Restaurant Time & Attendance Tracking

If you’re a restaurant owner, you may have opened shop because you have a love of food, or entertaining, or both. You also probably discovered—very quickly—that there was an administrative side to things that involved parts of the business you weren’t particularly fond of, like paperwork, and employment laws, and tracking time and attendance for your restaurant.

Still you got by. The dining experience you created led to great reviews, which drove more diners in the doors. With a little luck and smart planning, your single location now includes sister eateries, a commissary kitchen, a catering wing, and event spaces.

As your business grew, so grew the side of your business you weren’t that fond of. A small staff became a large one. And while you remained focused on growth, the quality of products, and the dining experience of your patrons, you’re even more nervous about the other side of your business.

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Does your restaurant have the right time & attendance tracking software in place?

Some restaurant chains still write schedules on pen and paper; some maintain a spreadsheet; some purchase time & attendance software early on. Some manage all their payroll and HR at each location; while others have a central office staff that handles payroll and HR issues that come up across the breadth of your business.

Whatever your current restaurant time and attendance tracking system: Is it making things easier for your employees, managers, and office staff across multiple locations? Or is it disorganized, inflexible, and making your accountant nervous?

Restaurants and food industry businesses of all sizes continue to manually track time and attendance, or rely on outdated technology. Doing so can put these businesses in serious risk of time theft. How much do you understand about time theft? Take our quiz now and find out.

Take the Time Theft Quiz

As a restaurant owner or manager, you can cut the amount of time you spend on tasks like scheduling and tracking attendance by using an intuitive time & attendance solution like stratustime.

Here are three ways that the software can help simplify and speed up the way you schedule, while putting more control in the hands of your staff members.

3 Ways that Time & Attendance Tracking Helps Restaurants

  1. Save time and avoid scheduling conflicts

This is perhaps the most obvious reason for restaurants to choose advanced time & attendance software. It gets owners and managers away from cumbersome spreadsheets, and on to the floor of the restaurant.

Today’s advanced time & attendance systems take the time-saving benefits to the next level by helping you and your staff members avoid scheduling conflicts. Driving this benefit is an easy-to-use shift swapping feature that puts more scheduling power into the hands of your people.

Let’s say one of your servers is sick, and doesn’t want to spend eight-hours sneezing on your patrons. In the old days, she may have had to play the game of phone tag, calling around until she found someone who could take her shift. Or worse, she may have called the manager, and left a message that she couldn’t make it to work. Then the manager would have to figure out a workaround.

With stratustime, all your server needs to do is log into the scheduling module from her phone, and send an alert to see who might be able to cover for her. Suddenly, her shift is covered at the speed of a few screen taps.    

  1. Improve communication among all departments

Improved communication is one of many positive offshoots that comes with using stratustime, and a key ingredient for success in the restaurant industry. Whether you’re running one restaurant or a dozen, good communication can foster cohesion, while bad communication can create conflicts.

But how does time & attendance software create better communication? When you add stratustime as a key operational tool, the software gives staff members at all levels—kitchen, servers, office, cleaning, you name it—a new way to communicate quickly and consistently with each other, and with their managers, which is vital when scheduling is concerned.

What’s more, if employees from across a family of restaurants split time at different locations, stratustime helps different managers keep an eye on their time, which helps avoid issues related to overtime pay, or even burnout.

  1. Manage multiple locations with greater ease

And speaking of multiple locations, when it comes to keeping track of which employee works where, and when, the challenges can be particularly tricky, especially when things are run through a central office. Sure, different managers may handle the daily scheduling needs, but eventually, everything will come back around to the central hub, especially when it’s time for payroll.

stratustime brings real-time scheduling into the fold, along with up-to-the-minute data related to attendance, shifts, and the power to mix and match different staff members at different times. Say, for instance, that both of your event spaces will be hosting weddings on the same day, and the dates just so happen to coincide with employee vacation requests.

With access to everyone’s schedule in just a few clicks, you can make sure you have the right number of people at each of your locations for what promises to be a busy weekend. And, as a manager, you can do this from anywhere without having to be tied to an office computer.

Whether you started your career as a culinary creative with a dream, inherited the family food business, or worked your way up from dishwasher to general manager, stratustime can help you simplify the way you manage both the people and scheduling sides of your business.

Simplifying your scheduling can have profound effects on how your restaurant operates, and can help keep your seasoned staff happy. Give us a call today, and learn more about how we can put stratustime to work for you and your business.

Contact a Time & Attendance Expert Today

 

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