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Years ago, controlling labor cost in the food service industry was done mostly by natural process. Effective labor control meant having just enough people on hand during a rush to keep the operation from going over the cliff, then 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. And at night when the restaurant closes, the manager sits down on his desk calculating time cards for the day’s labor percentage where success or failure of those efforts will be determined.

Today, these manual tasks are eliminated with the help of a restaurant POS system where managers can easily do multiple tasks with a few mouse clicks and keystrokes.

With the minimum wage set to rise to .25 over the next few years, operators are looking for every tool they can find to keep labor costs under control.

Jim Phillips the general manager of a Pizza Inn restaurant, tracks down his daily labor record via the store’s POS system. Phillips uses a POS from Pixel Point.

“I check my labor cost every 45 minutes when I’m in the restaurant,” Phillips  said. “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.

The restaurant POS system can display forecasted sales, actual sales and a variance between the two, as well as scheduled versus actual hours.

“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.”

POS as your extra pair of eyes

There are POS reports that shows trends over time which easily makes tracking of labor cost manager performance per shift, according to Speedline Solutions marketing manager Jennifer Wiebe. The system can also produce reports detailing manual editing of time clock reports to help spot potential abuse.

The time clock reports provides valuable information which can also be used as a basis for labor board reviews of attendance-related employee terminations.

And by the end of the 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 forecasting sales and generating a schedule based on those sales.

Restaurant Managers can efficiently schedule to meet their labor targets using sales forecasting and their labor plans. The Pixel Point scheduling tool is linked with employee skills and availability that can speed up the scheduling process.”

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

Mostly, operators will set their clock-in and clock-out times within 5 minutes before or after the actual time.

“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 a Customer Relations Vice President at POS-FOR-Restaurants.com – a national organization of retail and restaurant POS systems dealers.

For more information see their website at POS-For-Restaurants.com