When you sit down to schedule staff, are you adding them to the schedule based on your need for someone to fill a spot, or your projected labor cost? If you’re cursing at the cost of labor at the end of each month, you might need to make a small change in how you actually put together your staff.

You need to work backwards. If you do $100,000 this month and you want your labor cost to be around 30%, you have a $30,000 budget for labor. Your schedule can’t be random and haphazard – it has to be built TO THAT BUDGET, not to your needs.

There are templates for cost-it-out schedules that you can download for Excel, there’s online scheduling systems and even most POS systems have a costed schedule built in to easily include what your staff makes, what your budget is and will show you your final labor cost based on your schedule.