Stop struggling with calculators, paper schedules, and late-night math. There’s a better way to manage labor costs.
Perhaps one of the biggest challenges for any small business is determining how to manage labor costs. Obviously, you need people to help run your business, and you need to pay them. You also need to balance that with your other overhead, the amount you can charge your customers, and how that all works out to fund a profitable business.
Labor isn’t the only big cost, of course, but it might be the most variable. For example, while your office rent or business insurance costs will remain relatively stable, your labor costs can change dramatically depending on whether or not people call out sick, how many clients you have and how much the pay differs from employee to employee.
Before the advent of janitorial software, a commercial cleaning schedule could be quite the puzzle. You would try to ensure your janitorial supervisors were working in different locations so as not to double up on higher payroll expenses. You also had to watch the clock toward the end of the week to determine if anyone was close to overtime as well as ensure enough coverage, so all of your jobs were done.
With software, however, scheduling appropriately and managing labor costs is much easier. Here’s how it can help.
Keep track of inventory, work orders, and more with Janitorial Manager. Learn more today with a discovery call!
9 Ways Janitorial Business Software Can Help You Manage Labor Costs
1. Accurate timekeeping. It’s easy to forget to clock in or out, especially if your team is busy and moving from location to location. With geofencing, you don’t have to guess when someone entered or exited a location. Time stamps can give you accurate information, making it easy to adjust hours if needed.
2. Efficient timekeeping. Rather than fish around for a timecard or hang onto a notebook to manually record clock-ins and clock-outs, a simple QR code scan can quickly take care of timekeeping for your team.
3. No more payroll fraud. Gone are the days of buddy punching (clocking someone else in even if they aren’t there). With unique QR codes, geofencing, and facial recognition, janitorial software can ensure that you aren’t paying people for work they aren’t doing.
4. Reduce redundancies. You don’t want your employees duplicating work. One way janitorial software like Janitorial Manager can help is with QR codes. With QR codes, your team can scan to find out which tasks need to be completed in a location, eliminating the possibility that you’ll pay two or more people to do the same job.
5. More accurate scheduling. If you find your estimated time and actual time for a job are often different, you can use QR codes to help track down these inaccuracies. Discovering the real cleaning time needed for a space can alert you to inefficient work practices, unexpected complications, or the need to readjust your estimates.
6. More accurate bidding. Making accurate bids is an excellent way to help manage labor costs, as these bids have those expenses wrapped up in them. When you underestimate and make a low bid, you’re left figuring out how to cover those additional expenses on your own.
7. Reduce turnover. Reducing employee turnover is a great way to manage labor costs. When you hire and train someone, your labor costs go up. It takes time for new employees to learn how your team works. In the meantime, your veterans are working more hours to pick up the slack, leading to higher expenses.
8. Focus on organization. Good organization is one of the most potentially overlooked ways to manage labor costs. It’s not just about scheduling, either. When your entire operation is organized, your team can spend their time working instead of looking for supplies or trying to track down cleaning products. Software like Janitorial Manager can help with this, thanks to built-in tools that track inventory.
9. Optimize your schedule. We alluded to this earlier. There’s usually no need to have multiple supervisors or your most experienced people on one job site. While still ensuring everyone is getting the hours they want, try to optimize your schedule so you have your highest-paid and most experienced people spread out and working alongside newer or less experienced people. Janitorial software can make it easy to glance at your schedule and determine if you need to make adjustments.
Harness the value of Janitorial Manager to streamline your cleaning operation like never before. Learn more today with a discovery call and find out how to make your cleaning operation more efficient and cost effective!