We provide you with the key points for easy management of your shop planning with Excel. We explain you the mistakes to avoid and the situations in which the use of Excel and Whatsapp can present risks or complications.
If you want to avoid these risks, use a simple platform that is specially designed to make life easier for retailers!
To plan the working hours of a shop, you can use Excel. It's free and it's very easy to use. You can do it as you like, and you'll be able to do all sorts of checks, from weekly to annual totals. You can also use your own colour codes to distinguish between hours and absences. You will need to record in the same file the actual working time from the clockings, or the entries and exits that your clocking system will give you. For a small shop, or for someone who manages 3 or 4 small shops, this is the best solution. Firstly because it's free and secondly because with few employees, keeping track and updating the data shouldn't be too complicated.
However, managing with Excel can quickly become complicated when you have more shops and more employees. Having to annotate on a sheet and then on your Excel file each change quickly becomes tedious. Then, to communicate the changes to the employees, you will have to print the same calendar each time, change it on the bulletin board and then communicate it again to your employees to make sure they are well informed of the changes. Using Whatsapp to communicate changes can quickly overwhelm us. In addition, it becomes complicated to keep track of overtime, it is easier and more frequent for errors to creep into the formulas of the different calculations and monthly or annual amounts, and on the other hand it is much more complicated to control certain legal and operational obligations: the control of daily rest time, annual hours and the hours bank, the overlapping of working hours between several shops, maximum overtime and annual overtime, etc.
Another disadvantage that quickly becomes apparent is that it is not an easy tool to share, even less with our employees who do not have a work computer. You will use Whatsapp, but be careful not to saturate your employees.
In any case, at least it allows you to plan your shop employees' schedules as you wish.
This is when using a platform that is truly designed to simplify scheduling and time management makes our lives easier, frees up time and takes the worry out of our lives, allowing us to spend that freed up time on other more valuable tasks: training employees, recruiting new staff, educating them about products, and arranging the shop so that it's spotless to provide the best customer service.Thanks to this, every shop manager spends more time in the shop with the teams and serving customers instead of in the back office. The Beam application offers you all these benefits and more!
The other problem with the use of Excel files is that of monitoring actual working time: it has recently been shown that recording the entries and exits of employees on a sheet of paper or in an Excel file can cause problems. Firstly, because, in order to be valid, it must be possible to demonstrate that each entry and exit indicated was actually carried out by the worker himself, which can be difficult to prove in the event of an inspection or in the event of a dispute with the worker. If you want to have more validity, you will have to require a signature from the worker on each entry or exit and this forces you to switch to a sheet of paper with all the problems that this entails. In addition, you will also need to have a record of the breaks the employee takes and indicate for each one whether it counts as working time or not. And secondly, because the law requires that the records of the clocking in and out and the actual control of the working time be kept on file and can be presented up to 4 years later in case of an inspection or a dispute with the employee. With paper sheets, this archiving becomes complicated, and even more so if you take into account all the shops, moves and changes of premises, and because of the ink fading from the paper over time, etc. Having an integrated, 100% digital solution makes your life easier and reduces the risk of errors and fines in the event of an audit.
Also, for those who want to take the planning exercise to an even higher level of value, the key is to be able to do it in such a way that we have more resources allocated when we have workload peaks and vice versa. This is one of the keys to getting the most out of the business. To do this we need to have up-to-date workload forecasts, in the shop this is done with the traffic data provided by the visitor counting systems. Having last year's historical data is good, but being able to cross-reference it easily with the schedule planning can be complicated. Not least because this data comes from headquarters and they only give it to us once or twice a year.
But then you have to be an expert in Excel to cross-reference the traffic data with the sales and then with the expected hours for each day of the year, or for each time slot! Beam has an interface that allows you to easily collect up-to-date traffic and sales data from each shop, so that each shop manager has the KPIs to make the best human management of his shop at any time. And by the way, Beam is able to produce a very reliable forecast based on this real traffic data, so we will have a reliable workload forecast, many times more reliable than the forecasts made by the company's management control and above all more granular, because we will have the breakdown by days and by time slot. In this way, we will have the best possible planning of our schedules and work plans!
Finally, as we have mentioned, in the retail sector, annual contracts are widely used, and it is necessary to have a precise vision of the hours and how the annual closure or termination of a contract will be carried out. This is important because if you plan below the annual target, you will lose these unallocated paid hours and if you exceed this annual total you need to know how to manage it at the end of the year: make an agreement with the employee to compensate them for these hours the following year or pay this balance of hours, and then you need to know with which category of hours you can pay them. The risk of not having control over these elements is that on many occasions when the employee leaves and finishes his contract, we don't know how many hours he owes us or we owe him in order to establish his balance correctly. But not knowing this and not having this information readily available is a sure source of conflict with the employee, which on many occasions can be costly at the Prud'hommes, resulting in a very high financial cost that makes us much less competitive.
Don't make it difficult for yourself: use a platform that allows you to facilitates management of your shop floor teams!
You can start trying Beam now to see how the solution works and will make your life easier in your shops, restaurants or hotels.
