An introduction to Loaded Team, Rosters & Timeclocks. In this session, we’ll cover setting up your team, creating rosters, and using the timeclock to accurately track labour costs.
Every role sits in one of three cost groups: food (usually back of house), beverage (usually front of house) or no cost (marketing, admin, general managers). Get these right and your food and beverage labour reports are accurate.
It's where their roster is sent and the email they use to join the Loaded Team app. If someone can't get in, check the email on their profile first.
Once your first roster is published, copy it to a future week (choosing specific roles if you like) or save it as a template. If the week you're copying to already has shifts, you'll see which ones conflict before anything is replaced.
Once budgeted sales are in, the roster shows total cost and staff percentage for the week or for any single day, filtered by role. Use day view as a final check that key roles are covered.
Duty managers checking clock times each day makes payroll far quicker. Getting 90-95% of shifts approved leaves only a few to chase.
Everything for rosters and timeclocks sits in the Team module, and the data entry lives under the Workforce tab. Before you build your first roster, check three things: your roles, your staff and your leave types.
Roles do two jobs. The main one is assigning a cost group: food (generally back of house), beverage (generally front of house) or no cost (marketing, admin, general managers). Labour reports for food or beverage leave out anything in the no-cost group, while overall labour reporting includes it. Remove any old roles, rename roles, and add new ones if you want your teams split out more.
Deactivate anyone who has left since your account was set up. To add someone, you need their first and last name, date of birth (important in Australia, where it triggers junior rates), email address, employment type and a role.
Under Compliance, then Leave, enable the leave types you need or deactivate the ones you don't. Staff can request leave in the Team app and you approve from an email or the Approvals tab. To add leave on someone's behalf, open their staff profile, go to Leave and make a request.
Staff run down the left of the roster and days run across the top. Click a cell to create a shift, choose a role, set start and finish times and add breaks. Drag the top right corner of a shift to copy it to other days or other staff. Leave and unavailability show on the roster too.
Salaried staff show grey default regular hours (a 40-hour week in New Zealand, 38 in Australia). Those hours are used for their cost when they aren't rostered and haven't clocked in. Once you roster them, their rostered hours are used instead, and if they clock in, their clocked hours are used. Their weekly salary is divided across whichever hours apply, so their effective hourly rate moves with the hours.
When publishing, choose whether to notify particular roles or staff, add a note for the whole team and save any missing email addresses to their profiles. Staff receive an email with their shifts, your company code and links to download the Team app. For next week, copy a roster across (choosing specific roles if needed) or save it as a template.
Staff clocks are your timesheets: every clock in and out is recorded there. Check start and finish times, edit them directly or from the calendar, and add or remove breaks. Duty managers should approve shifts daily, which makes pay runs much simpler. A change log shows how each clock was created and every edit, who made it and when.
Rounding is set under Team settings. Times can be rounded to the nearest minute, or to 5, 10 or 15 minutes, but there is no snap to rostered time. Before a pay run, use the in-and-out punches by staff view for the final check. It shows every shift, total pay and approval ticks, including any award penalties and loadings for Australian venues.
The most common cause is an email mismatch. Staff must sign up with the same email address saved on their staff member profile in your Loaded account, which is also where their roster is sent. They also need your company code, which you'll find under your account details and is included in the roster email.
Every role is assigned to one of three cost groups: food (generally back of house), beverage (generally front of house) or no cost (for example marketing, admin or general managers). Food and beverage labour reports include only their own group, and no-cost roles are left out of them but counted in overall labour reporting.
Loaded uses the best information available for each day. A salaried staff member's default regular hours (a 40-hour week in New Zealand, 38 in Australia) are used when they aren't rostered and don't clock in. If they're rostered but don't clock in, the roster is used. If they clock in, their clocked hours are used. Their weekly salary is divided across whichever hours apply, so they are never paid more; the effective hourly rate just moves with the hours.
Not currently. Expected revenue including GST is set day by day. Once budgets are set, your roster shows budgeted sales, total roster cost and staff percentage for the week or any day, and updates when you filter by role.
Rounding is set in your Team settings. Clock times can be rounded to the nearest minute, or to 5, 10 or 15 minutes. There is no snap rounding to rostered start times: clock times are rounded to the increment you choose, not to the time someone was rostered to start.
Tom: We'll look at some of the setup and give you a few things to check off, particularly if we've implemented your staff for you. I'll show you how to add staff members and edit their details, then we'll look at building a roster in Loaded. We'll touch on the timeclocks and what timesheets look like when they come through to your account, and finish with a little more information. Everything we talk about today sits under our Team module, and any of the data entry setup lives under the Workforce tab.
Tom: We've likely set up your account from the information you provided, whether that's your time and attendance data or a template you filled out for us. The first thing I want you to do is go into your roles and check that the roles we brought over are ones you want. Typically there are some redundant roles in there. Maybe at some point you stretched your roster out across lots of roles and have since shrunk it back down, or maybe you only have front of house and back of house and want to spread that out a bit more.
Roles have two main purposes. The first is assigning a cost group. If you want to create a new role, click Add New and name it. Ignore the department code for the moment; that's determined by your payroll system, so I'll direct you to your onboarding app or onboarding manager to go through it. If you're an Australian company using Xero Payroll you likely won't need any setup there. New Zealand companies have a lot more payroll systems, many of which we support, and your onboarding app takes you through it step by step.
The primary thing we're doing is categorising roles into one of three cost groups: food, generally back of house; beverage, generally front of house; and no cost. No cost is typically used for things like marketing, admin or general manager roles. When we look at a food or back of house labour report, anything in the no-cost group is excluded, and the same applies to front of house or beverage. If we look at your overall wage or labour reporting in Loaded, the no-cost group is taken into account. If there are roles you want to get rid of, go to Actions, Manage Role, and you can delete or rename them. Roles also have a second purpose, which we'll look at in the roster.
Tom: Again, we've likely set up all of your staff. First, check that everyone currently in your Loaded account is still relevant. Between implementation and you jumping in, you may have had staff leave. If so, open the staff member and deactivate them.
To add a new staff member, click Add New in the top corner. We need a few details to complete setup. First is their first and last name, and their date of birth, particularly if you're an Australian company with junior staff, because the date of birth triggers the junior award rate and any rules that apply to juniors. The next is their email address, which is really important. It's where the roster is sent, and it's the same email they need to use to sign up for the Loaded Team app. As a bit of future troubleshooting, if staff are having trouble getting into the Team app, the first thing I check is that the email address they're signing up with matches the email on their contact details in your Loaded account.
Next is employment type: full-time, part-time or casual. Full-time or part-time staff can be set to a salary, and hourly staff to an hourly rate. For Australian companies especially, make sure you select the correct employment type, because that triggers the different award penalties and loadings. Then we add one of the roles we just went through. The first role you add will be the default role, and you can click on it to assign a different one. For New Zealand venues you set the pay rate manually. For Australian venues, click where the pay classification says not set, and that brings up all of the award details in your account.
Tom: Once the roles and staff are right, we're nearly ready for rosters. This should already be set up in your account, but go into Compliance and then Leave to check. I'm in a New Zealand demo, so these are New Zealand leave types. If you don't have leave types sitting there, you can add them: it shows the available options and you can enable them. If there's a leave type you don't want enabled, go to Manage and deactivate it.
There are two ways to get leave in for staff. The preferred way is that staff sign up to the Team app and submit leave requests there. You'll get an email notification where you can approve or deny directly, and requests also appear in the Approvals tab under Workforce. If you need to add leave on someone's behalf, such as sick leave, open their staff member profile and go across to Leave. Your leave types sit at the top. Make a request, change the leave type if needed, set the dates, and add any notes, doctor's certificates or other supporting evidence. If you're doing this on someone's behalf, I'd approve the request straight away.
When a staff member submits leave in the app, you'll get an email notification if you have that permission set, and the request appears under Approvals. Opening it shows the total leave required. As a New Zealand venue these are eight-hour days; Australian venues use 7.6. You also get a notification if anyone else is out on leave across that period, which is more useful for annual leave than sick leave. Then you choose to approve or deny.
Tom: To build a roster, go to Roster and then Edit Roster. Staff run down the left-hand side and days run along the top. You'll notice some greyed-out shifts on certain staff members. These are for your salaried staff and are their default regular working hours, which are set in your settings. The idea is to make up a 40-hour week if you're a New Zealand company, or 38 hours for Australians, typically Tuesday to Saturday in the middle of the week. If a salaried staff member never clocks in or out and never goes on a roster, we use their default regular working hours. Once you add an additional shift, the rest of those defaults disappear, and their rostered hours are used to allocate their cost on any given day.
Essentially their weekly salary is divided by the number of hours they're working. This staff member shows an effective hourly rate of $480 because they only have three hours on the roster. As I drag the shift out to copy it across, their effective hourly rate drops substantially. They're never getting paid more; the hourly rate for salaried staff fluctuates depending on the hours they're rostered and the hours they've worked, giving you an effective cost for any given day.
To create a shift, click the cell you want. Their default role is assigned automatically, and you can assign another role if they have one. If they have a separate pay rate for that role we'll use it. If they don't, say someone who's always in the kitchen is out the front on the floor because you're short staffed on the weekend, we use their default role's rate. Set the start and finish times, add breaks if you need, and save. To copy shifts, drag the top right corner and drop onto other days or other staff members.
The sick leave we entered shows on the roster with the leave type, and any unavailabilities show down the bottom. Anything like that appears on the roster.
Tom: For some of you, building your roster on this default screen will work. If you have larger teams you'll likely want to break them down, and you can filter by role. If we just want to look at the kitchen, we select our kitchen roles, and the same for front of house. Down the bottom is the total cost of the roster. Before we use this as a budgeting tool, make sure your budget is set. Setting a budget is straightforward: you set your expected revenue, including GST, on any given day. They do need to be set day by day. There's currently no bulk upload to set daily budgets across the year. That's been requested a lot and may come in the future, but for now it's day by day.
After a quick refresh of the roster, we now see budgeted sales, total roster cost and a staff percentage. We can also see a daily breakdown of hours and cost for any given day, and this reflects whatever you've filtered. If you filter to back of house roles, the cost updates, and you can look at your overall roster as well.
Building out a roster in week view makes sense for the most part, making sure people have the correct days off. What can be really useful is jumping into day view as a final check before you publish. You can toggle between week and day at the top, or jump straight into a day. This screen is really good for making sure we have cover across important roles. We can edit shifts, drag and drop new shifts, and move them to other staff members. This is where you might filter to specific roles. My concern was always dishwashers and duty managers, because I'd have to become the dishwasher or duty manager if I'd messed up the roster. It's a good place to make sure you have the right amount of cover through the day so you're not leaving any holes.
Once we're happy with our roster, we publish. In the top corner we choose whether to notify particular roles or staff members. This is also a final check that we haven't missed anyone's email. If we add an email address here and tick the save option, it saves to their staff member profile going forward. That's where the roster is emailed, and it's the same address they'll use to sign up for the Team app. You can add any additional notes, which go out to all of your staff, and then publish and lock.
Once the first roster is published, staff get an email with their shifts, a company code and links to Google Play and the App Store to download the Team app. When we jump off I'll send some information about comms we've used with staff before to help them get set up.
Tom: Once the roster is published, we'll want to work on future rosters. There are two options: save the roster we just built as a roster template, or copy rosters across. To copy a roster, select the week you want to copy and the week you want to copy to. You can select specific roles to copy. If you copy to a week that already has shifts, you'll see which shifts conflict and will be deleted when you copy. Once you're happy, copy.
A question came in about where to find the code for the Team app. Go up to your account. You'll have your one company sitting there, and your company code is shown there. That's the unique company code staff need to sign up for the Team app. I'll also send it across with the other documents after the session.
Tom: Once staff have the roster and are signed up to the Team app, we want them clocking in and out of their shifts. Staff clocks are essentially timesheets: any clock in and clock out is recorded here. I've unapproved a couple of these so we can go through them. This shows the staff member name and, in this case, a week, though you'd normally look at a day. We can check that start and finish times are right and make adjustments by typing directly or using the calendar. This is something we want duty managers completing daily. It makes payroll a whole lot more straightforward knowing shifts have been checked by the duty managers on those days. We can change start and finish times, add breaks and remove breaks.
Depending on a staff member's permissions, you can hide hourly and salaried rates from them. Automatic rounding of timesheets is set in your Team settings. By default you can round to the nearest minute, or to 5, 10 or 15 minutes. We don't currently have snap rounding, so if someone is rostered at 11:00 their start time won't automatically snap to 11:00; it's rounded to the nearest increment you've chosen if you're not paying to the minute.
When I jump off I'll send some information about permissions for staff. For duty managers especially, we probably don't want them seeing everybody's rates, so we can hide that. Then we approve the shifts. Depending on their permissions, some users can unapprove shifts and some can't. If you have a lesser permission rather than a manager permission, you can't unapprove and make further changes. Using the little clock down the side, you get a change log. You can see how the clock was created, whether it was manually created or has a clock in, and then any changes made, who made them and when. That gives you an audit log of your timeclocks.
Tom: Briefly, here's what it looks like when you get to a pay run. Your first pay run is one we want you to organise with your onboarding manager. Give them plenty of notice and we'll jump on your call for it. We'll go from start to finish with you, from checking the time sheets through to processing the pay, so there are no hiccups along the way and you're confident completing it.
The in and out punches by staff view is where we do our final check for pay runs. It shows all start and finish times, all shifts worked for staff members and their total pay. If you're an Australian venue, it includes all of your award penalties and loadings in their pay rate. Shifts that have been approved have a green tick, and ones that haven't don't. In an ideal world everyone has a green tick. That might be hopeful in the beginning, but if we can get 90 to 95%, we only have a few shifts to chase up with duty managers to make sure we're happy with them and good to pay.
Just a quick recap. Go into roles and make sure the roles in your account are relevant, removing any old ones. Check your staff members, and if you want to edit any details, click on their profile to edit their details and pay details. Then start building out a roster. If you have concerns getting a roster built and published, which usually feels pretty straightforward for people, please reach out and we can jump on a quick call. And make sure we have plenty of notice for your first pay run so we can go through it start to finish with you.
That's everything on rosters and timeclocks today. If you have questions, reach out to me or your onboarding manager. I'll send information through when we jump off today, as well as the recording so you can watch it again or share it with other staff. All of our sessions are open to any of your staff, now or down the track. If you don't have the registration links, flick us an email and we can get any of your staff registered. Thanks a lot for your time, and enjoy the rest of your day.
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