Cost Control consolidates your wage spend, hours and sales per site or department, with each one broken out by stream, such as wet and dry in a restaurant. Wage percentages are automatically calculated too, representing labour cost as a percentage of sales.
👀 Find out more in our Spotlight Session 'Conquering cost control'.
The grid
❗️ Cost Control has an extensive set of preferences that allow you to customise how figures are derived. Our explanations below attempt to be agnostic, but where that's not possible, they're in-line with the default preferences.
Cost Control is divided into three core sections:
Rotaready prediction
This is where Rotaready's intelligent demand forecasting lives. If enabled for your organisation, you'll see a daily sales prediction for each stream for the next 7-14 days. You can interrogate how we arrived at a prediction and optionally copy it into your forecast.
💎 Demand forecasting is only available with the Premium package
My forecast
This is where your forecast lives. It's what you planned to spend on wages and anticipate to receive in sales.
For sales, you can manually type a forecast or copy Rotaready's prediction. If calculating your own figures, you can build reports and charts in Rotaready to analyse past performance. Don't forget to consider anticipated demand too, such as bookings.
⚠️ If typing in sales figures manually, always use net sales. This means sales exclusive of VAT (or the prevailing local sales tax).
Hours and wages will be automatically populated when you mark your rota for approval or when you publish it. Rotaready takes a snapshot when both of these events happen.
✅ Top tip: when typing in the grid, you can press tab to jump to the next cell, much like a spreadsheet.
Actual
When a day or week has elapsed, this section will be populated based on what actually happened, rather than what was planned.
For sales, you can manually type a figure. If an EPOS integration is enabled, sales will populate automatically instead and the figures will be read-only.
⚠️ If typing in sales figures manually, always use net sales. This means sales exclusive of VAT (or the prevailing local sales tax).
For hours and wages, these are derived in several ways:
If a day hasn't yet elapsed, figures are calculated from how your rota currently stands, taking into account any changes that were made since it was published.
If a day has elapsed, the figures are instead derived from an intelligent calculation that uses the shifts on the rota and the attendance records. This gives you an even more accurate picture of reality, as it takes into account things like overtime and no-shows.
If a day/week has been signed-off, these figures are used as they represent the final hours and wages that were confirmed as ready for payroll.
You can learn more about how Rotaready calculates hours and wage costs.
We've also written an article that explains all the reasons why your forecast and actual wage costs/hours might differ.
Aggregated Totals
The Aggregated Totals tool allows you to report on your Forecast and Actual figures across multiple sites and departments, for a customisable date range. You can choose to report on a total, or breakdown per site/department to view a comparison for the selection.
You can view your Aggregated totals by clicking on Cost control in your navigation bar, and then Aggregated totals.