How to Manage Wage Costs Over Peak Season

Summer is when many Australian businesses make their money. It's also when wage costs are hardest to control. Headcount climbs, rosters change daily, and the calendar is packed with weekends, public holidays, and late shifts. If you only find out your wage costs on payday, it's too late to do much about it. 

By considering wage costs when you're making rostering decisions, you can catch overruns before they're paid. Here's how.

Where wage costs creep up over summer 

Wage costs, the direct payments you make to staff for their work, are the part of your labour costs most likely to swing over summer. Peak season costs more because of how people are paid as well as how many people work. The most common pressure points are:

• Public holidays and weekends: Christmas Day, Boxing Day, and New Year's Day fall in the middle of peak season, and many awards attract penalty rates for weekend and public holiday work. Substitute and additional public holidays also vary by state. If penalty rates aren't factored into your rosters, you'll underestimate the cost of shifts.
• Overtime and extra hours: When shifts go unfilled, it's tempting to keep extending your most reliable people. Part-time and full-time staff can quickly tip into overtime.
• Multiple roles, classifications, and venues: A staff member who works as a swim instructor in the morning and a lifeguard in the afternoon may be paid under different classifications, and sometimes different awards or agreements. Staff can also progress to a higher classification as they gain qualifications or experience.
• Holiday leave: Permanent staff often take annual leave over Christmas and January, so you may be paying for leave and extra cover at the same time.
• Unplanned shift changes: Late arrivals, last-minute call-ins, no-shows, and shifts that run late create variances.

Plan with last season's data

Before peak season starts, look back at last year to see how many hours you rostered, what was worked, where overtime crept in, and which weeks or venues ran over budget.

In foundU, labour management reports calculate wage costs from your roster and timesheet data, with breakdowns of standard and overtime hours. You can analyse wage costs by site, activity, and cost centre, even across multiple sites and entities.

Use the insights to plan your roster budgets. In foundU, you can set an individual budget for each roster, for the whole week or per day. For a club, that might mean separate budgets for the pool, the gym floor, and the bar. For an event or tourism business, it might mean planning around specific peak dates.

If you manage a lot of rosters, budgets can be imported in bulk from a CSV. That way, when roster managers sit down to build each week's roster, they can see the budget they're working with straight away.

Visualise wage costs as you roster

Displaying hours and costs on your roster will result in better decisions. In foundU, when you assign a shift, the system references the position on the employee's profile, their award settings, and their pay rates. Rosters then show live wage estimates as you build them, including overtime alerts. Those estimates factor in ordinary time, overtime, shift penalties, weekend and afternoon rates, and public holiday rates, so managers can see what a Boxing Day shift will really cost before they assign it.

Roster analytics and budgets put those costs in context:

• The roster analytics bar shows a running weekly summary, including staff numbers, total hours, estimated wages, and average hourly wage. Hovering over estimated wages shows the percentage of your budget used.
• The roster efficiency drawer breaks this down by day, with total wages and hours against your daily budget. It shows green when you're under budget and red when you've gone over.
• You can prevent admins from publishing a roster that's over budget, so overruns are caught before they reach staff.
• When you filter multiple rosters, such as every venue in a group, estimated wages and budgets are combined, giving you a quick group-wide view.
• You can also show labour as a percentage of sales and sales per labour hour and set thresholds.
• Analytics are also permission-controlled. You can let roster managers see staff numbers, hours, and budgets without exposing individual pay rates.
  

Keep actual hours in check 

A well-built roster only protects your budget if people work the hours you planned. In peak season, shifts could run late and managers need to approve extra time on the fly. Accurate time and attendance helps you close that gap. In foundU, you could load the clock app on an iPad at each site, or let staff clock on the go through the employee app with geolocation tracking enabled.

Shift notes also help managers understand why hours differ from the roster when they approve timesheets. As the data flows straight into foundU, you can review hours worked and wage costs at any point in the pay cycle.

Scale back down without losing ground 

Peak season doesn't last, so your costs shouldn't stay at peak levels either. With foundU's active user pricing, you only pay for employees who are entitled to be paid in a given period. That means you can build a pool of labour to tap into when you're busy, without increasing your costs when demand drops.

Protect your margins this summer 

When rosters, time and attendance, and payroll work from the same data, you can see costs as you plan and catch overruns while there's still time to act.

Book a demo to see how foundU can help you manage wage costs across every location this summer.