precarious financial situation.
Restaurants need to have a strategy to survive slower seasons, where the drop in temperature causes a corresponding drop in foot traffic. Whatever special winter tactics you decide to employ, having modern software streamlining necessary but inefficient functions will save money 12 months of the years.
Let’s examine the ways employee scheduling software can save your business money, so you can survive the winter.
Save Time Producing Schedules
Having a restaurant schedule maker that produces schedules in 80% less time than it would otherwise take is an important way to improve efficiency, and reduce the restaurant’s costs. Creating a schedule manually requires juggling many complicated pieces at once, and it’s not only a time-consuming weekly task — it causes headaches.
The time saved by this software results directly in a 1-3% reduction in labor costs. Labor is one of the biggest drains on a restaurant’s finances, so finding a reduction here is a no-brainer. After building schedules with one click instead of laboring over them for hours, you’ll wonder how you ever did it any other way.
Budget Insights at a Glance
The best employee scheduling software has tools which allow restaurants to see how much they’re spending on staff labor at a glance, and in real time. It’s very easy to compare the daily, weekly and monthly totals to past data, so managers can make decisions from a place of knowledge.
The tools even include proactive alerts which warn if a staff member is about to be scheduled for overtime. This way, the restaurant avoids paying overtime hours accidentally, and skilled restaurant staff aren’t needlessly burned out.
Creating schedules and making important decisions requires understanding the relationship between sales and labor costs and more — the right software puts this information and more at your fingertips.
Effortless Labor Compliance
Restaurants need to balance their own staffing needs with the legal rights of employees for things like time off and breaks — today’s software helps them to comply with the law effortlessly, saving them time and money.
For example, the software combines the actual hours already worked with what a staff member is scheduled to work, so managers receive alerts in real-time if staff are scheduled for overtime. Similarly, the software helps enforce required breaks for staff, so they get the rest they need and the restaurant expends no effort to avoid paying labor-related penalties.
Surviving the winter used to mean staying warm and keeping sufficient stores of preserved food, but in our technological era, look to the right software to see you through the harshness of winter. For restaurants looking to keep their margins tight, the drop in temperature doesn’t have to mean a drop in their budget so long as they have the right software.