10 March 2023 - 3 min read
Jamie Harvey
Founder
When you think about rota software it’s likely that the thing that springs to mind is the building and sharing your staff rotas for the weeks ahead.
But it doesn’t take an intelligent bit of software to build a simple rota… or does it? If you’re building your staff rotas based on sales, footfall and budgets, you’re going to be one step closer to achieving operational efficiency. So if you’re considering investing in, or changing your rota software, then make sure it can give you the insight you need to build the perfect staff rota every day of the year.
That’s what we have done with Rotaready. You have all the metrics you need to build accurate staff rotas and achieve the operational efficiency you’re striving for. Here are some of the key metrics that help you do so…
Sometimes known as the ‘labour ratio’, this measures the proportion of sales spent on wages. Keeping your wage percentage within budget is crucial for the commercial stability of your business, as naturally many business owners deem this the most important metric of them all.
The devil is in the detail: it’s essential to review ‘gross’, or ‘rolled-up’ wage spend i.e. the total cost incurred by the business. If the figures you’re studying aren’t inclusive of contributions such as Employer’s National Insurance & pension contributions or don’t account for holiday properly; you’ll struggle to make the right commercial decision first time. Thankfully Rotaready handles this straight out of the box, even allocating costs into customisable ‘streams’ (allowing you to see a breakdown).
Whilst this is a particularly simple metric, it’s no less important. Having an accurate grasp of the scheduled hours means you can ensure your colleagues are meeting their contracted hours, and that you’re compliant with the Working Time Directive (which Rotaready handily calculates your compliance against). Similarly, having an accurate grasp of the hours actually worked, means the correct amount of holiday will be accrued, overtime payments will be accurately identified and ultimately, the payroll data will be spot on.
Through an integration with your EPOS solution, you can review sales made from within Rotaready; broken down into customisable streams (perhaps food vs drink). This allows your wage percentage and productivity calculations to run automatically.
This metric shows the sales made for each hour resourced. Combined with ‘wage percentage’, this is a particularly powerful figure when optimising your labour deployment on each day.
Demand means different things to different operators. However, most hospitality businesses will choose their covers as the metric to align their staffing distribution with. Those using a reservations platform can integrate this with Rotaready to view the number of covers booked against the staffing headcount at each 15 minute interval of each day. It’s all about resourcing your team in the most efficient way to get more bang for your buck.
Rotaready takes the core metrics to the next level by allowing you to compare your budgeted values, to your forecast values, to your actual values. Not only does this allow you to plan commercially sensitive rotas ahead of time, it also means you can compare the figures against the performance of the business after the day had elapsed. This in turn informs your future forecasting (if you consistently spent more than you’d forecast, it would suggest you need to schedule more labour upfront, which might then influence how you approach your rotas, or even influence your recruitment plans).
In addition to this, Rotaready makes it dead easy to aggregate (or combine) metrics across multiple departments, sites and weeks. Being able to see the group-wide wage percentage for next week is the ‘holy grail’ of workforce management for many operators.
These are just the metrics which help you build staff rotas which are cost effective and cater to demand. Rotaready also offers several reports outside of these, which can help you with other areas of your business, including…
If you’d like more information on the full range of metrics Rotaready offers, or would like to hear more about how Rotaready could help your business operate more efficiently, then drop us an email at team@rotaready.com, or get in touch via live chat. We’ll be more than happy to answer any questions you may have!
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