Amid the increasing need for smart decision-making in a competitive marketplace, hoteliers are turning to bespoke solutions to better guide intelligent solutions.
The ATO offers benchmarking tools and advice for small business. As labour-based businesses, it specifies the key benchmarking ratio for Pubs, Taverns and Bars is: cost of sales – turnover.
Most often the largest expense, and traditionally hardest to monitor closely, is labour. An Australian company has developed customised labour and rostering software that is gaining popularity in hospitality, in part due to the simplification of this process.
Zenshifts has found its way into venues such as The Mercantile, in Sydney’s tourist-driven The Rocks precinct, with the operators reporting significant benefits to both roster efficiency and staff satisfaction.
“It’s very easy to use, and doesn’t cost as much as some of the bigger software packages,” The Mercantile licensee Mick Comerford told PubTIC.
“It communicates well to employees, and really taps into peoples’ pockets – they don’t like to read things on wall much anymore.”
The software allows managers to ‘publish’ the roster, which distributes it to all parties and makes it available to read online or on smart devices.
Founder of Zenshifts, Andy Longworth, worked in roles requiring him to perform multi-site rostering and developed the software in response to what he saw as a need in the market.
“One of the biggest costs – and also one of the most manageable costs in hospitality – is staff labour,” Longworth said to PubTIC.
“This often goes overlooked, due to the pain of accurate costing when planning the staff roster.”
Longworth says consistent and effective data analysis in real time is really the only way to clearly see trends and patterns in labour costs and be able to respond proactively.
“When you can do this, the next step is to determine a benchmark, then make informed decisions and importantly – measure the results.
“The visibility of costs makes it easier to set budgets for venue and kitchen managers for different times. Seeing trends of costs is incredibly useful, particularly when you run labour costs as a percentage of revenue.”