Use Smart Scheduling to make informed business decisions, drive down costs and ensure optimal schedule coverage with clear and accurate data-driven insights.
This guide written for System Administrators and Location Managers will help you get started using Smart Scheduling features in your business and will cover:
- Why use Smart Scheduling?
- How to access Smart Scheduling In Deputy?
- Before using Deputy Smart Scheduling
- The Smart Scheduling Suite
Why use Smart Scheduling?
As a business owner or leader, you're probably already trying to figure out how to make your business more efficient, run better and be more profitable. You might be using spreadsheets and workarounds to try and express what your "gut" might be telling you.
Now you can use the suite of Smart Scheduling tools in Deputy to get a handle on key business metrics, look under the hood and begin to see trends and opportunities in your business more clearly.
Deputy Smart Scheduling tools can help you make the correct decisions to help your business run efficiently by utilizing your key business metrics like Sales, Wages, Hours etc to:
- Always have just enough people to cover the labor needs for running your business by leveraging with your demand-driven metrics like Sales, Transactions or Foot Traffic etc.
- Observe the performance of your business closely by comparing Budget vs. Scheduled vs. Actual Wages/Hours, or Forecast vs. Actual Sales etc.
- Set and monitor your labor costs/hours by observing the Labor percentage or Sales per hour.
- Save your time and efforts to auto-create shifts based on the accurately estimated labor needs and assign to the most efficient employees.
Deputy Smart Scheduling helps any business to become a thriving workplace with more profit.
How to access Smart Scheduling in Deputy
To get started using Smart Scheduling, go to the Schedule page and click on Insights.
Once you have Smart Scheduling set up, you can also view the stats panel within the Schedule page by clicking on Show stats panel from the Insights menu drop-down or expand out the Graph or Table view on left-hand side of the page as shown below:
Before using Deputy Smart Scheduling
Import your metric as demand drivers
In order to schedule just enough employees to not only cover the business labor needs, but also save some labor cost to get more profit , most businesses will use Sales data to determine their labor needs You could also determine any metric data to be used as the demand driver to make data-driven scheduling decisions.
You could:
- Connect your POS system for Actual Sales data upload to improve your ability to create an optimal schedule that matches revenue. Deputy can provide forecast sales figures based on your actual historical sales data and you can in turn use this to better schedule around anticipated revenue.
Read Sales Data Integration and How to Build Set and Track Sales Forecasts for more information.
- If you can't connect your POS to Deputy directly, you still have the option to:
- enter actual sales data in Business Insights OR
- use a Dropbox Sales Integration OR
- use our bulk import sales tool to import any metric data including Sales/Budget .
Configure permissions for who can visit Business Insights and who can manage/view the wage costs
For Premium accounts, default Location Managers and Admins can visit Business Insights.
For Enterprise accounts, "View cost on Schedule" permission needs to be turned on for a specific role in order to alllow them to visit Business Insights.
In order to ensure your managers can efficiently manage schedules without creating issues related to their peers' costs, you can control if managers can view their peers or above managers' salary/hourly wage costs in the Schedule, Report, or People tab.
Premium Deputy accounts:
Configure the permissions via Business Settings - People - Location Managers can see costs for all roles.
ON | Location Managers will be able to check/manage wage costs for all roles including their peer Location Managers and other higher levels from Schedule/Report/People/Timesheet |
OFF | Location Managers will only see wage costs of the Supervisors and Employees reporting to them |
If customised roles have previously been set up in your account, please contact Support to set individual role permissions for this feature.
Enterprise Deputy accounts
You can customise a particular manager role with the following 4 different permissions in different combinations via Enterprise - Access level & permissions
Under Scheduling Section:
- View cost on schedule
- View cost of peers and above
Under Approve Timesheets Section:
- Approve timesheets for all team members in the areas they manage on web
Under Global Visibility Section:
- Manage team members from all roles
If you wish to allow a manager to see wage costs from all roles across the People, Schedule, Timesheet and Report tabs, you will need to turn on all four permissions:
If you only allow a manager to see wage costs while scheduling for those employees reporting to them, you will only need to turn on View cost on schedule permission but keep the other three permissions turned off.
If the permission of Manage team members from all roles is turned on, the specific manager from that role will be able to manage wage details of all of the people across all of the roles via People Tab even if the other 3 permissions are not turned on.
The Smart Scheduling Suite
Smart Scheduling Suite refers to a set of features available to you in Deputy that help you schedule smarter for your business:
Business Insights
Business Insights is the centralized business intelligence/demand planning center for you to reveal and measure meaningful data in your business.
- Track forecast to actual variance in sales wage metrics and set performance benchmarks.
- Use the Dashboard to deep dive into specific metrics in your business to identify and measure trends over time.
- Build custom metrics to give you visibility of the demand measures unique to your business.
- Optimize your workforce arrangement by setting up demand planning labor models and required staff.
Read Business Insights Dashboard for more information
Setting Hour/Wage Budgets
You can set a daily or weekly wage budget and/or hourly budget for each location or area of your organisation within Business Insights.
As a scheduling manager, you can use schedule wage cost or hourly budgets and check the variances. You can ensure that you are budgeting your staff within variance, allowing you to increase or reduce your workforce as required.
Read Setting Schedule Budgets for more information.
Labor Percentage & Sales Per Hour
Labor percentage(or Payroll percentage) is a business goal metric that can help you manage your labor costs with Sales to get more profit by checking on how much percentage does my total wages cost take into the total sales.
Sales per hour is another business goal metric that can help improve the business efficiency by gaining insights into employees' productivity by checking on how much sales could been earned per shift's hour.
Both of them could help your business run optimally and smart.
Labor Modeling
Use the Labor Modeling dashboard to help your business forecast requirements based on metrics.
You can determine the number of required staff based on sales or your own custom metrics that best suits your business. This will empower your business to stay on budget and forecast employees according to demand.
Read Labor Modeling for more information.
Staff Coverage Planner
Use the Staff Coverage planner to set the amount of staff required and ensure there is adequate coverage across all areas of the business.
Read Using a simple staff coverage planner when scheduling for more information.
Scheduling Statistics
When creating a schedule, there are many competing factors that need to be considered to ensure your coverage is balanced, and on budget.
On the cost side, you have the rostered hours, and ultimately the cost of wages for scheduled employees, while on the demand side you may be looking at the foot traffic, transaction count, and sales that will be made on the day.
With our Stats Panel, you can see all of these factors in a simple snapshot, providing real-time budget guardrails as you schedule.
Read Using The Stats Panel for more information.
Auto Scheduling
Auto-Scheduling is a powerful tool that uses metrics and AI learning to create an entire schedule.
With a single click, Auto-Scheduling will build you the perfect shift structure from scratch, then fill it with the right people to best match your scheduling priorities.
It will not only save your time and efforts to create hundreds of shifts in one go, but also make sure your business is covered by just enough employees.
Read Use Auto Scheduling for more information.