Human resources is at the core of the restaurant business. It poses the biggest challenge in terms of cost as well as operations management.
Managing employees, laborers, contractual laborers, and delivery personnel requires employee friendly policies in place. For example, an overworked staff leads to low service quality and underperformance. Payment related discrepancies and conflicts can easily lead to employee dissatisfaction. These are some of the prime reasons for high attrition in the food and beverage business, which of course leads to huge labor-related costs.
At the same time, no matter how labor friendly your business policies are, restaurant operators and owners should be able to implement the policies quickly and effectively. This is where technology comes into the picture. For example, a proper system that also records time logs and attendance can easily calculate the per hour or monthly payments to be made, thereby eliminating errors and saving time.
There are several aspects of labor management that a robust point of sale solution can provide. We discuss a few here.
Time log and attendance
This feature of POS is integrated with the attendance system. It helps record the time logs of employees and laborers, which further automatically calculates the hourly or monthly payments due to each worker. It can also easily help you manage overtime hours. Workers should also be able to view their profiles, monitor their pay, and track the number of hours or overtime clocked by them.
No more time theft
Time theft is a common challenge faced by restaurant owners and operators. Time theft occurs when they are billed for time that the laborer hasn’t actually worked for. This could even be related to time miscalculations or long breaks, not necessarily a theft per se. Overtime, it adds up to high cost for the business.
Payroll reports
Manual maintaining and tracking of different types of pay is challenging and prone to errors, especially, during peak periods. With payroll reports, you can do away with errors in payments and ensure timely payments.
Scheduling
Scheduling is a crucial activity of any restaurant business. You do not want the restaurant to be overstaffed on lean periods and understaffed during peak days. Also, replacing a staff during any emergency should be quickly doable. A digital schedule helps in this case. It can give you an instant view of who’s on job on a given time and date and help you quickly reschedule whenever required. A digitized schedule is way better than working it out manually.
Tip reports
A restaurant point of sale should be able to provide you tracking and reporting of tips generated. This would eliminate all errors in tip allocation to the staff and help maintain a fair system. This would go a long way in reducing conflicts during payments.
Reward and training system
The reports and analytics generated by a point of sale give an accurate information on performance. Owners and operators, for example, can easily see performance in terms of sales generation and appropriately reward those who have performed well and train those who are lagging behind.
Overall laborer reports
Any good POS system based on the latest technologies such as cloud and mobile should be able to provide reports and analytics on any device. Owners and operators can see real-time insights about overall laborers related to payments, costs, percentages, and employee productivity connected to number of orders completed, tip amount, and table turnaround times.
Automation let’s you focus on growth
We discussed just a few of the features of a restaurant POS system that can help you with human resource operations and management. With technological advancements, more advanced features get added, and it’s only a matter of time that the humble point of sale might take on a completely new avatar.
Since a restaurant business depends on efficient labor management not just for growth but its very survival, it’d make much business sense to automate the many operations that affect laborers directly or indirectly. The idea is of course to let you direct your focus on those areas of business that need your attention the most, those that no machine can do for you.
