Making the most of OneBoxBM - Rota Template Management

This is part of a series of posts that’s designed to help you get the most out of OneBoxBM, to view the index click here.

In OneBoxBM staff rota templates are managed from within the rota template management area. Which includes:

• The New Rota Template Editor
• The Rota Template View

Note: We’ve also put together some useful help guides to help you manage your rota templates; we’ll reference the specific guides in each section.

In keeping with the rest of the series, we're going to be using a restaurant as an example.

We're starting to plan our staff rotas for the 6 week summer holidays, as we're a family friendly restaurant we're expecting to be a bit busier than usual.

To help us get a headstart on creating our staff rotas, we're going to be creating a new rota template for the summer period.

The Rota Template Editor

Note: You can view the relevant help guide for the 'New Rota Template Editor' at the following link.

When first creating a new employee rota template in OneBoxBM, your first stop will always be the 'New Rota Template Editor'.

To keep things simple, the 'New Rota Template Editor' will only prompt you for the key rota template details, such as:

• Template Name
• Template Notes
• Rota Details
• Rota Departments
• Rota Notes

In this instance, we’re going to give our new rota template a of name of 'Summer (2024)'.

We're also going to set the default values that will be applied to all staff rotas created using the rota template.

Now, while we could have multiple rotas running side by side, one for the back of house and one for the front of house. We're going to just stick with a single rota; some of our staff work between both areas, so it makes more sense to create a single rota.

OneBoxBM is designed to support either a single rota for all departments, or multiple rotas for a single or several departments at once; if you have a lot of employees with little crossover between departments, you may wish to create multiple rotas.

Upon the creation of the employee rota template, you will be presented with the 'Rota Template View'.

The Rota Template View

Note: You can view the relevant help guide for 'Rota Template Management' at the following link.

Much of the day to day management of your staff rota template will be handled within the 'Rota Template View', which contains the following tabs/sections:

• Details
• Targets
• Employees
• Days (Starting Monday to Sunday)

Note: each 'Day' on the rota template view has it's own tab/section.

Now we've already captured the basic details as part of the template creation process, so we can move onto 'Targets'.

While we're expecting to be busier than usual, and we want to make sure we have enough staff to cope with the increased number of covers. We also need to try and keep our employee hours/costs under control.

In order to do this we're going to set our:

• Target sales
• Target spend per head
• Target employee hours
• Target employee costs

As we mentioned earlier, we're going to assign all employees to a single schedule, so we're going to skip over the employee schedule assignment and just make use of the 'Auto-Add' feature on the main employee schedule.

Now that we've:

• Captured our basic details.
• Set our targets.
• Made sure that the correct employees are going to be assigned to the schedule; when we create rotas using the template.

We can start working through the days ond getting our shifts set out.

In OneBoxBM, each day has it's own shifts within these shifts you can:

• Set the shift details
• Set the shift targets
• Set the shift employee job role requirements

In our restaurant we have morning and evening shifts everyday apart from Sunday, which will just have a single longer shift.

First we'll start with the basic details, such as the shift start/end time, we'll also capture some basic details about the shift as well as some additional notes for the management team.

Next, we're going to set the default targets for the shift. These will be based upon the initial targets we set at the rota level.

To finish things off, we're going to set our default shift job role requirements. As this will help us make sure that we have a enough staff covering each area of both the front and back of house.

For the most part, our morning shifts are the same across all weekdays, so we're going to save some time by just copying the details of each shift making any amendments as we go along.

Once we've filled in the morning shifts, we're going to move onto the evening following the same process as before.

To make life easier, we're going to make use of the 'Copy From' feature, by taking a copy of the morning shift and then making any amendments as we go.

Rota Template Search

Note: You can view the relevant help guide on searching for rota templates at the following link.

The summer rota template needs to be updated, to take into account the fact that the restaurant has taken on a new cook in the entry level position.

As the new member of staff will be joining in a junior position, and will therefore require extra resource they've decided to amend some of the target employee costs and the rota shift requirements.

To do this, they need to search for the rota template record and open the 'Rota Template View'.

Once they've found the relevant record, they can simply go through and review the details, making an additions and/or amendments necessary.