Having an integrated ecosystem for your store’s technologies and internal processes ensures your business runs smoothly and that your managers can focus on getting your employees performing at the highest level. You can also assure a quick pick-up time whenever a new employee comes onboard and has to learn the system.
Some examples of the software tools that should integrate with one another are payroll, point-of-sale, and shift planning, just to name a few. Whether you’re running a retail business or restaurant, following this rule of thumb will improve your efficiency and make life easier for your staff.
Another rule of thumb crucial to retail businesses and restaurants is ensuring you aren’t throwing money away on labour costs and hurting your customer experience by not having enough staff rostered.
For this purpose, trust Deputy’s auto-scheduling feature to study your past demand signals like sales and bookings so it can automatically spit out perfect employee schedules for your business each and every time.
And the best part? We integrate with a number of top-rated payroll and point of sale software solutions so your business runs efficiently without you having to invest hours on multiple platforms. Click the link to start your trial now and see why our platform is trusted by brands like Gelato Messina, Amazon and Nike.
That said, these three systems are crucial to the efficiency of retail businesses and restaurants:
Point of Sale (POS)
Payroll
Human Resources
Point of sale
Modern POS systems provide a variety of functions for businesses. Some examples of their different functionalities include:
Inventory management and control
Front of house and back of house operations
Sales and cash flow tracking
Suggestive selling and upselling
Although a POS can be used within a number of areas, there’s a number of functions requiring integration with another system to work properly. And while certain POS platforms have the capability to create employee schedules, trusting your employee schedules with a platform that considers it an afterthought will just lead to issues down the road.
An employee scheduling platform like Deputy provides efficient shift planning and other workforce management functionalities such as tasking, performance management, and collaboration to allow your restaurant or retail store to create schedules in minutes.
Here are some benefits of integrating your POS with Deputy:
Save time
With Deputy’s Auto Scheduling feature, we take into account the unique characteristics of your restaurant or store to enable you to build schedules for different shifts in a matter of minutes. Auto Scheduling saves you time and our mobile-first application also saves employees’ time, because they’re able to request time off and manage swapping shifts with the touch of a button. Your managers can review, approve or deny requests easily in a simple to use interface.
Improve the customer experience
With the data from your POS, Deputy can create the perfect schedules to ensure you’ll have the right number of staff when your business gets hectic. Ensuring an optimal experience for your buyers.
For example, if your business is seasonal, you’re able to adjust schedules based on the time of year. This can also be done on a more granular level. For instance, if you run any type of restaurant, you can schedule the staff you need on an hourly basis to ensure your busy periods are covered for.
With an integrated POS and scheduling software ecosystem, you’ll reduce your labour costs because your employee schedules will only have the number of staff needed.
And to ensure an easy clock in/clock out process for your team, Deputy’s on-site time clock allows your employees to clock in and out of your store or restaurant from one central kiosk. This can also be done via an Android tablet, iPad, or your employees’ smartphones for optimal convenience.
Build a stronger team
Everyone in your store or restaurant can be kept up to date with Deputy’s collaboration feature, which is called the Newsfeed. You can distribute schedules, share messages, and provide relevant updates. You can easily message individual employees, certain groups of employees, or the team as a whole.
Our list of integration partners is growing by the day and already includes some of the biggest names in POS software, some examples include:
Click here to see how Gelato Messina integrate their payroll with Deputy.
Payroll
Getting payroll right is crucial. Your employees deserve to be compensated for the time they’ve worked and you need to ensure your payroll is accurate.
The following are benefits of integrating Deputy with your payroll software:
Eliminates errors
Manually reviewing timesheets or even using Excel spreadsheets is time-consuming and can become frustrating because these methods are prone to errors.
When using Deputy as your shift planning software, problems associated with manually planning shifts are solved. You have the option to build customised shift templates or drag and drop existing shifts. Additionally, you can also use one-click auto scheduling based on different factors, such as:
Budget
Employee availability
Laws and regulations
When you’re working with only one true source of data, all the necessary information is easily shared between the two systems and there’s no need for someone to duplicate data entry. The system updates automatically – saving you time, effort, and reducing the chance of errors.
Controls costs
Your retail store or restaurant may have budgetary constraints determining the number of employees able to work any particular shift. When you integrate Deputy with your payroll software, Deputy will take these budgeting constraints into account and provide suggestions for staffing your restaurant or store to make it more efficient while saving you money.
Provides accurate and faster reporting
When you have created an integrated payroll and scheduling software ecosystem, you have access to data to make better decisions. You’ll be better able to forecast for the upcoming year and budget accordingly.
By integrating Deputy with your payroll system, you’ll easily be able to:
1. Get off to a flying start
You can sync all of your employees’ details straight into Deputy to get up and running quickly.
2. Simplify payroll
Timesheets can be collected via the smartphone app or kiosk into your payroll software in just a few seconds.
3. Remain compliant
Deputy works out penalty rates, overtime, loading and salary costs with every shift.
The Fresh Flowers Group integrated their payroll with Deputy and hasn’t looked back since. Find out more about their story here.
Here are only a few of the payroll software systems that Deputy integrates with:
Human Resources
Even though your store or restaurant may have efficient HR functions, if those functions aren’t integrated with your shift planning software, you’ll end up wasting time because manually transferring information between an HR system to a scheduling system and then a payroll system is inefficient, confusing, and has too many steps (I got confused just typing it up!).
Optimise your efficiency by integrating your HR system with Deputy and:
Get up and running quickly
You can sync your employee details, such as time off requests, pay rates, and location automatically from your HR software into Deputy.
Remain compliant
Calculate overtime penalty rates, salary costs, and relevant regulatory requirements when you integrate your HR system with Deputy.
Here are some benefits of building an integrated ecosystem of your HR software and Deputy:
Easily stay up to date with regulations
When integrating HR and shift planning software, you can minimise the risk of breaking rules in regards to labour compliance. This integration will help you manage overtime, attendance records, and taxes.
You’ll receive alerts when you’re on the verge of breaking a specific type of regulation, for example, predictive scheduling laws. If you fail to comply with certain labour laws, you’ll be liable for financial penalties or even criminal prosecution.
Easier planning and strategy
When using HR and scheduling software on an integrated basis, you’ll be better able to organise your company’s budget and make it easier to plan your growth. Deputy’s custom report builder offers valuable insights into important metrics like sick leave, over time, as well as how your labour is being used.
Deputy’s tasking feature will also give you information about which tasks are being carried out by members of staff while they’re on shift. This will enable you to ensure you’re utilising the most qualified staff for the right duties and you’ll be able to ensure your resources are allocated in the most efficient way.
Stop time theft
Deputy has a facial recognition and geolocation feature to ensure your employees are exactly where they need to be for each shift. This feature stops any incidents of fraud, where your employees may say they’re attending work but they haven’t, or tried to make someone else attend instead of them.
More productive employees
When you integrate your HR system with scheduling software, staff have access to accurate schedules with enough notice to plan their lives accordingly.
This way, they don’t have to scramble and wait for their schedules at the last minute. In fact, studies have shown the happier employees are, the more productive they are.
And providing your hourly workers with an easy and convenient way to swap shifts or request changes to their schedule results in less stress and happier employees. Scheduling software with HR will increase staff autonomy, which may result in a higher level of loyalty.
Better communication
Integrating HR and shift planning software helps HR managers keep on top of what’s happening with staff. If the HR manager is a designated administrator, they can communicate with staff on what’s happening in the restaurant or the store. This enables both one-on-one conversation or team-wide communication to ensure everyone’s on the same page. It also reduces the time the HR manager has to spend going back and forth using emails or SMS messaging. This integrated ecosystem will help remove confusion from the communication process.
Ameer El-issa, Owner, Bar Biscotti, has this to say about Deputy’s collaboration hub:
“Communication is such a big part of growing a business, because the moment you lose that communication, I think that's where things start to fall apart. With Deputy, our communication is stronger than ever.”
Here are some examples of the HR software systems able to be integrated with Deputy:
Conclusion
To increase efficiency within your retail store or restaurant, your shift planning software must be able to integrate with your existing software systems like payroll, point of sale, and other crucial platforms.
This will help you increase your profits, reduce the time spent on employee scheduling, and save you hours on administrative tasks. Scheduling software also helps you optimise your labor investment to maximise your profits.
Building an ecosystem around workforce management software means your retail business or restaurant will no longer be operated without organisation.
