Customer Spotlight: Manor By The Lake

Customer Spotlight: Manor By The Lake

Saving 24 Hours a Month at a Busy Wedding Venue

Jose Luis Marques, the Group General Manager of Heritage Rocks Group, sat down with Planday to explain how the platform has made the daily operations much simpler for him and his staff. Heritage Rocks owns three events properties in the UK including Manor By The Lake.

Wedding venue with a personal touch

Being so personal in nature makes Manor By the Lake different from a hotel. We rely more on the concept of having a home-away-from-home style staff to make our guests’ weddings and events one of a kind. We employ between 75 and 100 staff during the main seasons, but it can go up to 150 during peak times. As a GM with decades of experience in hospitality, scheduling and staff management has always been a pain point, because I was not able to track revenue versus wage costs in real time, and could not react until it was too late.

Payroll made simple

Planday is extremely helpful for tracking revenue and payroll expenses, which is why we looked for a workforce management solution. Previously, we used Excel spreadsheets, but by the time we entered all the data, it was too late and we’d already gone above costs. It wasn’t cost-effective, and when we weren’t on-site, we couldn’t see who was at work or have really up-to-date information about what was going on. This is a 24-hour industry, so Planday is really helpful in this respect. It means we’ve got full access to everything, so if anything needs to change, we can make constant updates, whereas in Excel this was quite tricky.

Payroll used to take an entire day to run. However, with Planday, payroll only takes an hour. There are hardly any complaints, because it is very accurate. All in all, it has probably saved us about 24 hours a month in time we used to spend doing payroll, and that time is priceless. It has also helped department heads become more accurate in running their departments and in increasing efficiency. It’s been a fantastic learning opportunity for all of them.

More control over scheduling and attendance

We use Planday as our scheduling system. All staff have access to it so they can see what shifts they’ve got coming up and what’s going on. Our Operations Manager uses Planday to schedule the rota for our staff. Each staff member has direct access to Planday on their phones, so they use it as a clocking-in/clocking-out system. It is then directly linked to the payroll which is great because we can see the percentage of staff cost compared to the revenue.

The Punch Clock feature is brilliant, because you can see when people are actually coming in. We used to have a pen and paper system which can easily be altered. Now you have to be in the area to clock in and out, and that’s really important. It allows us to keep track of people’s hours and ask the right questions at the right time.

We use the Template feature for scheduling staff that work at our weddings and other events. With the click of a button, the schedule is pasted and set across the whole of the next set of weeks. When we were still using Excel spreadsheets or something similar, we had to type it in manually – copy, paste, copy, paste – it was a lot more work. But Planday is more simplified and you can easily just spread it across those weeks and say, “that’s it, it’s done!”. So, it saves a lot of time!

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