Measure costs against your budget

Keep wage costs under control by tracking against your budget

Updated over a week ago

Entering a Labor Budget into Workforce.com enables you to track schedule and timesheet costs against your budget. Labor budgets can be entered directly into your dashboard weekly planner, or imported from a spreadsheet.

Enabling this feature: To make your labor budget visible in your account, firstly enable Labor Budgets in Feature Management.


Entering budgets on the Weekly Planner

Labor budgets are entered as daily amounts on your dashboard weekly planner.

Things to note:

  • Budgets can be entered per team or per location using the location filters

  • This method is a fast way to enter your current and next week’s budget - for longer time periods see the import option below


Importing budgets from a spreadsheet in 5 steps

Step 1: Download the budget template: In your account navigate to Integrations > Demand Data Integrations > CSV (Manual Import) > Import data.

On the next screen you will see a link to download the labor budget Labor Budget CSV template, or download the template here

Step 2: Enter your daily budget into the 'Data Point' column. Give your budget a Name in the 'Data Stream Name' column (this helps you identify the budget if you have multiple)

Step 3: Copy the Time, Date and Data Type fields to ensure each row contains all fields

Step 4: Save your spreadsheet as a .CSV filetype and follow the instructions on the 'Import data' page to import the spreadsheet to Workforce.com

Note: you won't need to update Time or Data Type - just make sure these fields are copied to every row that contains a Data Point.

Your completed spreadsheet should look like this:

Time

Date

Data Point

(Enter your daily Labor Budget in this column)

Data Type

Data Stream Name

(Enter a name for your budget in this column)

00:00

2021-02-11

1200

Labor Budget

Labor Budget (Sydney Store)

00:00

2021-02-12

1500

Labor Budget

Labor Budget (Sydney Store)

00:00

2021-02-13

2000

Labor Budget

Labor Budget (Sydney Store)

Step 5 (Final Step): Assign your budget to Locations or Teams

Labor budgets can be assigned to Locations or to specific Teams.

In your account navigate to Integrations > Manage Data Streams. You will see the Labor Budget data-stream that you named earlier.

Assign the data-stream to a Location if the budget should apply to the entire location

or

Assign the data-stream to Team(s) if the budget applies to a single team or group of teams


Comparing costs to your budget in Workforce.com

You can compare costs to your budget in two places:

Compare Schedule costs to budget when building Schedule

Labor budget is visible when scheduling as a schedule stat:

Compare timesheet costs to your budget on the weekly planner:

Once shifts have been worked you can see how you're tracking against your schedule on the Weekly Planner dashboard widget:

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