Staff Management is Getting Simpler and Smarter
Time Clock is easier to use, the Labor Tracking report is out in beta, and there’s more to come!
Labor is often one of the largest and most significant costs for any business, sometimes reaching upwards of 70% of total business costs. Therefore, understanding your staff hours, performance, and wages is critical to managing and optimizing your labor costs.
Our recent set of enhancements and new functionality around staff management, along with our upcoming improvements scheduled for 2019, will help you manage labor costs much more effectively with ShopKeep. As is often the case, these updates are a direct result of your feedback, so keep it coming!
Upgraded Time Clock
Tracking employee hours on the ShopKeep Register has long been ShopKeep’s most widely used staff management feature and data on those hours for each employee has been available through the Time Clock report in BackOffice.
Over the past few months, we have upgraded the reporting experience, making it more powerful and easier to use. Specifically, we’ve made it easier to view total store hours and employee total hours for any time period, while also adding filters, print, and export functions that allow you to analyze and manipulate your data any way you see fit.
We’ve also made it easier to identify unpaired shifts to be fixed and added new audit trail functionality to let you see details on any changes to shifts as part of Time Clock’s permanent record.
Taken together, we think that these changes give you more control than ever before to understand and track your employees’ hours. Want to learn more? Check out our detailed Time Clock article on the support site.
Store-specific Wage Settings
As a precursor to full labor cost tracking, we’ve recently launched a wage settings page in beta so that we can start getting some of this functionality into your hands as soon as possible.
On this page, you can set your store’s work week (e.g. Monday to Sunday) and enter the overtime and double time rules for your employees. This information is required to populate the Labor Tracking report we’re going to talk about next, so make sure you get it done! If you have questions about overtime and double time rules for your business, we’ve conveniently linked to the U.S. Department of Labor, so you can make sure you’re following your state’s regulations.
The Labor Tracking Report (in Beta)
The new Labor Tracking report takes your employees’ hours from Time Clock, factors in your store-specific rules from the wage settings page, and provides you with a chart showing the breakdown of each employee’s hours worked for a selected number of work weeks. Total hours are listed in the right-most column, and broken out into columns for base, overtime and double time, so you can conveniently see the distribution of hours across your entire staff.
As mentioned, this report is in beta and we have a number of improvements planned…but please tell us what you think and help steer us in the right direction as we make improvements! Have questions? Learn more about the Labor Tracking report from our support site article.
On Deck: Manage Employee Wages in BackOffice!
You knew where this was going, right? The final step in this series of improvements to Staff Management will be to allow you to track individual wages and labor costs for each employee!
This means you will be able to set wages at the employee level and that the Labor Tracking report will be updated to include labor costs for each employee and your store as a whole, along with net sales for easy and valuable comparisons. True labor cost and labor cost-to-sales tracking have been long-requested at ShopKeep and we are super happy to be close to delivering these tools to help you run even smarter businesses.
We would love to hear what you think about the recent updates, the beta, and what’s coming up! Share your thoughts in the comments below, or send an email to [email protected]. We’ll be waiting eagerly for your feedback.
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