The Riverside hotel saves time scheduling with Deputy

The Riverside is a 5 star guest accommodation premise with restaurant based in the historic fishing village of Boscastle in North Cornwall. Having worked for the hotel since his teenage years, owner Ross bought the venue in 2015 and immediately started looking for ways to streamline key processes.

Having been in the industry for the last 20 years Ross has seen customer expectations change from en-suite rooms, to TVs, to WiFi and claims the market is constantly evolving.

“Going from working in, to running a business gave me the ability to really streamline processes. Prior to Deputy we were using very manual methods and spending a long time fixing errors and managing payroll.”

A key focus for Ross’ business was reducing staff admin, which “can run away with you sometimes” and the need to replace manual processes with a system that can better manage his team and save his business time.

Ross’ setup with Deputy involved using both scheduling and time & attendance features of the platform and integrating with Xero. The Riverside use Deputy’s kiosk app on iPad to allow staff to start and end shifts, look at tasks and view the company News Feed. Staff have Deputy’s app on their smartphones enabling them to be immediately notified of new shifts and updates.

“We now have an iPad to manage time and attendance and assign tasks to employees. The staff also have all of their key information in their smartphones and we’re able to easily communicate things to them.”

There was “little friction” with getting his team onboard and with more transparency his employees started seeing real benefits over the manual approach previously in use.

“The fact that it’s transparent and the staff can see as much information as possible makes for a big improvement compared to manual methods. ”

Managing shifts

Ross divides the rota between different areas of the hotel such as restaurant, housekeeping and kitchen and places a different member of staff in charge of managing shifts for each department. With upfront visibility on leave, labour costs, and training his team can more effectively manage shifts with fewer errors and updates required.

“Having things like leave, unavailability, training and stress profiles visible up front means they’re not stored in the staffing managers head or written down on a piece of paper somewhere and we can easily keep training profiles up to date so we know we’ve got the right people involved.”

Clawing back time

Using Deputy timesheets are automatically created when employees start and end their shifts. Ross is then able to approve each timesheet and export directly into Xero, saving hours each month in payroll processing time.

“I Would buy Deputy even if it was just based on payroll. It saves me hours as it means I don’t have to go through manual processes involving lots of data entry errors.”

Overall Ross mentions one of the biggest benefits to the business is the time saved on staff admin:

“The day-to-day firefighting of running the business can’t be shortcut but we can make those regular tasks we have to do are a bit more automated. Using Deputy you end up clawing back the time spent on staff admin to do something else that will enhance your business.”