Why consistency with Deputy

Why consistency with Deputy will see your franchise thrive

In franchise world, it is now a well-known mantra that the key to success is consistency...

An early advocate for this

way of thinking was Ray Kroc, the businessman behind the McDonald’s franchise, who famously made it his mission for people to be able to eat the same McDonald’s hamburger in Alaska, that they did in Alabama.

While the legend behind McDonald’s global domination

today has become an aspirational tale for franchises of all shapes and sizes, it only answers part of the consistency equation. To ensure that franchises have the ability to not just survive but to really thrive in their industry means looking beyond the procedures that relate solely to the product. The employees working with the franchise are every bit as crucial

@deputyapp

Kristin Harris, General Manager,

Deputy

Kristin has been with Deputy since 2008 and is part of the company’s founding team. During this time, Kristin has been involved in nearly all areas of the business developing a firm understanding of all the facets of Deputy and has a keen eye on future global growth for the business. Growing up with a strong work ethic has equipped Kristin with a determined attitude and a firm belief that success is a direct result of hard work and a positive attitude.

to its success as the product they are selling, and yet the procedures for managing employees often vary greatly from one franchise to another.

Particularly at an enterprise level, the benefits of using an end-to-end employee management solution are plentiful and should be considered best practice for all franchise businesses.

The most immediate benefit that franchisors will see through implementing Deputy is that it helps develop a solid internal business structure. Particularly as we move towards the busier part of the year, having a scalable platform that offers consistency, accuracy and reliability across their network of franchises becomes increasingly important.

A standardised employee management system allows franchisors to tie procedural tasking to specific roles and positions, which can then be delivered across all levels of the franchise. In this way, it is also easy to communicate business procedures throughout the franchise that can be consistently replicated as the business grows, as well as universally identify which are the key areas of the business that need to be covered and what the skills needed in those areas are.

With a visibly consistent structure between franchises and a stable understanding of how the business should be run, employees have a greater idea of the role they are expected to perform and where they fit into the business, which not only increases employee efficiency but will also likely reduce employee churn.

Contributing to building the internal business structure is the ability to ensure a consistently accurate payroll. An employee payment is detrimental to any business, however when it comes to franchises, a scandal at just one franchise will hurt every single franchise operating under that brand. For franchises operating under an without franchise owners or through manually entering

When employers are relying on manual systems to run their payroll, there are any number of ways that errors can occur, with the most common being:

Failing to update minimum wages to comply with industry standards Misreading hand written timesheets Double handling errors between timesheets and payroll Failing to correctly calculate the various adjustable rates according to industry awards The simple misinterpretation of awards

Given the higher stakes for a franchise that is found to be incorrectly paying their employees, providing franchisees with an automated system that accurately captures time and attendance and integrates with their Xero payroll is the risks around payroll errors. Through ensuring that franchise owners are working with Deputy, all the heavy lifting around award interpretation is managed automatically so that there is no ambiguity that franchisees are paying their employees at the correct rate.

Enterprise Bargaining Agreement, Deputy can offer individually built out wage multiplications in accordance with their agreement, to guarantee wage compliance needing to interpret the variable adjustments for different employee roles.

Deputy’s effortless, one-click integration with Xero further means that once employee timesheets have been approved, it is simply a matter of pushing the hours through to Xero to run payroll – removing any possibility of mistakes from double handling a failsafe way to mitigate many of

payments.

Even among the strongest legacy franchise brands, there will still be individual franchises that fail to thrive, and some that do eventually go under.

Without an accurate way to fairly compare how individual franchises

are performing, franchisors lack the visibility needed to identify where the problem areas in their business might be, and which stores are underperforming when compared against the whole.

Implementing a uniformed employee management system that yields accurate in-depth reporting on wage cost against sales and profits offers the franchisor the opportunity to identify franchises that might need some extra assistance, resources or advice, rather than waiting until the business has churned to find out where things went wrong. On the flip side of this, franchisors will have the opportunity to identify the highest performing franchise stores to understand what they are doing differently, and if possible replicate their process to improve the brand’s performance overall.

While consistency is key for every business, it is particularly critical for franchises. Through providing franchisees with a best-in-breed, end to end employee management solution that has a flawless integration with Xero, franchisors can guarantee consistency throughout employee management, business structure, payroll and reporting, to ensure their franchise brand not only survives, but thrives.