Understanding labor costs is crucial to your company's profitability. By reviewing your projected labor costs during the scheduling process, you can ensure that employee shifts align with your budget. This approach allows you to identify inefficiencies like overtime, understaffing, or overstaffing, enabling you to make adjustments in real time. By analyzing past schedules and looking at the actual labor, you can pinpoint instances where labor costs exceeded the budget. This provides valuable insights to optimize future schedules and avoid similar costly mistakes. In this article, we will go over everything you need to know about viewing labor costs in Connecteam.
Before proceeding, it's important to note that you must have pay rates enabled and set to view scheduled labor costs in the schedule. To learn more about setting up pay rates, click here. To see actual labor costs in the schedule, your employees need to be clocking into the Time Clock feature.
How to View Labor Costs in the Schedule
To view Labor Costs, access the Job Scheduling feature from the left sidebar and access the relevant schedule. Next, click on View Options on the top left, click on Show More, and toggle on the Labor Costs option.
Click on the three dots next to the labor cost option. Here you can toggle on the option to view scheduled labor costs and/or actual labor costs. Let's go over the differences below:
Scheduled Labor - this is based on the shifts/jobs that are scheduled for the day and the pay rates assigned to the assigned employee and/
Actual Labor - based on the time your employees worked and their pay rate, or pay rate per job.
Now, at the top of each day, you should see the scheduled labor and actual labor cost per day.
You will also be able to view the Labor Costs by switching the view to View by Jobs or View by Layers. Viewing labor costs about jobs, customers, or layers allows you to evaluate expenses in the context of workload. If costs are high on a particular day, you can quickly pinpoint the jobs or layers contributing to the increase and adjust schedules as needed.
To view the Labor Costs in the Daily view, switch to the Day option, enable Daily Totals in the View options, and hover over the Labor tab on the far right.
Please note that labor costs are only visible to admins who have permission to view or/and view and edit pay rates.
What is Included in the Scheduled Labor Costs Calculation?
Now that you know how to view your scheduled labor costs, let's review what is considered and what is not when calculating them.
Included | Not Included |
Pay Rates | Paid Time Off |
Daily Overtime | All other types of overtime (consecutive day, weekly overtime, etc) |
Publish Shifts & Draft Shifts Assigned to Users | Unclaimed Open Shifts, & Unassigned Shifts |
Note: Published Open Shifts (shifts that employees can claim) are included in the calculation AFTER being claimed by a user and/or approved by an admin. To learn more about open shifts, click here.
How to View Actual Sales Data in the Schedule
Seeing sales data directly in the schedule helps managers quickly assess team performance against revenue, spot inefficiencies, and make real-time staffing decisions based on actual business outcomes.
If your account is integrated with a POS system such as Lightspeed (K series), you have the option to view Actual Sales Data alongside labor costs. This means that in addition to Scheduled Labor and Actual Labor, you can enable a third row in the schedule called Actual Sales Data, which shows total sales revenue.
Note: To view this, ensure that the Sales data is activated under your General settings > Integrations. Learn how to do this here.
From the left sidebar, access the Schedule and the relevant schedule
Click the three-dot menu next to the existing labor cost toggles
From View options, toggle on Labour costs
From the three-dot menu next to Labor & Sales, toggle on the Actual toggle for Sales data
Your screen will then reflect the sales data:
Now, you can easily track Sales data KPIs. Learn more about Connecteam's performance tracking capability.
*Labor Costs are available from the Operations Hub Basic Plan and above*
Additional Resources
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