With our Pro package, you gain access to Labour Forecasting. Labour Forecasting enables you to measure and target your labour spend against your sales income. Initially, you will need to enter your estimated takings and your desired targets, but you can later enter your actual revenue to see your true labour spend as a percentage.

Head to the Settings menu and open the Budgets & Forecasting tab to see your annual forecasting settings. You can also set up your Budget Caps by clicking the tab at the top of the page - for more info on Budget Caps, click here:

Below the Labour Forecasting tab, you’ll see a drop-down menu to allow you to switch between your Locations, and a date selector to move back and forth between years. To the right of this is the Show Labour Costs switch, which will show or hide the currency value of your targets.

You can enter a weekly estimate for revenue on the far left, to split it equally between all days of the week. If you’d prefer, you can enter daily estimated revenues yourself, and the total for the week will be automatically calculated.

Next, enter the daily target of what you want to spend on labour, expressed as a percentage of sales. If Show Labour Costs is switched on, then you’ll see the amount that this percentage translates to below. Your week’s total labour target will be calculated from each day’s target, and shown to the left of your daily targets.

To the left of each week, under the week’s number, is the copy menu. Click here to copy your costs, percentages, or both to all future weeks in the year. You can also clear all figures from this particular week.

Finally, you can click ‘Clear table data’ in the top-right corner to completely reset your figures for the year.

When viewing the rota, you can show/hide the Labour Targets at any time in the Tools menu.

Your labour targets and revenue are shown in their own footer, just above the typical rota footer.

The day’s current labour percentage shows first, followed by the amount by which you’re over/under target. If you hover your mouse over a single day, you’ll see that day’s target, for reference. These figures update in real time as you add shifts to the rota, meaning you can always see where you are in terms of target, and add/remove shifts as necessary.

In the next section, the Revenue field will initially be the same estimated figure from your Settings menu. However, it can be overwritten with your actual takings, by typing a new figure into this box on the Rotas page.

Any editing done to this Revenue figure will not affect the estimates in your settings menu.

At the very bottom of the page, the typical hours and cost estimates appear in the normal footer. The week’s totals for all rows are calculated in the far-left column.