EZTime and Lightspeed: retail and restaurant, two different questions

Know which Lightspeed you use

Lightspeed sells separate products for retail and for restaurants, and the data in each is shaped differently. A retail account is built around products, stock and registers. A restaurant account is built around tables, orders and courses. Tell the EZTime team which one you use, and in the case of retail, whether you also sell online, because the in-store comparison should leave out orders fulfilled from a warehouse.

To record clock-ins, breaks and overtime automatically, see EZTime time and attendance software.

The data points, direction and timing for your account are confirmed with the EZTime team during setup, so use this page to prepare your questions rather than as a technical specification.

Retail: coverage by the hour

A boutique with two floor staff and one register can see sales by hour and spot the times when the second person is not needed. Do not compare a Saturday afternoon with a Monday morning. Compare Saturdays with Saturdays over four to six weeks, and mark holidays and events so they do not skew the average.

Week 4 had a local event. Mark it so next quarter’s plan does not use it as normal.

Restaurant: dayparts and the kitchen

A restaurant needs front of house and back of house hours kept apart. Servers follow the cover count and the kitchen follows food orders, and the two do not move together. Set up job codes in EZTime for each role so that labor cost by role can be compared with the right sales line.

Stock days and closing

Receiving stock, counts and cleaning do not produce sales. Give them a task code, schedule them in the quiet hours, and check that they stay within the budgeted hours. If stock counts take a team of three an extra two hours every Sunday, the labor line for Sunday looks worse than the shop really is.

Questions to settle before you start

• Is this retail or restaurant, or both?
• Do you include online orders in the sales you compare?
• Which outlets or locations should be compared?
• Which tasks are not sales related and need their own code?
• Who reviews the weekly numbers and what can they change?

A worked example: labor cost by role in a restaurant

A fictional bistro compares one week of Lightspeed sales with EZTime hours, split by job code:

Totals alone show 30.5 percent, which may or may not be a problem. Split by role, the bistro can see that the kitchen accounts for two-thirds of hourly wages. If food sales fell but kitchen hours did not, the fix is in the prep schedule, not on the floor.

When the workday starts in a kitchen

Under the Fair Labor Standards Act and the Portal-to-Portal Act, as interpreted by the U.S. Department of Labor, the paid workday generally starts with the first principal activity and ends with the last. In a kitchen, that can mean the clock starts with prep work or receiving a delivery, not when the doors open. Time spent waiting after being told to arrive, or cleaning down after the last order, is also usually paid.

Lightspeed records when orders start. EZTime records when people start. If a cook’s first punch is regularly 45 minutes after the first delivery was signed for, ask why. The schedule in EZTime can block clock-ins far ahead of an assigned shift, which keeps early starts deliberate rather than habitual.

Turning a four-week average into a schedule

1. Take the same day and hours over four to six weeks, leaving out marked events and holidays.
2. Calculate average sales per labor hour for each block.
3. Set a target figure for each block based on your best normal week, not the event week.
4. Divide forecast sales by the target to get the hours to schedule.
5. Publish the schedule and compare actual hours with it the following week.

For retail, a fictional example: forecast Saturday afternoon sales of $1,700 divided by a target of $140 per labor hour gives about 12 hours, which matches the two floor staff already scheduled.

Common mistakes with retail and restaurant data

• Comparing outlets with different opening hours without adjusting for them.
• Using gross sales for one month and net sales for the next.
• Leaving stock days in the average, which makes normal weeks look overstaffed.
• Counting salaried managers in one outlet’s hours and not another’s.

Marking events, holidays and closures

An average is only as good as the weeks that go into it. Keep a short calendar of anything unusual: a street festival, a holiday weekend, a burst pipe that closed the kitchen for a night, a staff training morning. Note the date and what happened, and leave those days out when you calculate a target.

The same calendar helps next year. If last year’s festival Saturday brought $2,100 between noon and four with 12 staff hours, you have a starting point for staffing this year’s, and the clock-in records in EZTime show whether the extra hours were actually worked as planned.

Questions people ask

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