Processing payroll is one of the many hats that a business owner wears. But it's time consuming, tedious, and requires a lot of auditing. This is where payroll software comes in. Restaurant payroll software users experience up to 3% of cost-savings efficiency through labor cost recovery and savings!
But if you're already using it, are you fully optimizing your payroll software's capability? Here are 4 tips on how to optimize your payroll process:
Get in a habit of getting your manager to approve the clock hours daily. Ideally, it's best to approve hours at the end of each shift. That way, you won't forget the details of each day. Maybe there were some special changes to shifts, or maybe an employee skipped a break; making same day approvals ensure that these are still fresh in your memory!
Even when hours are approved, it's important to audit your clock entries. If your restaurant payroll software has integrated with your time attendance software, make sure it has the capability to run a report to audit your clock approvals daily.
Having all your clock entries on one report will allow you to easily catch employee with missing rates, unapproved clock hours, overlapping hours and verify if the multiple shifts are valid.
It's always better to catch a mistake before you've approved payroll; especially if a new hire is supposed to be paid $11.60 hourly, not $116!
If you know you have multiple bonuses, deductions, or advances to enter into the system, be sure to add them ahead of time.
Add the earning and deduction entries as you receive the information, instead of all at once when your planning to run payroll. Having to input a large volume of earnings and deductions can be stressful and the chances of errors is higher.
Doing this ahead of time will expedite your payroll process when you actually have to approve payroll, and leave enough room for you to make adjustments as necessary.
Always verify that you’ve inputted the earnings and deductions correctly. Sometimes, $100 bonuses may be entered as $1000, or advance deductions could be entered by multiple managers.
Make sure you allow yourself adequate time to make adjustments; or use reports to view your pay run summary on one page!
“In the labor numbers, we were reporting about a $300 to $400 difference than what we were getting through Push!”
-Tara Hardie, ZZA Hospitality Group, 16 locations