Agency/Forecast Employee Additions
Polaris Data has an optional function that allows you add “generic” employees to enable more accurate forecasting of wage costs; i.e for new starters where all details have not been provided so cannot be set up on Polaris Data yet.
Along with this, Agency/Contract staff can be added with a fixed weekly cost or an hourly rate – allowing you to add these employees to your rotas and in turn assigning their costs to the relevant departments (Back of House, Management etc) to help with scheduling your staff each week along with providing full transparent wage costs.
ADDING A FORECAST/AGENCY EMPLOYEE
To add a forecast employee (or agency employee), please use the new drop down menu selector, which accompanies the usual “ADD NEW” button on the staff maintenance screen;
You will have 3 options;
Forecast – for adding “future” employees for future week forecasting, without having to input the starter information (if you don’t have the relevant information for setting up the new starter at the time of forecasting)
Agency – for adding an Agency employee and their associated fixed weekly/hourly costs. You will now be able to include agency staff within the tips distribution if you wish. Simply select yes next to the "Include in Tips Distribution" option.
Standard – for setting up a standard employee
**NB you will still be able to set up a standard starter by clicking the ADD NEW button as normal**
Select the FORECAST or AGENCY option to take you to the set up screen;
Please fill out the required (*) details in the same way as you would any other new employee – ensuring the rate of pay, scheduled job/dept and start date is correct.
AS OF OCTOBER 1st 2024 - DUE TO THE CHANGE IN TIPPING LAWS, THERE IS A NEW FLAG TO INCLUDE THE AGENCY EMPLOYEES IN THE END OF WEEK DISTRIBUTION IF REQUIRED
The “WORKER TYPE” will default to the option you selected from the main Staff Maintenance addition screen – but this can be changed from “FORECAST” to “AGENCY” if the wrong option was selected.
**N.B. the “Job/Pay Rate End Date” is only really required for AGENCY type workers (i.e. if the Agency staff is someone filling in a temporary role for a pre-determined length of time.)
The Forecast hours will automatically be removed once the forecasted hours becomes the actual trading day, unless the hours are assigned to a specific employee**
Once all details have been filled in, please click SAVE.
Once you see the Agency/Forecast Employee appear in your Staff Maintenance list, you will be able to assign hours to these employees. To do this, you go to your rota planner, as normal. You will notice in the top right hand corner of the Rota Timetable window, a “SHOW FORECAST and AGENCY” button;
Once clicked, any employees that are marked as Forecast or Agency will show in your rota denoted by red text.
You add hours in the normal way, and you will notice that any FORECAST employees’ hours are highlighted RED.
This is because these hours MUST be re-assigned to a genuine employee/new starter once they are added as an employee – so that they can be processed by payroll.
Rota sessions can be dragged and dropped to another member of staff in the usual way; when a rota session is moved from a FORECAST employee to an actual employee, the rota session will turn the regular BLUE session colour.
**As previously noted, any FORECAST hours which are NOT re-assigned to a genuine employee before the day is confirmed, will be automatically removed from the rota**
The AGENCY hours/costs work in exactly the same way as a normal employee’s hours and will calculate a daily and weekly cost for the Agency staff based on their hourly rate, or their fixed weekly rate of pay (depending on which option was chosen when they were set up. These costs will be added to department that was assigned in the Agency employee set up – to give you a true reflection of wage costs (i.e. Back of House).
If you wish to move/delete any AGENCY/FORECAST rota sessions, this can be done using the normal rota functionality.
You can see the costs on your weekly cost screen which will include the addition of any Holiday accrual/EmployersNI (only applicable to “FORECAST” type employees)