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Implementing effective time tracking practices is crucial for restaurants to manage labor costs, ensure efficient scheduling, and optimize both daily and long-term operations. CAVU's Time & Attendance Solution offers a comprehensive set of tools and features tailored for the hospitality industry to ensure seamless time tracking and labor allocation.
In this article, we’ll explore seven time tracking best-practices restaurants can adopt to optimize daily tasks, improve scheduling, increase transparency, gain insights from reporting options, and increase profit margins over time.
Best Practices in Time Tracking for Restaurants
To apply time tracking best practices in restaurants, a number of strategies and tools can help, especially when integrated with related HR processes like scheduling and payroll. Whether it’s improving scheduling software, automating time tracking, boosting data security, or utilizing geofencing, making these adjustments can improve the productivity and efficiency of your business while improving employee experience.
Utilizing Comprehensive Dashboards and Reporting
Disorganization and lack of access to real-time data can hamper any manager’s ability to make informed decisions about time & attendance, scheduling, and ways to optimize labor costs. CAVU’s Time and Attendance Solution provides comprehensive dashboards and reporting features to grant managers ready access to integrated scheduling and time & attendance data to improve decision-making, reduce manual data entry for employees, and automate tasks that were once an administrative burden.
Using an intuitive and streamlined platform, managers and employees are empowered to clock in and out with ease – when they’re performing core job responsibilities or even completing additional tasks (meetings, conversing with guests, stocking inventory) that are sometimes inaccurately or incompletely documented when using a manual timekeeping approach or obsolete software.
With robust reporting options, managers can automate daily or weekly reports to gain insights about productivity, efficiency, and other concerns related to labor costs and workforce management. Generating these reports allows managers to leverage historical data to address issues, adjust scheduling, reward/acknowledge team members, and gain a holistic perspective about a key facet of workforce management.
Implementing Clock Approvals + Improved Scheduling
Both managers and employees benefit when they can quickly submit, review, and correct punches. Through CAVU’s Clock Approval and Scheduling system, managers can more expediently approve time sheets, review daily hours worked, and coordinate rescheduling based on the restaurant’s needs. By increasing transparency for both managers and employees, it’s easier to dynamically respond to daily, weekly, or long-term business needs. With the right restaurant scheduling software, employees feel more informed about the scheduling process and managers avoid over- or under-staffing issues, while ensuring customer satisfaction and responsible labor cost management.
Clock approvals for employees shouldn’t be tedious or time-consuming. With CAVU’s Time and Attendance Solution, employee self-service is expedited and simplified while instilling increased accountability and transparency. For employers and managers, the elimination of administrative headaches provides clarity and makes it easier to prioritize work tasks, adjust workloads, revise budgets, and staff more efficiently.
Securing Data with Manager Approval
While CAVU’s Time and Attendance Solution increases transparency about scheduling and time & attendance for your workforce, it also utilizes data security measures to keep sensitive information protected. Role-based security features allow you to grant data access to employees and managers on an as-needed basis, minimizing the risk of a data breach or incident of internal fraud. These permissions can be adjusted at any time based on changes to your workforce, promotions, or other circumstances.
Leveraging GPS and Geofencing
Although using a mobile, cloud-based time & attendance platform has numerous advantages, it’s important to know where and when your employees are clocking in and out of work. To support responsible time tracking in the hospitality industry, CAVU offers GPS and geofencing features as part of its Time and Attendance Solution. This grants employers and managers increased awareness and peace of mind about the prospect of time theft. In particular, geofencing limits an employee’s ability to clock in or out of work based on set location parameters.
These GPS and geofencing features can help identify and minimize falsified time tracking, “buddy punching” for fellow employees, unauthorized overtime hours, and labor cost discrepancies.
Benefiting from the Company In/Out Board
Making broadscale improvements to time & attendance practices is a must, but it’s equally essential to prioritize daily operations and team management. CAVU’s Company In/Out Board offers you and your managers an active, real-time view of your team’s status throughout each individual workday. The In/Out Board displays a color-coordinated graph for each member of your team, providing quick visual data signifying when they’ve clocked in, taken breaks, or clocked out. By improving managers’ daily view of productivity and time & attendance patterns, it’s easier to manage responsively, address concerns with an objective data source, reward high productivity, and increase transparency and accountability across your team(s).
Optimizing Labor Allocation
Especially for mid-sized and large restaurants and hospitality industry businesses, labor allocation responsibilities increase in conjunction with business growth. That’s why CAVU’s Time and Attendance Solution lets you allocate labor based on locations, jobs, divisions, and a host of other attributes. Using our software solution, you can choose from a wide range of attributes – jobs, department, piece work, tips, locations, divisions, and more – to track, allocate, report and pay labor, making adjustments in the platform as needed.
Seamless Integration with Payroll and Other HR Processes
Using time & attendance software is a crucial best practice to manage labor costs in restaurants, improve productivity, and increase transparency across your workforce. Even so, these and other benefits can be further enhanced by integrating time & attendance with other related HR processes. CAVU can help your business seamlessly integrate your time & attendance process with restaurant payroll and scheduling, ensuring that your employees are paid accurately and on time. Additionally, payroll integration automates wage calculations, invoices, and ensures long-term legal compliance with local, state, and federal regulations. CAVU even offers extended integration with additional HCM processes like onboarding and a wide range of talent and HR management processes to support business efficiency in other key areas.
Streamlined Time & Attendance with CAVU HCM
Using an inefficient time & attendance strategy can cost your business by diminishing productivity, inviting time theft, creating staffing issues, or extending employee time spent on manual and administrative tasks.
Discover how CAVU HCM's Time & Attendance Solution can revolutionize your restaurant's labor management process to improve labor costs, increase productivity, and foster transparency for your managers and employees. Request a demo today.
