So what is the DOL looking for?  For the most part, the DOL is auditing to ensure that that minimum wage, labor laws, and employee overtime laws are being followed correctly.  Also, the DOL spends a large amount of its effort trying to find overtime violations.

What documents will I need?  You’ll need the last three years of payroll, time sheets, employment history, jobs, and  I-9 form data.

What happens if they find a violation?  Don’t stress.  In many cases you may be able to fix a violation without any penalties.  For more egregious errors, you may be on the receiving end of a fine.  That’s why having a time clock tool for record keeping can really help.

We’ll leave you with a few tips for passing your labor audit:

1. Make sure that you have an attorney who knows labor laws, and has worked with the DOL before.
2. Start keeping good records NOW by using an employee scheduling and time clock system like Hello Scheduling (shameless plug ).  With Hello Scheduling we store all of your time clock data, so that it’s easily accessible.  Also, you can always export your time clock data to Excel for easy analysis.
3. The DOL will request a number of documents from you.  Be sure to review everything they are requesting and ensure the documents’ accuracy.  This is a very import step; you may want your lawyer to help you ensure your records are in order.

1. Avoid manual processes
2. Prevent time theft

Avoid Manual Process

In the article, the author mentions that the American Payroll Association estimates that error rates from manual payroll processes can cost you 1% – 8% of your total payroll. The more you automate your payroll system with a payroll software program, the fewer errors you will have to pay for out of pocket.

With Hello Scheduling you can use our time clock feature to make payroll as simple as one click.  With a time clock, employees clock in and out for their shifts.  This makes calculating the number of hours that an employee has worked very easy.

At the end of the pay period, simply run our payroll report and Hello Scheduling will automatically calculate the number of hours that your employees were clocked in for (they can also add mileage information).  Here’s an example of a payroll report — remember this information can be exported to Excel or any payroll provider.

Prevent Time Theft

Preventing time theft is also critical to saving on labor costs.  From the article: “Implement a check-in system that automatically records an employee’s hours when they sign in or swipe their card”.  With Hello Scheduling there are a number of ways that you can prevent time theft.

Most importantly, you can actually ensure that an employee does not clock in before his or her shift starts — our time clock system can actually check the employee schedule.   You can also have Hello Scheduling automatically clock out an employee at the end of his shift (Learn more).  This feature prevents employees from clocking in too early or too late, reducing your labor cost considerably.  Saving a few hours per month can literally save you hundreds of dollars.

Another important way we prevent time theft is with our time record approval process.  After your employees clock out, you’ll have the ability to approve the time records (before you run a payroll report).  Here you’ll be able to find any time records that look suspicious, or are inaccurate.  You can delete any suspicious time records, or edit the record to ensure the employee’s hours are correct.

Let’s discuss desktop employee scheduling tools first.   Desktop tools are usually sold as packaged software, meaning you pay a large upfront fee to use the software.  The software vendor continues to make updates to the software, but you have to buy upgrades in order to continue to get bug fixes, new features, and customer support.

Also, desktop tools are, by nature, locked on the desktop.  This has a number of issues:

• Your employees can’t access the schedule from their computers or mobile phones
• If you have an issue with your computer, you’ll most likely lose your schedule
• Your employees can’t submit time off requests, or swap with one another.  You’ll have to do this work manually from your computer
• You can’t text message your employees.
• If there are new features or bug fixes, you need to install updates.  Most likely you’ll pay for these updates if the vendor no longer supports the version that you own.
• Many desktop offerings require a monthly service fee in order to get customer support

Online employee scheduling, however, is a much better option for most businesses.  Here are just a few of the benefits:

• With online tools, you pay a low monthly subscription fee.  Included in that fee are bug fixes and new features — and there are no updates to install or upgrades to make. 
• Also, customer service is included with your subscription — there are no yearly “maintenance contracts”.
• Your employees can access the schedule from any computer or mobile phone
• Your employees can swap with one another, as well as put in time off requests from any computer with an internet connection
• You can send text messages to your employees
• ..and so much more

Those are just a few reasons why we sell Hello Scheduling as a subscription.  We think a subscription product really aligns with what our customers’ want — it allows us to provide the best product and customer service that we can.  And yes — that pharmacy is now a paying customer .

By adding an address to a shift, or location, your employees will know exactly where they work, and can even view the address in Google Maps with one click.

To add an address to a location, simply visit “Settings”.  You can either edit an existing location, or add a new location entirely:

Adding an Address to an Employee’s Shift

To add an address to an employee’s shift, simply fill in the address field when setting up the shift.  It’s located in the “Advanced” tab:

Where Do the Addresses Show?

All of the addresses are available on the employee’s dashboard, as well as in the mobile application.

Here are the addresses in the mobile application.  Again, your employees can simply click on the address and it will show in Google Maps.

So that’s it.  Now you can easily add an address to any shift or location — your employees are just one click away from knowing exactly where to work!

To turn on this functionality, go to “Settings” and then “Time Clock”.  Here you’ll see the option to “Automatically clock out employees”.  If your setting is currently disabled, change the “Employees can clock in” settings from “Anytime” to a different setting.

Hello Scheduling can automatically “clock out” your employees if they forget.

“The term ‘full-time employee’ means, with respect to any month, an employee who is employed on average at least 30 hours of service per week.”

That section, known as the employer mandate, requires any business with 50 or more full-time employees to provide at least the minimum level of government-defined health coverage to those employees. In other words, a business must provide insurance if it has 50 or more employees working an average of just 30 hours per week.

An obvious strategy to minimize the cost of Obamacare is to carefully track how many workers fall below the 30-hour threshold.  In fact, a recent Gallup survey found that the percentage of part-time workers as a share of the overall labor force surged to 20.6%, the highest level in data going back to the start of 2010.

Using Hello Scheduling to Track Employee Hours

Hello Scheduling allows your business to easily check employee hours.  In our settings area, you can set the maximum # of hours per week that your employee should work.  If your business wants to avoid having any employees work more than 29 hours per week, we can set the global settings for every type of worker:

While changing these settings will set the global maximum # of hours per week for employees, we can also set maximums on an employee-by-employee basis.  Here’s an example of changing an employee’s setting:

Now that we’ve set our maximum # of hours per week, Hello Scheduling will do much of the work for us.  Our autoscheduler will ensure that employees aren’t overscheduled.  Also, we can check employee hours at any time directly within the schedule:

So in this quick blog post, we’ve walked you through how Hello Scheduling can potentially save you thousands in health care costs.   Try it for free.

Last week we kept up our crazy pace of new feature releases, and made employee scheduling even better with our mobile app.  So what’s new?

• If your organization allows give up shifts, now your employees can give up their shifts directly from the mobile app
• You can now navigate to any future date in the “Everyone” schedule tab
• We’ve also made a number of improvements under the covers, improving your download speed when your phone has less than stellar cell service.

We promise this isn’t an April Fool’s joke!

Our employee time clock will replace our existing time sheets feature, which will be retired on 3/31/2013.  This video will walk you through the new employee time clock feature, as well as show you how you can access your existing time sheet data:

Administrators, click here to change the setting:

Many online employee scheduling tools offer the basics:

• Creating a schedule manually, or using templates to “copy” a schedule for one week to the next
• Time off management
• Labor cost calculations

But when you scratch the surface, you realize you’re still making your schedule manually.  

Why can’t other tools offer a 1-click work schedule maker?

At Hello Scheduling we designed our software to make creating an employee schedule as simple as 1 click.  From the day we started designing Hello Scheduling, we knew that customers wanted to reduce their time making the schedule as much as possible and we knew that an autoscheduler was how we would accomplish this.

So what are the benefits of using Hello Scheduling’s auto scheduling capability?

• You can create employee schedules in one click.
• You can tune the autoscheduler, to pick your favorite employees on shifts
• You can ensure that employees only work one shift per day
• You can ensure that employees never work back-to-back shifts
• You can ensure employees do not exceed the max number of hours per week they are supposed to work
• and so much more…

Our autoscheduling capability does all of the work for you.

Check out the video to learn more: