What are labor costs?

For business purposes, labor costs are anything and everything remotely related to compensating your employees.
Labor costs include such expenses as:

– Hourly wages
– Salaried wages
– Payroll taxes
– Overtime
– Health care
– Bonuses
– Sick days
– Vacation days
– Insurance
– Benefits
– Meals
– Supplies
– Training costs

Why are labor costs important?

First and foremost, labor costs are important because they can average a whopping 30-35% of your business’s total revenue. In some cases, labor costs can go even higher. In addition, labor costs factor heavily into your prime cost, which is a key metric for efficiency.

When you get right down to it, the key point in the discussion is that, while you may pay your team members a set amount per hour, the actual labor costs your business accrues are much higher because you have to factor in many, if not all, of the other expenses listed above. Regardless of how much your business spends on labor costs, chances are, it’s a lot of money leaving your business every year. If you don’t have control, your bottom line will suffer.

How do you track labor costs?

Tracking labor costs is all about efficient record keeping and reporting. The Sling app makes that simple with a built-in time clock and powerful reporting features. Sling automatically imports hours worked after your employees clock in and out and allows you to calculate and track labor costs over any period of time you choose.

How do you manage and optimize labor costs?

Optimizing your labor costs doesn’t mean you have to pay your employees less. In fact, there are better ways to manage one of the biggest expenses your business deals with. Here are a few tips to help you get control.

– Plan your schedule a month in advance
– Tabulate labor costs as you schedule
– Incorporate a rotating shift
– Train employees to fill in at other positions
– Establish clock-in, clock-out regulations
– Reduce absenteeism
– Decrease employee turnover
– Analyze labor trends

So how do you go about implementing these tips without cutting into the time you spend on other tasks? Sling is the answer.

Why choose Sling?

The best way to calculate, track, manage, optimize, and lower your business’s labor costs is to use the Sling suite of software tools. Sling gives you unprecedented access to — and control over — all the variables that affect labor costs, including:

– Employee scheduling
– Time and attendance
– Wages
– Budgets
– Task management
– Communication
– Reporting
– Location management
– Integrations

We built Sling with workforce management in mind. As such, scheduling, time tracking, and team optimization are the foundation of the Sling app. Sling helps you quickly and easily create schedules one month, two months, even six months or more in advance. And, with its built-in artificial intelligence (AI), Sling automatically notifies you if your schedule conflicts with requested time off, contains double-bookings, or exceeds the overtime hours you’ve set.

With those features, there is less back-and-forth trying to get everything to fit once you’ve completed the schedule. But the benefits don’t end there. Sling also acts as a time clock for your team. You can set up a central terminal or allow your employees to clock in and out right from their mobile devices. With Sling’s powerful geofencing feature, you can prevent early clock-ins and missed clock-outs with the touch of a button.

Sling even lets you optimize labor costs by setting wages per employee or position, track your labor budget, and receive alerts when you’re about to exceed those numbers. With all of that information at your fingertips, you’ll be able to see how much each shift will cost as you schedule it in real time. That’s control you can’t get with other scheduling apps.

Sling truly is the go-to solution for all of your scheduling and labor-costs-management needs.