Streams are customisable buckets for sales, wage cost and hours. They allow you to directly compare revenue with the labour that it cost you to service that revenue, split out by what matters to your organisation. 

A stream can be relevant for sales, labour or both.

For example, a restaurant would typically have two sales streams (Wet and Dry), representing sales/wages associated with drink and with food respectively; and would typically have two labour streams (Front of House and Back of House).

❗️ It's not yet possible to create new streams without getting in touch with us.

Wage costs and hours are incurred whenever a shift is worked. Each shift type is mapped to one or more streams which determines how to apportion the wage costs and hours to streams.

Learn more about mapping shift types to streams.

It's also possible to incur wage costs for a salaried employee. If they work a shift on a given day, the stream(s) as mapped on the shift type worked will determine which stream their labour is attributed to. On days when they're not working, their salary is still incurred, and so the employee's default stream is what determines the apportioning.

Learn more about employee appointments.

If you don't have an EPOS integration, you'll need to enter your sales manually in Cost Control. Your EPOS system should have a report that aggregates your sales into categories that represent your Rotaready streams. This makes it a simple exercise of copying in the figures at the end of each day.

⚠️ Always use net sales (excluding VAT or the equivalent local sales taxes) when entering sales in Rotaready.

Learn more about entering sales in Cost Control.

Using an EPOS integration

If you have an EPOS integration enabled, where sales flow into Rotaready automatically, the integration will be configured with mappings which determine how to apportion sales to streams. You might have set these mappings in the integration's settings page, or our customer success team may have done this for you.

Each EPOS provider refers to their categorisation of sales by a different name, such as Sales Department, Product Group, Product Category or something else entirely. The integration's mappings will reference these by name. As such, if they're re-named in your EPOS system, you'll need to update the mappings in Rotaready at the same time to ensure they continue to function as expected.

Unallocated is a special stream which appears under these circumstances:

If the Unallocated stream appears, we recommend you investigate the reasons listed above and address the issue. Cost Control and associated reports are less effective when the Unallocated stream is present.