The festive season brings a welcome boost to bar sales, but this surge in revenue can quickly be offset if rostering isn’t managed effectively. While unnecessary wage costs can eat into profits, understaffing risks lost sales opportunities, but thoughtful planning can ensure your bar thrives.
According to data from Quantaco, over the Christmas period venues typically see a 13 per cent increase on average sales for the year. But despite a surge in sales, December often records the lowest wage-to-revenue percentage, with wage costs spiking by 24 per cent.
As a result of public holiday loadings, longer shifts and inefficient rostering, wage costs far outweigh revenue increases, and with venues once again set for a Christmas sales uplift, planning for the increase in trade is the key to a successful trading period.
Mitch Stone, executive director of business advisory at Quantaco, told Bars and Clubs: “December is typically a very profitable month, but you can throw too many staff at it. That’s great for servicing, but you can over service, so there’s a fine line with getting that staffing accurate. Being efficient with your labour is the key for the next two months.”
According to Stone, the difference between a good result and a great result is driving labour efficiency, and he emphasises the importance of data-driven rostering.
“It’s about rostering more efficiently and understanding when to use fixed labour and flexible labour – so casual and permanent staff. You need to use data effectively to roster your venue, and technology is a big part of that,” he explained.
“[Pulling] in data in 15-minute increments [means] that you can monitor wage efficiency, and if you’re not hitting those sales targets, you can let staff go home early, or you can bring staff in if you’re busier than anticipated.
“There’s a fine line between getting the right labour, and the big thing there is forecasting. If you know what your sales are going to be, you can accurately forecast your labour to that.”
While data can enhance forecasting abilities, events and functions should also be factored into rostering.
“You typically forecast based on trends from the last year, month, or week before – a whole myriad of periods – and AI can help with that. If you know you have functions on, you can then add those spikes in. If you know you’ve got a 50-person party that’s going to bring in a minimum spend of $20,000, you can add that into your forecast manually, and again, monitor every 15 minutes, and that allows you be to be reactive pretty quickly to movements in sales,” Stone added.
Preparing for the next few weeks of busy trade is paramount, but bars can also anticipate a drop in trade in January, and operational efficiency is just as crucial. Strategic rostering means more than aligning with anticipated sales peaks, it also relies on the right combination of full-time and casual staff to reduce the need for overtime and penalty rates.
“It’s about utilising staff efficiently over the next two months, so people taking leave in January when it’s typically quiet, and maximising days in lieu now, because you’re going to have people working extra shifts in December, so making sure they utilise them in January when it’s quiet.
“Managing breaks is a big one, and not going into overtime, which gets difficult as you get busy and have more staff on. It’s easy to slip into paying extra overtime when you don’t need to,” Stone concluded.
