Staff drinks from customers and shift freebies

[dormouse]

Hi

we have a couple of issues which I’m unsure of the best way to deal with in Square.

• Customers will often buy a drink for their server (“and one for yourself”) and currently this gets tracked via post it notes which is not ideal. Is there anyway we could track this in Square? I was thinking along the lines of giving staff members a electronic gift card which would be updated with the amount of the chosen drink but I think that might be quite clunky to do
• Staff tend to help themselves to crisps/chocolate/soft drinks when working. We don’t have an issue with them doing this (as long as they don’t go overboard) but it does mess up stock take on those items. What’s the best way in Square for staff to put these “freebies” through, and is there any way to limit how many they can do per shift?

thanks

tim

[QuokkaCoffee · Accepted solution]

Hiya, Tim! 

Sorry to hear about your frustrations. I was in the same boat a little while back, and think it's great you trust that your team will self-regulate. This is what I've found useful:

• creating a 100% discount button we call 'Happy Meal' to account for shift food; you're right in that eGift cards get too cumbersome waaay too quickly
• coffee's too difficult for us to track because we all have so much of it during the day for quality control (but mainly out of bodily necessity, so I factor this into my COGs calculations)

My team and I have entered into this unspoken social contract: if they don't have that much coffee during the day then they can help themselves to any of our bottled drinks; they also typically pay for coffee at a discount if they come in and they're not on shift. 

I see it as a win-win if you can train your staff to ring up any chips/choc/non-fountain drinks they have, whether it's completely free or at a discount. I'm not sure how Square can help you limit their consumption (Square Reports is great for getting granular about this data) but I think you'll find once they're forced to account for things in that manner then they self-regulate pretty quickly.

It's such a grey area, hey? Really depends on how much of a benevolent dictator you want to be. 🙂

Always happy to offer more thoughts,

Kat

[doc_choc]

We just don’t bother managing or monitoring it too closely. We give the team free drinks and gelato as much as they like on shift, in production they can not eat on the production floor, but we do have a massive box of excess chocolates which they can take home or eat as much as they like during their breaks. There is only so much you can eat or drink in a shift so we factor this in as wastage. Small perks go a long way.

[mksavage]

We give our team one free meal per shift (from a pre-designated Team Meal menu). We track that by creating a "Team" ticket in the POS where everyone adds their food. Then the manager comps out the entire ticket under the "Team Meal" 100% comp at the end of the shift. This allows us to track the inventory (and comped amount) on a day-to-day basis. If you needed to make sure inventory was reflected immediately, you could have the manager comp out each team member's ticket as soon as they created it. For us, we set the Team Meal menu to include only things that aren't as stock-sensitive throughout the day, so we don't have to worry about it too much.

Buying drinks for the servers is an interesting one. I would think you could do the same thing -- have everyone add their "gifted" drinks to a tab that gets comped at the end of the night. At least that would put it in one place instead of having post-its floating around...