3. Departments and Department Groups

Before we begin, it is important to understand the difference between ‘Departments’ and ‘Departments Groups’ in Ameego. 

Departments are the jobs that we import (sync) from your POS system and they cannot be created (manually) in Ameego. We'll show you how to review and arrange your departments within department groups in this section, and show you how to update your department settings.

Department Groups are not synced from your POS and can be created in Ameego. Each department group will be scheduled separately and will have its own labour cost summary totals in Ameego’s reporting. Many restaurants like to create separate department groups for Management, Service and Culinary. Others prefer to use just one department group for simple “all in” scheduling and reporting. We will get you started with at least one department group and you can create more if required. 

This guide will take you through the following 3 required setup steps:

• Step 1 - Department Setup
• Step 2 - Department Settings
• Step 3 - Department Group Setup
• Step 4 - Department Group Settings

Step 1 - Department Setup

Navigation: ‘People’ tab, then ‘Employee Manager’

Goal: Review and clean up the departments we imported from your POS to suit your scheduling needs.

Sometimes your POS system has more departments than you require for scheduling, or has more than one department with the same or similar name. It is important to review the departments we have synced from your POS and deactivate the unwanted departments before beginning the department group setup. 

Follow the steps below to review your departments and the employees that belong to them.

1. Click on the department name to display the employees that belong to that department on the right side of the page.
2. If you have no employees in the department then it is OK to deactivate it (see below).
3. If you have employees in a department and would like to move those employees to another department, click the 'Edit Profile' button within the employees profile and choose the department that you want to move their profile to. Refresh your screen and the employee(s) will be move the to the department you chose. 
4. If you have more than one department with the same name, you will have to choose which of these two departments that you will use in Ameego. Use the above step to move employees to the other department of the same or similar name.

Follow the steps below to deactivate a department in Ameego.

1. Ensure that you do not have employees in the department you want to deactivate (as described in Step 1 above).
2. Click on the setting wheel that is located to the right of the department name.
3. Click on the 'Deactivate' button.

Step 2 - Department Settings

Navigation: ‘People’ tab, then ‘Employee Manager’

Goal: Customize your restaurant's department settings to apply a department default wage and control the amount of book off requests for each day of the week.

Put your cursor to the right of the department name and click the setting wheel. Click the ‘Edit Department’ button.

Observe the following settings below and make the changes that suit your restaurant's scheduling needs.

• Department Name: Since we sync the Departments (jobs) from your POS, you will not have access to change the department name. 

• Default wage: If an employee does not have a wage for this department in their profile, the wage you enter here will be used to cost a scheduled shift for the employee in this department.

• Payroll ID: If you are using Ameego's payroll export function, this field will be present. Add a payroll ID here if it is required by your payroll provider.

• Colour: Choose a color for the department. Once you get to the scheduling section, the shift tiles will be displayed in this colour. You should have a different colour for each department within a department group for clarity when reviewing your schedules in Ameego.

• Auto approve book offs: If you would like Ameego to automatically approve any number of employee book off requests for a day of the week, you can set this here. If you would like your managers to approve all book offs leave the numbers in this section at zero.

• Book off request limits: You can enter the maximum number of book off requests that you would like to receive each day of the week in this department. Remember, your managers will still need to approve these requests before they are confirmed and the schedule is updated.

• Click the 'Save Changes' button after editing.

You will see 'Badges' below the department settings. We will cover badges in the next section of this guide.

Step 3 - Department group setup

Navigation: ‘People’ tab, then ‘Employee Manager’

Goal: Customize your restaurant's department groups

Adding & removing departments within department groups

Click the ‘Manage’ button located at the top of the 'Departments' section. You will see the default department group(s) that we have added to get you started and the departments that belong to those groups.

Use the instructions below to add or edit your department groups

Edit a department group name:

If you see a department group that we created for you and would like to rename it, click the 'Edit' button, rename it and then click 'Save Changes'. (We will cover the other department group settings below in step 3)

Create a department group:

If you do not have any department groups or need to create another one then click the 'Create New Group' button, add a department group name and then click 'Save Changes'. (We will cover the other department group settings below in step 3)

If you are satisfied with your department group(s) then follow the instructions below to arrange your departments within the department group(s).

Add a department to a department group:

Click the ‘+ department’ button (if present) within the desired department group and choose a department to add.

Note: If all of your departments already belong to a department group, then no ‘+ department’ button will be present.

Remove a department from a department group:

Click on the department name and this will move the department to a section called ‘No Department Group’. This department will have to be added to another department group in order to be scheduled in Ameego. 

Moving a department from one department group to another:

To remove a department from a department group click on the department name within it's current department group. Then click the '+ department' button within the department group that you want to move it to and select the department. 

Here is a quick demonstration of how to remove a department from one group and add it to another.

Sorting departments within a department group

Now that you have added all of your departments to a department group, you can sort them within the department group. The sort order you choose will be reflected throughout the Ameego platform. Follow the steps below to sort the departments within the department groups. 

1. Exit the 'Manage' section by clicking on the Employee Manager tab. 
2. Put your cursor to the left of a department name to see the crossed arrows icon.
3. Click and drag the crossed arrows icon to move the department up or down in the list.

Watch this demonstration on department sorting.

Step 4 - Department group settings

Below is a description of the available department group settings. These can be applied now or later, depending on  your current stage of your Ameego setup. For example, you may not have your base floor plans setup yet. No problem, you can come back to these settings later. 

Navigation: ‘People’ tab, then ‘Employee Manager’

Goal: Customize your restaurant's department group settings that will automatically apply to each scheduling week.

Click on the 'Manage' button and then click the ‘Edit’ button on the first department group. The following settings that can be customized for each department group.

Rename: Rename the department group

Sales Metric: Default setting is ‘None’. If set to ‘None’, the department group will use the primary sales metric of Net or Gross sales to calculate the labour cost for this department group. You can choose another metric to make this calculation, but be sure to select a sales metric ($) and not a count metric (customer count). 

Auto Publish Schedules: Default setting is ‘Off’. If set to ‘On’ and you have default floor plans attached to this department group, then One Touch will create AND publish your schedules automatically.

Tip: We recommend that you leave this setting at the default of 'OFF' in the beginning so you have the opportunity to review your schedules before publishing. 

Default Wage Multiplier: Default setting is ‘1.00’. When creating and costing your schedules in Ameego, we will multiply all hourly wages by this amount. 

Tip: You can use this setting to account for some employee overhead costs. ie - setting the multiplier at 1.04 will add 4% to all wages and will be applied to the projected labour.

Default Fixed Labour: Default setting is 0.00. Add a dollar amount here that will represent weekly fixed labour for this department group (like managers salaries). This figure will be used in all of Ameego’s reporting for projected and actual labour. 

Default Labour Percent Goal: Default setting is 0. Enter your labour cost percentage goal for this department group here and Ameego will show you comparisons to this goal throughout the scheduling pages. This is an optional setting.

Default Floorplans: These are important settings that will enable Advanced One Touch to complete all 3 steps of scheduling with single button click. A default base floor plan must be applied to each day of the week to enable this feature. If you have not created your base floor plans yet, you can come back to this later. Be sure to come back and do this though, and this is a great time saver in Ameego!

Delete Group: Click this to delete this department group. Please use caution with this action. If you accidentally delete a department group, you will have to open up a support ticket to request that our support team adds it back for you. 

Cancel: Cancels any editing done since the edit button was clicked.

Save Change: Saves all changes made.

Great Job. You have successfully set up the department groups for your restaurant! 

Now lets move onto to People Setup.

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