You can set a daily or weekly wage budget and/or hourly budget for each location or area of your organisation.
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.
Before we begin, ensure you can access Business Insights with a Deputy login access level of Location Manager or System Administrator.
In this article we will cover:
What budgets you can set
Budget by the number of hours scheduled
You can set a budget for the number of hours scheduled in a period. The period can be budgeted by day or by week. You can set the budget by Area or Location within your Organisation.
Then you can set a budget for the hours scheduled (daily or weekly) and review the variance against what has been scheduled.
Budget wages by cost wages scheduled
You can set a budget for the cost of wages (including leave and salaries) scheduled in a period. The period can be by day or by week. You can set the budget by Area or Location within your Organisation.
Then you can set a budget for the cost of wages scheduled (daily or weekly) and review the variance against what has been scheduled.
How to access budgets
Go to the Schedule page and click on Insights.
Clicking on Insights will open up the business insights page. On the left-hand column, you will see the budgets, metrics and labor requirements.
Note: The location that displays in the drop-down menu on the top left of the page is the location you are setting a budget for. To view the business insights for another location in your organisation, select it from the menu.
How to add a budget
From the business insights page menu on the left, click on Add budget.
Click on the measure you would like to set your wage budget by:
- Hours: the number of hours scheduled in the period
OR
- Wages: the cost of wages scheduled in the period including leave and salaries.
Click on the period you would like to set the budget for:
- Daily: set a different budget for each day of the week
OR
- Weekly: set a budget for the entire week.
Enter your budget values in the box(es) that appear according to your selections above.
You can set a wage budget for each Location in your organisation or set a different budget for each Area within a Location.
If you tick the 'Set Budget for each area' check box then you can enter a budget value for each Area within the selected Location.
Once you have entered your values, don't forget to click Done and your budget will be saved. You can now set up another budget for another wage metric, Area or Location if you wish.
View your Budgets
The budgets you have created can be viewed on the business insights page against the actual scheduled hours as well as a variance amount to show how much you are under (green) or over (red) budget.
If you have set a budget by area then you can select each area from the drop-down box at the top to review the variance against the budget for each area.
The variance is shown as absolute values but if you mouseover the variance amount, you can also see the variance expressed as a percentage.
If you need to edit or delete a budget once it has been set up, click on the Budget Settings button at the top of the page.
If you need to change a budget value just click on the value, edit it and click on the tick to save.
To view the effect of applying a budget to your scheduling in real-time, return to the Stats Panel on your schedule page.
The triangle warning icon indicates days that are over-scheduled against the budget.
When you mouse over the graphs, you can see how many hours are scheduled against the set budget.
You can add or remove staff from the schedule and see the effect on variance to the budget in real-time.
Add more budgets that are specific to your organisation's needs in business insights and view the results in the schedule statistics panel.
The Metrics button menu dropdown allows you to select which statistics you wish to view and provides a colour key to the graphs.
Read more about our other Smart Scheduling features.
Otherwise for help with Smart Scheduling please get in touch with our 24/7 support team.