Protein Bar & Kitchen Reduces Time Spent on Payroll by 60% with Toast Payroll & Team Management

With over 250 employees, it’s critical that their operations are streamlined and efficient in order to provide their guests with consistent, quality dining experiences at each location. One of the many components that support their mission is building and maintaining a team of successful, happy employees that are paid accurately and on time. For PBK, having a POS system that integrates directly with payroll was one of the means to make that happen.

Kevin McTigue, Senior Finance Manager, found that as PBK grew, it was difficult to accurately track and manage payroll. Managing hours for employees who worked across multiple locations and calculating overtime accurately were particular challenges. As a result, the team at PBK spent a significant amount of time each week exporting data from Toast Point of Sale, manually manipulating the data, and calculating overtime pay.

Similarly, as new employees were hired, employee information had to be entered separately across multiple systems, which introduced the risk for human error. When it came to paying his team, this manual process was too dicey given the number of employees it could potentially impact. 

Time Spent Calculating Pay and Overtime Reduced from 5 Hours to 2 Hours

Prior to Toast Payroll & Team Management, PBK's accounting team had to extensively review employee time entries, looking for nuances that are hard to avoid, such as employees forgetting to clock out or inaccurate auto-clock outs. However, the largest pain-point was having to do overtime calculations across their 19 locations.

“With 250 employees that are responsible for doing their own punch-ins and punch-outs, there’s certainly going to be some challenges and errors. So it’s important for us to be able to identify some of those missed time entries, making sure that pay rates are reported properly and consistently with our records across the company for all 19 locations,” Kevin explains. 

For example, in downtown Chicago, PBK has employees who work at multiple locations. Throughout the week, employees often cross the 40-hour overtime threshold. Before switching to Toast Payroll & Team Management, each location was treated as a separate restaurant, so an individual’s time entries had to be manually calculated and consolidated to include their overtime pay at each separate location. 

“We have 13 locations throughout Chicago, so we have employees that are frequently borrowed to make sure that we can cover for no-calls and no-shows, to lend a helping hand, or to help train others. When they’d work across locations, those hours would accumulate almost as if they were individual companies,” Kevin says. 

After implementing Toast Payroll & Team Management, overtime pay is now calculated automatically—regardless of which location an employee works in. “It’s been really helpful for employees that work across multiple locations because as they start to cross that 40-hour threshold per week, their overtime hours and pay are calculated automatically,” says Kevin. “It’s not something that we have to do manually.” 

The former process used to take an individual a minimum of five hours was reduced down to two hours: a 60% decrease in time spent running payroll due to Toast Payroll & Team Management. 

An Implementation Process that Builds Lasting Best Practices

Toast’s implementation team helped PBK get up and running on Toast Payroll & Team Management quickly. More importantly, they helped the PBK team define best practices to simplify how they onboard new employees and run payroll: 

“We had regularly scheduled weekly calls to make sure that our time and attendance was flowing seamlessly,” Kevin explains. “Toast was helpful at making sure that we understood what our best practices would be for onboarding new employees, transferring employees between locations, and having employees work across multiple locations.”

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Integrating HotSchedules for Smoother Scheduling

One of Kevin’s primary goals was to limit the number of touchpoints that their in-store managers had to perform in order to hire, onboard, and add employees to their dynamic scheduling platform, HotSchedules.

First, managers used employee applications and new hire paperwork to create a new employee profile in Toast. They then repeated the process of manually entering new hire information in both their payroll and HotSchedules platforms. After switching to Toast Payroll & Team Management, they’ve been able to reduce the number of steps required to onboard and schedule new employees from three touchpoints to one. 

“Now when an employee is hired, they onboard through Toast Payroll & Team Management. All of their information is then pushed directly to Toast and HotSchedules. This leads to a pretty seamless onboarding process compared to what we used to have,” says Kevin. “We had three touch points before. Now it’s reduced to one.”

Accurate and Reliable Pay Builds a Loyal Workforce

Not only did this create a simple transition for Kevin and the accounting team, but it had a significant impact on their team on an individual level. 

“This has really helped in a lot of ways to make sure that our employees' lives are easier, and that they can rely more steadily on knowing that their hours are recorded correctly. I know that it gives our hourly employees the faith and confidence that we're properly recording their time, assigning their wages, properly calculating their overtime,” Kevin says.

With the addition of Toast Payroll & Team Management, both the staff and employees are confident in the accuracy of getting paid on time.

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