Scheduling

[griffin911]

For those who have a shop. Do you use a program to schedule your employees? I am having a hard time trying to budget payroll on paper for a shop. You know, How many employees on how many shifts will cost how much in monthly payroll?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

[Comfy Place]

We presently don't have any employees (we're working to get to that point!), but I would think that you could give yourself a rough monthly estimate of payroll just by using a simple spreadsheet.

One page could be for actual scheduling for the week/month. Another page could be for estimated payroll for that week/month. On this second page, you could have a list of employees and what you are paying them hourly. On the first page, you would list the employee working each day, the shift they work, and how many hours that is. The second page would reference the first page and automatically calculate how many hours each employee is working and how much in payroll you will expend to have them working these hours.

I'm making this VERY simplistic here, but it can be done. When I was working for Menard's (a home improvement chain, for those who aren't aware) at the corporate offices, I built a large spreadsheet for the advertising department. They needed to keep track of which stores benefitted (and paid for) radio, TV, and cable advertising. Sounds easy, but I had to code A LOT of macros and sub-macros in this spreadsheet so that, when they clicked a button, they would get a quarterly breakdown of how much each store should be allocated, etc., etc.. I was basically the savior of that department with this, but it took me about a week solid to code everything and test it.

My point with the story is that by spending a little time now, you could develop a simple spreadsheet that could grow with you over time as you add more employees. You accomplish 2 things: scheduling, as well as budgeting forecasts. Good luck. Cheers!