Running a restaurant, bar, or cafe is challenging. From customer service to menu developments, ordering supplies, managing inventory, and advertising, it definitely sounds like dancing with a gorilla. I mean it's difficult to handle all the tasks.

Even though you have those all figured out, you still have staffing issues. You need to hire full-time and part-time employees, train them, create a good culture among them. Those already are exhaustive tasks to managers and owners.

One of the many issues I heard from managers and owners is that they feel scheduling, maintaining timesheet, and processing payroll still the most strenuous tasks even though they've been doing this forever. Scheduling and payroll are their regular routine to run the business, however, they are time-consuming and tedious at the same time.

When scheduling, what managers take into consideration are:

• Each staff's availability
• Busy and slow time of the day
• Holidays and events in town and seasonality

In the perfect world of scheduling, a schedule with no shift conflicts preventing overtime, overstaffing and understaffing is achieved. In the real world, it is very difficult that things turn out as planned.

Before processing payroll, you probably should go over a checklist like one below:

• Is the timesheet accurate?
• Is there any employee who fakes clocks-in/out?
• Are there any missing or incorrect attendance records in the timesheet?
• Do I have updated hourly wage information?
• Who qualifies overtime work or holiday work pay?

Managing employees starts with systematic tools that increase efficiency and save time for everyone involved. Those tools promote better collaboration, communication among employees. Here's how to get you started.

Scheduling a significant number of employees is a daunting task. Using Excel which isn't meant for scheduling can only create more work for you

• scheduling shifts to employees by copying and pasting;
• going back and forth the availability excel sheet to check who is able to take the shifts;
• sharing by sending a screenshot;
• processing shift change requests and re-sharing revised schedule; and
• inefficient data/file management by saving and archiving as different excel files for each location.

Using this fragmented method to schedule also leads to a poor maintenance of past data. Accessing schedule data of previous month could make you another search of the file you placed somewhere on your hard drive.

Using scheduling tools makes your life a lot easier buy solving all the problems identified above and promote better schedule communications with your employees. You get the idea.

Are you using a paper timesheet to track employees' clock-ins and outs? Do you find yourself trying to read those records in illegible writings to approve every day? How about going digital? Not excel. A better one.

Having a system your employees can record attendance digitally so you can access them anytime you want will save you tons of time. The conventional method of recording on a paper timesheet or excel is not only inaccurate but also time-consuming for employees and managers. Employees need to wait for their turn to record. Managers have to fix incorrect records and even do data-entry into ERP or accounting system. The head-office can only access them if managers send them excel files or wait for them to enter into ERP system.

Why not remove all unnecessary steps and procedures in your staffing operation and replace them with one easy-to-use tool that truly creates value?

Your employees and managers are already busy with their own tasks and helping customers on the floor. They don't need to worry about having to submit vacation request form via email or document while at work. They don't need to waste time on walking back to their back office to take a picture of next week's schedule. Allow them to focus on their tasks and leave all schedule, attendance, and vacation related matters to a tool that works for them. Implement software tools that your employees would actually use to achieve organizational efficiency.

A great organizational tool for scheduling and timeclock attendance will help achieve elimination of unnecessary tasks and free up more time for all managers, supervisors, and staff. Now is the great time for you to assess if your business needs one like Shiftee.