Small Business Solutions: Employee Schedule Management

To have your business run smoothly and profitably, you need to manage employee schedules well. Yet scheduling problems are a frequent cause of headaches for employees, managers, and customers. Accidental under-scheduling affects the service your customers receive. It also increases stress for the workers who need to scramble to get things done. Likewise, over-scheduling leads to paying for extra labor and cuts into profitability.

Creating employee shift schedules in a spreadsheet tends to have a low return on investment. It's not easy to match worker availability to staffing requirements. And, using spreadsheets takes up a lot of time. In fact, managers who use spreadsheets to create employee schedules spend, on average, over three hours per week on just this task. Without a way to reliably predict labor needs, businesses often end up with inflated payroll during some shifts while others are understaffed.

Are you ready to upgrade from inefficient and error-prone manual scheduling? Help is available right in your point-of-sale system.

Employee Schedule Management Software in a Modern POS System

Point-of-sale systems don't just help you accept card payments anymore. They're now an opportunity to create an all-in-one business management platform designed to fit your needs that can help you streamline operations (like employee scheduling), manage your inventory, create loyalty programs, and more. For employee scheduling, the right POS system can help you:

Know When You Need the Most Coverage

Peak sales times, including order count and dollars sold, can help you understand when you're busiest. Visibility into sales by employee can help you identify top performers, and tracking discounts used can help give you historical information to know what sales will likely be the biggest draws. This data allows you to tailor your staffing plan to expected foot traffic to avoid overspending on labor costs and reduce the risk of having dissatisfied customers.

Plus, digging deeper into your numbers can identify opportunities for growing your sales and attracting new customers. Want more information on customers' spending patterns? To create benchmarks for your sales against the competition? All possible in the same tool.

Manage Last-Minute Time Off Requests and Callouts

The challenging job of employee scheduling only gets more complicated when employees call in sick before their shift. Of course, some last-minute absences are unavoidable. But they can throw your entire day off as you scramble to find someone available to work the sick employee's shift.

With the right point-of-sale system, however, managers can see employee availability, open shifts, trades, and time-off requests.

When one employee calls in sick, the system shows which employees are available to cover the open shift. With Bank of Hawaii Merchant Services, you can also add additional features to add time-off restrictions and PTO policies, manage accruals, and even track absence balances.

Manage Employee Payroll

Without accurate employee time records, it's impossible to manage attendance and payroll and follow labor regulations. There are plenty of manual or siloed options for capturing employee hours. But using a solution that integrates with your POS system offers several benefits.

Clover®, the POS product we offer, integrates with several major payroll programs, allowing you to set up and run payroll directly from your device. When you connect your payroll provider to Clover, you can see hours worked in the Clover dashboard and sync employee hours to save time and reduce errors.

Measure and Reward Performance

One of the best ways to engage and hold onto workers is to ensure they feel appreciated for their work.

The right POS system can make it easy to measure employee achievement and reward your top performers by:

Running detailed reports to identify your top sales and development performers
Make it easy for customers to show appreciation for your staff with customizable tip screens
Reward people for their hard work with tip pooling, revenue sharing, and commissions

Bank of Hawaii has helped hundreds of small businesses upgrade to a new point-of-sale system to help with employee scheduling and take care of many other day-to-day business needs. If you're ready to ditch paper-based attendance cards and time-consuming employee schedule templates, get started today by sending us a message. Our local experts can help you learn how a modern POS system can become the backbone of your business and boost your bottom line.