As a restaurant operator, your staff is responsible for executing the ins and outs of running your venue, which means they are often one of your restaurant’s greatest expenses. That’s why it’s important to manage your team efficiently and effectively, so you can reduce your labor expenses. So what’s the secret to managing your labor force better? A powerful restaurant labor management solution like TouchBistro Labor Management.
TouchBistro Labor Management is a restaurant staff management software that reduces the time and money you spend on managing your team, ultimately allowing your employees to deliver a great guest experience.
In this guide to TouchBistro Labor Management, we will walk you through the following to see if a restaurant labor management system is the right fit for you and your team:
- What is TouchBistro Labor Management
- Why do restaurants need restaurant labor management software?
- How does TouchBistro Labor Management work?
- The features of TouchBistro Labor Management
- The benefits of restaurant labor management software
- How to get started with TouchBistro Labor Management
What is TouchBistro Labor Management?
TouchBistro Labor Management is a robust staff management and scheduling software that seamlessly integrates with your TouchBistro POS system to simplify scheduling, streamline team communications, and keep your labor costs in check. Our restaurant labor management solution addresses multiple pain points that many operators experience daily, such as high labor costs, time-consuming administrative tasks, and fragmented communication between employees.
Why Do Restaurants Need Labor Management Software?
Let’s uncover why restaurants need a labor management solution. If you’re experiencing any or all of these pain points when managing your restaurant’s labor needs, it might be worthwhile looking into a restaurant labor management software:
- You are having difficulty estimating your staffing needs, which frequently leads to overstaffing or unplanned overtime due to not accurately predicting labor needs at your restaurant. A restaurant staff management solution helps you forecast your labor needs more accurately by analyzing your labor percentage, hours, costs, and number of employees, as well as net sales and guest count, so you no longer have to guess.
- You’re finding that managing employees’ shifts and availability requests, especially across multiple locations, is a difficult task to accomplish regularly. Fortunately, a restaurant workforce management solution can keep track of staff availability, blocked dates, and shift changes for you.
- You’re having trouble communicating effectively with employees across more than one location, which often results in delayed and misconstrued information. Having a centralized system, like a restaurant staff management solution, where staff members can reference from the same source, ensures everyone is held accountable regarding communications and tasks.
- You spend precious time completing administrative work, when you’d rather dedicate your time to doing other, more pressing tasks. A restaurant labor management solution can save you time through scheduling automations, which build suggested staff schedules based on forecasted labor – no manual admin work required!
- You’re facing an increased employee turnover due to scheduling mistakes, miscommunication or a lack of consistent staff engagement. Fortunately, with restaurant staff management software it makes it easier for staff members to request time off, trade shifts, pick up open shifts, and change availability. This ultimately results in increased employee satisfaction when requests are being managed correctly, as opposed to staff sending a message to their manager and the message potentially getting missed. Plus, a restaurant labor management solution can help improve overall team communication!
Continue reading to learn more about how TouchBistro Labor Management can help you address all these pain points.
How Does TouchBistro Labor Management Work
A restaurant labor management system, like TouchBistro Labor Management, uses near real-time data, like the latest sales, guests, and shift data, directly from your POS system. That data is then used to predict your future labor needs and build more accurate schedules. And because all this data is being pulled directly from your POS system, this means no manual data entry is required on your part, ultimately taking a very time-consuming task off your plate and reducing the risk of manual errors.
TouchBistro Labor Management Features
Now that you know how TouchBistro Labor Management works, let’s walk through all the powerful features it has to offer restaurant operators.
POS Integration
With sales, guest, and shift data flowing directly from your TouchBistro POS system every 15 minutes, you’re equipped with the latest information to estimate your labor needs, so you’re not overstaffing or understaffing and incurring unplanned overtime. Plus, there is no manual entry required with a direct POS integration, so your data is always accurate and timely.
Forecasting
You can eliminate the need to guess your labor needs for your staff schedules by using TouchBistro Labor Management’s labor forecasting feature. To ensure a more accurate prediction or estimate of labor needs, Labor Management enables you to use sales or guest count as a driver to calculate a variety of labor targets, such as labor percentage, hours, costs or number of employees.
Let’s say you know you’ll make $15,000 in sales on Saturday and want your labor percentage to be 30% of your sales. With the help of TouchBistro Labor Management, it’ll show you if you’re over or under your 30% labor percentage target as you build your staff schedule when you add or remove shifts.
More accurate staffing ultimately helps in reducing labor costs, as you no longer have to guess your labor needs and run the risk of overstaffing or understaffing and subsequently racking up unexpected overtime hours.
Scheduling
Building schedules often requires a ton of manual work, which means the potential of making errors. However, with TouchBistro Labor Management, one of the best restaurant scheduling software, you can quickly build staff schedules using easy-to-use scheduling tools and do so accurately based on forecasts of your labor needs.
When building out these schedules, you can reuse existing schedules or create brand new ones seamlessly using the drag and drop schedule builder. And as you’re building out your schedule, the scheduling tool feature in TouchBistro Labor Management shows your forecasts. For instance, if you want your labor percentage to be 25% of your sales, the scheduling tool will show you this as the schedule is being built out and indicate if you’re over or under the ratio based on how you’ve scheduled your staff. This way, you can ensure you’re optimizing your team and adequately staffing your venue during service, without asking staff to stay later to complete those additional tasks and tack on extra unplanned hours you never accounted for.
And once you’ve completed building out those schedules, they can easily be shared with all your employees, ensuring every team member references the same schedule, and eliminating confusion and missed shifts. Plus, to help you build shift schedules, you’ll be notified whenever your staff change their availability or submit time-off requests, which makes scheduling decisions more accurate and seamless.
Employee Management
With TouchBistro Labor Management, you can easily manage staff availability, schedule changes, and time-off requests, all with one centralized tool, which serves as the single source of truth for your entire team. Having a centralized tool eliminates confusion when managing your team members’ availability, especially if you’re managing multiple team members across more than one location.
Team Communication
Communication is key and that statement couldn’t be any truer when it comes to managing your restaurant staff, especially if you manage team members across multiple locations. TouchBistro Labor Management is designed to improve your team communication using one centralized platform, so staff will receive up-to-date and accurate communications, documentation, and tasks checklists. This way, everyone is held accountable and stays on the same page.
As a manager, you can also effectively communicate with your team in real-time through SMS or in-app messages to instantly share shifts or scheduling changes, along with any other updates. With these handy features, you can say goodbye to miscommunication, confusion, and missed shifts, all of which helps service continue moving efficiently.
Data Driven Reports
Having accurate, up-to-date data is essential for making informed decisions about your labor needs. With TouchBistro Labor Management, you’re able to use in-depth reports using data pulled directly from your POS system to accurately monitor your sales, guest, and shift data. A huge plus with our restaurant workforce management software is that you can make custom ad-hoc labor reports that are unique to your restaurant’s needs.
Multi-location Management
Managing employees from more than one location can be a challenge, but with TouchBistro’s Labor Management, you can schedule all your employees using one centralized platform for multiple venues so you can accurately schedule employees who work across more than one location. Additionally, if you have a team member or several working across multiple locations, you’ll want to prevent double booking them. And staff who work across multiple locations have the ability to easily trade shifts with other team members and pick up any open shifts, as well.
Benefits of Restaurant Labor Management Software
It’s evident that TouchBistro Labor Management comes with several robust features to support your restaurant labor management needs. So how exactly do these features benefit your restaurant? Let’s break it down!
Simplifies Team Management
First off, a restaurant management system acts as a centralized system to simplify team management across one or multiple locations, thanks to scheduling automations that remove the manual work of building the schedules yourself.
Additionally, all communications are housed in one centralized location to simplify team comms. This can be especially critical if you constantly have individuals sending you a text message requesting shift changes or adjusting their availability.
Strengthens Staff Communication
No more playing broken telephone with a centralized platform that can act as the single source of truth for your entire team. TouchBistro Labor Management allows you to communicate information, documentation, and tasks checklists to hold staff accountable and keep everyone on the same page. Plus, these messages can be communicated through email, SMS, and in-app messaging in real-time to avoid miscommunication.
For instance, let’s say you want to make an announcement about temporarily closing your restaurant for a day due to maintenance issues. You’ll be able to publish an in-app message through TouchBistro Labor Management and all your staff members will be notified. This way, there is no confusion and it prevents staff members from showing up to their scheduled shift that they’re no longer needed for.
Get Time Back
There are only so many hours of the day and labor management is only one responsibility in a laundry list of tasks you must complete as a restaurant operator. TouchBistro Labor Management helps reduce the hours spent on administrative work, specifically labor and scheduling. With the help of scheduling automations, building schedules will be a breeze, as they are built out for you using real-time insights and reporting. Gone are the days spent pulling manual data, so you can focus your time and attention on other areas of your business.
Reduces Labor Cost
In this economic climate, you can’t afford an increase in your restaurant’s labor costs. Fortunately, with TouchBistro Labor Management’s scheduling automations, staff forecasting, and real-time reporting, you can save 2% on your labor costs. So how exactly can it do that? TouchBistro’s restaurant workforce management software has pre-built scheduling templates and staffing suggestions based on predicted revenue that help you find cost-saving and make scheduling adjustments to reduce your labor costs.
Improves the Guest Experience
If you run a restaurant, chances are you’ve accidentally under or overstaffed your venue. The right restaurant staff management software ensures your restaurant is properly staffed at all times and your staff delivers efficient service.
A centralized restaurant workforce management solution, like TouchBistro Labor Management can help with exactly that, as it prevents errors when schedules are being built out by helping you juggle employee requests, shift trades, and blocked dates. For instance, if you know one of your full-time line cooks is going away on vacation, you can accurately schedule another team member to ensure you’re not missing a line cook during that period and your back of house operations can continue to run smoothly.
If You Already Have TouchBistro POS…
Get in touch with your account manager to get started with TouchBistro Labor Management today.
If You Aren’t a TouchBistro Customer…
Get started with TouchBistro POS and Labor Management by clicking on the button below
While figuring out how to manage restaurant staff efficiently can come with a massive learning curve, if you’re equipped with a restaurant management solution like TouchBistro Labor Management software, you’ll not only be able to manage your team efficiently and keep labor costs in check, but also deliver a great guest experience.
Megan is the Content Marketing Specialist at TouchBistro, where she uses her passion for food to write about the restaurant industry. She’s a big “foodie” at heart, and you can always find her enjoying a delicious meal at a restaurant with friends and family, or cooking one up at home. She also loves relaxing with a good book and making progress at the gym.
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The right POS should help you increase sales
The right POS should help you increase sales.
