Sleep Inn & Suites Manages Staff & Payroll Efficiently with Workforce.com

OVERVIEW

Part of the Choice Hotels family of brands, Sleep Inn & Suites is a 71-room hotel in Coffeyville, Kansas. The hotel’s banquet and meeting facilities can accommodate up to 160 people. It is rated “excellent” on multiple travel sites including Trivago, Choice Hotels, and TripAdvisor, with high praise for cleanliness, customer service, and value for money.

CHALLENGE

For a long time, Sleep Inn & Suites manually created shift schedules and tracked time using a complicated library of spreadsheets. Calculating timesheets using these spreadsheets slowed their payroll process down immensely. “Payroll was taking me anywhere between three and four hours to do,” laments John Chevere, the hotel’s general manager. This sheer amount of tedious admin work took valuable time away from training employees and managing operations.

With a growing business and plans for expansion, Sleep Inn & Suites needed a workforce management platform to reduce administrative work, track expenses, and optimize labor management. This solution would need to be efficient, user-friendly, and responsive to changing compliance requirements in the accommodation sector.

SOLUTION

After investing in Workforce.com, payroll processing was reduced to 15 minutes. This is because Workforce.com comes with features to quickly publish shift patterns, easily track employee time, and auto-approve correct timesheets pre-payroll. It’s a one-stop shop that decreases administrative work across operations, HR, and payroll.

“Everybody here uses the software. We literally use Workforce.com for everything,” says John. “I don’t know why more people don’t dive into this program, especially in the hotel business.”

More significantly, however, Workforce.com has taken the guesswork out of frontline management. By showing revenue side by side with labor costs, scheduling managers can make decisions that maximize revenue and reduce overspending. Managers also use Workforce.com’s mobile app to communicate more efficiently with staff, whether it be for approving shift swaps, posting important announcements, or flagging incomplete timesheets.

RESULTS

Since teaming up with Workforce.com, Sleep Inn & Suites has saved time for their payroll department, streamlined communication between managers and staff, and improved their ability to handle accommodation-specific pay conditions.

Payroll processing reduced from 4 hours to 15 minutes

Workforce.com tracks employee time via a digital time clock and calculates wages according to the employee’s pay rate. Complete and accurate timesheets are automatically approved and ready to be processed based on parameters set by managers.

Better communication across teams

Workforce.com’s mobile app facilitates team announcements, vacant shift claiming, shift trades, timesheet reminders, and more. These communication features help teams better handle last-minute schedule changes and important updates from HR.

Improved ability to handle room rates

Workforce.com can be set up to track pay according to rooms cleaned instead of by a traditional hourly rate. This customization makes it easier for Sleep Inn & Suites to calculate and approve timesheets quickly for everyone across the organization.