Quick-service restaurants face mounting pressure to strike the perfect balance between labor efficiency and customer satisfaction. Without accurate forecasting and smart scheduling tools, operators risk overstaffing during slow periods—draining profits—or being caught shorthanded during rushes, which damages service quality and employee morale.
According to Datassential, 62 percent of operators say labor is their most pressing challenge, and nearly half report difficulty optimizing schedules to meet real-time demand. In the fast-paced industry, margins are tight and customer expectations are high; poor scheduling can quickly spiral into lost revenue and long wait times, making efficient labor management more essential than ever.
Restaurant365’s Smart Labor module is designed to tackle these labor management challenges directly, giving operators the tools needed to make smarter, data-driven decisions. Recognizing that inaccurate forecasting and inefficient scheduling can lead to costly staffing mistakes, Smart Labor integrates real-time sales data, historical trends, and predictive analytics to create optimized schedules tailored to each restaurant’s unique needs.
Enhancing this capability further, the Restaurant365 Red App extends these tools to the palms of managers and staff through a mobile app, allowing them to view schedules, request time off, swap shifts, and stay connected on the go. “The Red App makes it very convenient for employees to stay connected to their schedule and their team,” says Melissa Rex, Customer Success Manager at Restaurant365. “The app is easily downloadable to any mobile device, giving employees a convenient way to manage their personal profiles and keep their availability up to date—ensuring they’re scheduled at times that work best for them.”
Beyond giving employees and managers flexible, on-the-go scheduling capabilities, Restaurant365 also strengthens labor planning with powerful forecasting tools that help operators anticipate demand and schedule accordingly.
“Managers can improve their labor planning with the new weekly forecasting tool, which simplifies the daily forecast management and allows for easy adjustments,” Rex says. “It also enables operators to add events that may impact sales goals and creates custom rules and configurations, making forecasting and scheduling more efficient and intuitive.”
To take forecasting a step further, operators can integrate a custom Labor Matrix by job code, allowing them to align staffing needs more precisely with project sales and operations demands. “Operators can set up the Labor Matrix to suggest total labor hours needed across all job codes together, or can assign different metrics per job code,” Rex says. “For example, a single labor matrix might suggest 60 hours for the whole restaurant without breaking it down by job code, leaving operators to guess how to divide the hours. By configuring the matrix by job code, operators can get a more accurate breakdown, such as 30 hours for line cooks, 20 for servers, and 15 for bussers/dishwashers.”
With tools like customizable labor matrices and precise forecasting, Restaurant365 equips quick-service restaurant operations with the insights they need to make smarter staffing decisions—leading to tangible benefits across the board. “I’ve seen the Labor Matrix implemented firsthand and how it helped to reduce overall labor costs while helping to keep the staff happy with their schedules,” Rex says. “Taking the guesswork out of scheduling and relying on real data ensures better control over labor expenses.”
Restaurant365 recently held a webinar on Mastering Scheduling & Forecasting for Smarter Labor Management. To learn more about the webinar and tools offered by Restaurant365, visit its website.
By Abby Winterburn
