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 scheduled hours, and ultimately the cost of wages for scheduled team members, while on the demand side you may be looking at the foot traffic, transaction count, and sales that will be made on the day.

Our Business Insights Dashboard provides you with the opportunity to customise metrics to quantify these factors and display meaningful scheduling statistics in your Stats panel.

With our Stats Panel, you can see all of these factors in a simple snapshot on the Schedule page, providing real-time budget guardrails as you schedule.

This article will cover:

• How to add demand data
• How to set up accurate costs
• View the stats panel
  • Graph view
  • Table view
  • Summary of our stats panel terms
• Hide the stats panel
• Viewing other statistics
• Distributing wage costs for overnight shifts

Before we begin, ensure you are logged in as a Location Manager or System Administrator

How to add demand data

Your 'Demand data' refers to the inputs that will determine how 'busy' your business is going to be on any given day, such as sales, foot traffic, line abandonment or transactions.

Sales

You can add sales data to Deputy through an integration with your POS provider, or manually.

For more information on how to get your sales data into Deputy read How to add sales data.

Custom metrics 

You can add other demand data such as foot traffic or transactions by adding a custom metric and importing the data into Deputy.

Please read How to add custom metrics for more information.

How to set up accurate costs

Adding pay rates for your team members will ensure that your schedule is properly costed. You can assign hourly rates, salaries, pay based on area, and awards (if applicable in your region).

How to set up team members' pay rates

How to set up salary allocation

View the stats panel

Access the Stats panel on the Schedule page by:

• selecting Show stats panel from the Insights menu
• expanding the arrow on the left-hand side of the Schedule

as shown in the example below:

The stats panel is designed to help inform the decisions that you make while scheduling.

It can display the following for each period

• The number of hours scheduled
• The amount of staff required
• The wage cost
• The total value of sales (or other custom metrics)
• The labour percentage (wage cost as a percentage of sales)

Stats Panel Graph View

The Stats Panel graphically displays your Required and Scheduled Staff numbers, Scheduled Hours, Scheduled Wage Cost, Sales data as well as any Custom Metric added through Business Insights. See our summary explanation of what each of these terms represents.

1. Weekly summary - see the summary of key numbers over the entire period

2. Edit graph - toggle on/off metrics to focus on what is important

3. Daily summary - see how your business is performing day-to-day

4. Graph - easily notice trends and comparisons in a visual format

5. Mouse over the graph to see shift, wage and sales stats by the hour

When you hover your mouse over the graph itself, a pop up shows a summary of the different values of each statistic for that block of 1 hour.

There is also an option to configure the blocks to show a 15 minute summary for weekly views rather than 1 hour blocks. To enable this option, go to Business Insights and select the Schedule tab and then select the box for Show extra detail in stats panel on week view. Don't forget to Apply changes.

The key in the pop up indicates the colour and pattern for the corresponding statistic on the graph.

Note: in the example above, Home Deliveries is a custom metric created by the customer.

If you'd like to focus on only specific metrics in the graphs, you can toggle each of them on and off by selecting or deselecting them in the Metrics drop-down menu.

To see a summary of the whole day's statistics, hover your cursor over the cost figure at the top of each day column.

Stats Panel Table View

If you find that the graph view provides more data than you need and would like a simpler representation of key data you can use the Table View.

On the left-hand side of the Stats panel click on Edit and select the metric you wish to view.

In this example, we will choose Wages. You can see the budgeted, scheduled and actual wages listed in table format above each day's schedule for the week. 

By clicking on Edit, you can select and view the data in Table View format for :

• Hours
• Wages
• Sales
• Labor % (this will only appear if you have wage and sales data entered)
• Sales per hour

or return to Weekly summary (graph) view if you prefer.

If you click on the data shown in the Stats Panel Table View it will take you to the Business Insights Dashboard.

Summary of our Stats Panel Terms

Let's look at all the terms we use in our Stats Panel and define how the values are calculated.

Note: If you do not want to include leave hours and costs into total hours/costs, simply toggle off leave from the Time off section or completely hide the Time off section in the schedule.

Hide the Stats Panel

If you do not want to display the Stats Panel, simply toggle it off by selecting Show Stats Panel from the Insights dropdown menu at the top of the Schedule page.

Viewing Other Statistics

In addition to being able to review your statistics in the Stats panel, you can also find statistics in the following areas.

Team Member Costing Panel

Located on the left side of the Schedule, this panel will list the team members assigned to the location you are viewing. Each team member in the list will have a total of all their hours and a total cost for their schedules shown in the current view.

You can change the order team members display in the list by selecting different filters such as scheduled cost and total hours and the lowest to highest or highest to lowest toggle.

These values update in real-time, so if you are viewing your Monday-Friday schedule on Tuesday, the hours and cost for Monday will come from the team member’s actual Timesheet data, not what was scheduled.

For example, if a team member is scheduled to work 5 days of 8 hours per day, the total will show as 40 hours. If that team member clocks out after 9 hours on Monday, then on Tuesday you will see this total update to 41 hours instead of 40. This will allow you to keep track of your team member’s hours and help avoid overworking team members when adding last-minute schedules to the week. Read more.

Your salaried staff won’t show their cost in this panel, instead it will just show $0.00 even if they have scheduled shifts, as they are costed differently in Deputy. For more information on setting up salary, please see this article on Salary Allocation.

Reports

You can also generate a sales versus hours report in more detail on the Reports page.

For more information read more about Reporting.

Distributing hours and costs for overnight shifts

When your hourly workers are working overnight shifts that straddle two dates, System Administrators can choose how these costs are distributed in Deputy.

In Business Settings > Schedule, there is the option to select whether the cost of hours for overnight shifts for hourly workers is distributed:

• to the date the shift started OR
• according to the portion of hours worked on each date of the shift that straddles midnight.

Some notes regarding this selection:

• This setting affects hourly workers only. Employees with a salary allocation who are scheduled for overnight shifts will still have wage costs accounted for on the date the shift started.
• This selection will affect how hourly wage costs of overnight shifts are reflected in:
  • Stats panel graph view
  • Stats panel table view
  • Business Insights
  • Schedule vs Timesheets vs Sales report

Here is an example of the stats panel on the Schedule showing how the wage costs are distributed for an overnight shift beginning Monday night and finishing Tuesday morning when the option to "Split across days from midnight" is selected in Business Settings.

Read more about our other Smart Scheduling features.

Otherwise, for help with Smart Scheduling please get in touch with our 24/7 support team.