After working with many small businesses, I am surprised how many do not have a rostering and/or payroll system.
When I owned two franchises, rostering was something that took so much of my time. At peak, I had 80 staff and keeping up with their availabilities was a nightmare. It would take one day to do the rosters, then days to do the Easter and Christmas rosters.
I decided to look at a rostering system, I found one which worked well for my staff and managed to save me one day per week, instantly I could do in one hour, and eventually, I managed to complete in twenty minutes.
Years later, I decided I should look at a payroll and rostering system, to save me even more time. However, I got caught up in the whirlwind of business and always put it in the “too hard, I will get to that later basket”. What a mistake that was!
Fast forward to now and I am looking for the best way for my clients to run their business. I cannot put it on hold any longer, so I have been researching payroll and rostering systems. I am blown away!
I have listed 15 reasons how they will benefit your business:
- They are cheap if you compare the time you save and your own hourly rate, and what you can do with your extra time.
- All leave requests will be controlled for you, including accruals, balances, and entitlements.
- Notification of staff birthdays, surprising how many payroll packages do not have this.
- They can link to your award or agreements, so you never have to worry about missing updates.
- Can provide costed rosters and do reports of previous weeks so you can compare before sending roster, helping keep wages in the right percentages.
- They can link directly to your Super account, saving you another job.
- Can link with POS systems, tablets, and phone apps which makes it convenient for your staff.
- Shift swapping and shift bidding can take place, meaning you don’t have to spend time covering the changes.
- Assign qualifications to individual staff, setting preferred employees for shifts that need specific skills..
- Notifications direct to your staff via email or SMS.
- Weather forecasting for businesses that this affects, e.g., chocolate, ice cream and ski resorts.
- Employees can onboard themselves.
- Payslips are linked to the roster so fewer queries.
- Clock in and out photo recognition, stopping others clocking in for someone (it happens).
- You just have to approve their timesheets, press the button and payroll is done for you.
There is much more, I am still doing my research. I am going to work out which one is best for my clients, then help them implement.
I am not sharing this for any personal benefit, I am not affiliated with these companies, I just see how much difference this is going to make. I honestly believe I have wasted months of my life by putting this off and I don’t want others to go through that, too.
I will report in a follow-up article how much my client’s life has changed because of this.
