I Use Toast Payroll - Ask Me Anything!

[acurley17]

Hello Toast Community! My name is Alex Curley and I am the Chief Operating Officer at Palacios Murphy, a multi concept restaurant and hotel hospitality group based out of Houston Texas.

I have been in restaurants for around 30 years and have worked for groups big and small all over the globe. During this time I have used just about every payroll solution out there, from crazy copy and paste "what if" saturated excel sheets, to pen and paper, to the massive corporate monstrosities.

I have been with Toast Payroll for a little over a year now and find it to be the most fluid, operationally sound, guest and employee centric, cost effective and cost saving, flexible payroll solution out there. It restores our teams to sanity and gives us  lost time and energy back so we are able to focus it on what is really important : the guests.

I would love to share any ways that Toast Payroll has been a game changer for us, answer any specific questions you may have, or just talk shop. I never sleep, and love to engage the restaurant community so please, ASK ME ANYTHING!

For the next 30 days or so I will be actively monitoring any responses so please reach out anytime!

[Penguin_Meg1]

Hi Alex!

Thank you for taking the time to answer some questions! I love that I can add all types of documentation from doctors notes to evaluations into the "Taxes & Documents" section of an employee profile so that it is easily accessed and organized. 

I also LOVE the Quicknotes section. We track everything here so there is a detailed and exact timeline of events for each employee. We track tardys, evaluations, pay raises, verbal warnings, sick days, etc. here! I recently needed to pull a quicknotes report for a particular employee and the reports process is a little unsophisticated for lack of a better word when it's comes to quicknotes. I have to run an excel sheet that pulls EVERY employees quicknotes that has ever worked for us into one document. Then cut the rows and columns down to see just that specific employee.   When I talked to Toast about this they unfortunately said that Quicknotes has been grandfathered in and isn't going to be in use anymore by new Toast Payroll customers. This is sad for 2 reasons, #1 it's awesome, #2 there are no future improvements being made to it.  

My question is what do you use to have organzied employee information all in one place? Do you use Toast Payroll for it and if so how?

We had another community member have a rough go of not being able to do a simple pay raise history report for a single employee. We use quicknotes as a  work around for a report such as that, but do you have any reporting secrets on how to access that information?

Generally, REPORTS is a question that I am wondering if you use the custom reports section much and if you have found it to be user friendly? 

Thanks!

[acurley17]

Hello Megan!

Nice hearing from you, thank you so much for reaching out! 

I am also a huge fan of the "Taxes and Documents" section. It is so nice to be able to file TABC permits, food handler licenses, diciplinary documentation etc. in a secure, easily accessible space alongside all new hire related forms.

So don't hate me, lol, though we do not use the Quicknotes feature, though not because it isn't cool, though it appears that we tend to use the "To Do" feature to achieve a lot of the same goals. I believe one of the reasons we do this is because a lot of such forms (Evaluations, warnings, etc.) require employee signatures and we like the fact that the "To Do" feature includes an e sign option.

If you aren't familiar with it, it is the plus sign to the right of the notifications notice on the dashboard. We use "Add to do" and then are able to provide all the details of the documentation. This allows us to add an email notification if we like as well as specify if we require the e sign.

In the same respect, when we go back to check on someone's history regarding a chain of documentation like this, we use the "TO DO Report" on the dashboard and then filter it by either employee or item type. The document lives in the document library, so it is easy to go back in and download and/or print it if necessary.

I hope that helps!

Thanks,

Alex Curley

COO 

Palacios Murphy

[Penguin_Meg1]

Interesting!! I have not used this feature! I'll give it a go! Thank you!

[Penguin_Meg1]

I did a TODO experiment on myself and it looks like it went as a notification to my dashboard. What do you do if it is documentation that isn't necessarily for the employee to see? It is just management documentation of that particular staff member? In quicknotes. we document even small sit downs with staff like- "Julie came in with a negative attitude & I was worried it was being felt by the customers. We chatted, she's having some personal issues, and I gave her a pep talk. She was more pleasant throughout the rest of the shift".

This type of documentation helps us see a trend. So if all 3 of my front of house managers have to have quick talks with her on different shifts to help improve her attitude then this is an issue and not just a one off of someone having a bad day. This information is helpful for the managers but not necessary for the employee to know or have as a notification. Does that make sense?

I'm going to try and dive in to Toast Central to see how to utilize this feature more.