Why use sales data to schedule?

When scheduling for any shift-based industry it is important to schedule your staff based on the expected revenue and ensure you are paying wages at the time when your business demands. For example, knowing that you typically have a boost in sales on a Friday and Saturday night allows you to plan in advance how many team members to schedule for those nights.

Using sales data to generate meaningful statistics about your business will help you schedule more efficiently, minimise costs and maximise revenue.

The types of sales data Deputy can use to help you schedule

Deputy forecasted sales data

This type of sales forecast is generated by Deputy, based on your past sales data and the Deputy Forecasting settings you have configured.

Manager forecasted sales data

This type of sales forecast is generated by entering in your own projections for your future sales.

Enter actual sales data

Using real sales data will provide the most accurate statistics for business insights and you will be able to use Deputy's forecasted sales data to make better predictions for future scheduling periods.

If you connect your POS system to Deputy via an integration you can have your sales data uploaded automatically into Deputy.

You can also enter the sales data into the Business Insights dashboard under the Sales metric manually using a spreadsheet-like copy and paste functionality.

Enter sales data as a daily total or hourly figure. Read more about tips for entering data into the Business Insights Metrics.

Importing actual sales data into Deputy via a POS integration

What is a POS integration?

A POS (Point of Sale) integration is a connection between Deputy and a third-party software system that handles your sales.

Depending on the integration and how you configure it, it can perform tasks from your POS system such as:

automatically start shifts
transfer actual sales data
create new users
start timesheets

What do I need?

Depending on which integration you'd like to set up, you'll have different requirements such as :

admin / advisors permissions (in Xero for example)
your location, user name, password (in Vend for example)
Email address and password (for Kounta)
API Key and Secret (For Revel)

If you don't know these details please check with your POS system provider before connecting the integration to Deputy.

If you aren't using one of the listed POS systems you can use our Dropbox integration to upload the files via CSV. The files explaining how to do so will be created in Dropbox for you when you create the integration.

Setting up a POS integration

System Administrators can connect new integrations by selecting Integrations from the dropdown menu under your name.

You can add new integrations from here or view your already connected integrations for each location.

Connect your integration

Click on the integration you want to connect.
Click on the 'Connect new location' button in the top right of the screen.
Choose the location in Deputy you want the integration to connect to.
Follow the prompts to log into the third-party system.
After successfully logging in, head to the 'Connected' tab to find it.
Click to open it and press 'Configuration options' to finish setting up your integration.

For help on connecting specific POS services please see our list of POS integration help articles.

API

For those organisations that do not calculate sales using a POS system it is possible to populate sales data via API.

To find more information please visit our API site here, where you'll be able to find extensive documentation on the subject.

Read more about our other Smart Scheduling features and how using sales data can help you schedule more efficiently.

Otherwise, for help with integrating your POS system or Smart Scheduling please get in touch with our 24/7 support team.