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Creating Labor Schedule - Weekly

Creating a weekly labor schedule in FireFly is a convenient way to manage your team.   By scheduling inside of your point-of-sale, you can take advantage of enforcement at clock in, comparisons of actual vs. expected clock in times.  You'll also see time off requests, be able to email your employees their schedule notifications, and integrate forecasted sales to help you stick to your labor budget!

Schedule Basics

To get started with a schedule, navigate to Manager Home > Employees > Schedules

You'll see the blank weekly schedule form:

Notice that the weekly view starts on the day you've set as your start of week  (Configuration > General > Store Setup) and at the top of the screen you can use the arrows to move forward or backward a week at a time.

Below each day you'll see your "Daily Budget" for labor.   Learn More about how to manage this budget.  If you click the checkbox "Include Budget Salary" the budget amount will increase to show any salary distribution for the day.    Below the budget you'll see your "As Scheduled" total which starts out as zero.

Click on the Add Schedule button at the bottom of the screen to add a weekly shift:



You'll see the Add Schedule window:



Select a job type first, then select an employee from the drop down (only employees eligible for that job type will be shown).  Then check the days you want this employee to work, and enter the start and end times.   If the end time is past midnight, check "Next Day".   The "Breaks" will fill in automatically according to your configured break rules.

If you check the "Use same schedule for all days" box, the entries you put on the 1st day will be copied down to the rest of the days.
Press Save when you've got this shift completed.


Now you'll see this shift has been added to the weekly schedule.

On the left is a summary of the employee's total shifts, hours and pay.  You can click on the employee's name to go to their personnel record.



At the top, the scheduled labor cost has been added to the daily total.    

You've also got a summary per job type.



You can click on the shift hyperlink to edit this shift.


Continue to add shifts until your schedule is complete.  When you are done, press the "Post Schedule" button at the bottom of the screen.  This will make the schedule public to your employees (They can see it from the POS Timeclock area).


When a schedule is posted, if you've configured the system to enforce it (Configuration > Employees > Schedule), employees can not clock in who are not scheduled.  You can tell that the schedule is posted as it will say so at the top of the screen.   The "Post" button will change to "UnPost" if you need to unpost a schedule just press it.



If you click the "Print" button at the bottom of the screen you will go to the Employee Schedule report, which is a great format for printing and posting.


Employee Availability Restrictions:
If employees have restrictions on when they can work, or if they have approved time off requests  (learn more), these will appear on the schedule for notification purposes.    On the "Add Schedule" screen you will see an alert icon.  Hover over that icon to get details:



On the weekly view, you'll also see an availability alert:


NOTE:  These alerts do not prevent you from scheduling the employee.  They are for your information only.

Schedule Templates:
Once you've created your weekly schedule, save it as a template so that you can use it as a starting point week after week!  Just click the "Save Template" button at the bottom of the screen:


Give your template a name, a description, and press save.

If you click forward to a blank week, you can load the schedule from the template. Click "Load Template" from the bottom of the screen, and select your template.


If you check "Load template with employees" the employee names will be schedule exactly as the template.  If not, you'll load unassigned shifts, like this:


Click on the "Unassigned" link or any schedule link to assign this shift to an employee.


Daily Notes:
Daily notes are a great way to inform your staff of important events, or to remind your managers to schedule heavier or lighter than usual based on what is happening around you.    Click on the Daily Note link at the bottom of the schedule matrix



From here, you can enter your note:

Check the "Exclude from future sales forecasts" if this day is so unusual, it would throw off your forecasted sales.  Press save.
You'll see the note at the bottom of the day on the schedule


Employee Notifications
When you post a schedule or make changes, you want your employees to know about it! Set up internal and external notifications so employees will get an email when a schedule is posted with their name on it!   You can do this in the employee record on the Communications tab.   Enter an external email, and check the alerts for external or internal.     (Note, you must have your system set up to send external email -- here's how)



Daily View
Click on any of the days of the week to go to the Daily View of the schedule.  Read More about how this view works!




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