7 Time Tracking Best Practices in Restaurants

Implementing effective time tracking practices is crucial for restaurants to manage labor costs, ensure efficient scheduling, and optimize both daily and long-term operations. Our Time & Attendance Solution offers a comprehensive set of tools and features tailored to the hospitality industry to ensure seamless time tracking and labor allocation.

In this article, we’ll explore seven best practices for tracking restaurant time and attendance to optimize daily tasks, improve scheduling, increase transparency, gain insights from reporting options, and increase profit margins over time.

Best Practices for Restaurant Time and Attendance

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, automation, boosting data security, or utilizing geofencing, making these adjustments can improve the productivity and efficiency of your business, while enhancing 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 and attendance, scheduling, and ways to optimize labor costs. Our Time and Attendance Solution provides comprehensive dashboards and reporting features to grant managers ready access to integrated scheduling 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 while they’re performing core job responsibilities, or even completing additional tasks, 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 our 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 our 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 the Time and Attendance Solution increases transparency around time and 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 and 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, we offer 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. Our 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 our 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. We 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. We 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

Using an inefficient time and 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 our Time and Attendance Solution can revolutionize your restaurant's time and attendance processes; improving labor costs, increasing productivity, and fostering transparency between managers and employees. Request a demo today.

DISCLAIMER: The information provided herein does not constitute the provision of legal advice, tax advice, accounting services or professional consulting of any kind. The information provided herein should not be used as a substitute for consultation with professional legal, tax, accounting, or other professional advisers. Before making any decision or taking any action, you should consult a professional adviser who has been provided with all pertinent facts relevant to your particular situation and for your particular state(s) of operation.