Fast food chains were moving to combinations of cloud apps for greater visibility across multiple stores, said Roster with Ross, a cloud software developer.

Fasta Pasta Corporation, which operated 13 Fasta Pasta stores in Melbourne and Brisbane, had moved to cloud accounting program Xero and Roster with Ross, a web-based scheduling app, to replace highly manual business processes with more transparent and timely workflow.

But first the company needed to make it easier to upload customer information from its point of sale. Fasta Pasta replaced its cash registers with Ordermate POS touch pads. Ordermate sent the sales data to Roster with Ross which added them to labour cost figures to calculate performance measures, before exporting it to the Xero accounting program.

“The way we approached rostering was very approximate. ‘I need two people tonight, three people tomorrow night’,” said Fel Bevacqua, consultant general manager of Fasta Pasta Corporation, who had been tasked with upgrading the business systems.

Bevacqua had a background in quick service restaurants (QSR) having worked previously at the Domino’s pizza chain and wanted a more reliable method.

Instead of recycling the previous week’s roster, in-store managers could view sales and transaction data hourly from Ordermate and use Roster with Ross to display the information against the next week’s roster. This allowed managers to roster to sales demand and ensure they met their targets.

Managers could also use the rostering app to view the cumulative sales data against hours worked for the day, which showed labour cost as a percentage of the day’s takings.

The rostering app had also slashed the time taken to do payroll for 300 staff from four days to less than a day and with fewer errors, Roster with Ross claimed. Payroll staff typically spent three days correcting errors such as number of hours paid or award rate due to mistakes manually copying data between spreadsheets.

The manual-intensive workflow took seven steps, Bevacqua said. The steps were:

1. Staff record hours worked in manual time books
2. Store manager enters staff hours worked from time books to spreadsheet manually
3. Spreadsheet containing hours worked for each store emailed to head office
4. Payroll staff copy and paste hours worked for each individual into a new aggregated payroll spreadsheet
5. Payroll staff manually calculate hours worked under each classification under each different award/enterprise agreement
6. Hours worked multiplied by the different pay rates for each classification, including age-based rates for people under 20
7. Individuals total pay for the week aggregated, then entered into the banking system to pay staff.

After moving to a digital system comprising Ordermate, Roster with Ross and Xero, the company reduced the steps for payroll to four.

1. Staff clock on and off electronically
2. At the end of each day, store managers use ROSS’ cloud-based interface to compare the rosters with actual hours worked manage any exceptions (eg. staff arriving late)
3. Payroll staff access the cloud-based ROSS payroll web interface and export this data directly to Xero
4. In Xero Payroll staff double-check hours exported automatically from Roster with ROSS and then process payroll, print payslips, and transfer the money to staff.

Fasta Pasta’s head office had greater insight into workforce management across all 13 stores and access to near real-time information as the cloud apps updated each other. “We’re on the road to having much more timely information across the organisation. I call it ‘actionable information’ – information that is timely and accurate, that inspires you to take action,” Bevacqua said.