Folkart Restaurant Management Rises to the Hospitality Challenge With Help from ADP Marketplace
"We are saving time and money because now it's easier to manage employees across multiple units with varying wages and roles, overtime, and POS integration of sales and tips with employee name matching across payroll." - Amy Biller, Operations Manager at Folkart
Chicago's restaurant scene is producing many creative solutions to industry challenges. To maintain its competitive edge, Chicago-based Folkart Restaurant Management, a craft-driven hospitality group led by Chef Matthias Merges, focuses on operational excellence, state-of-the-art design and a deep-seated commitment to using locally sourced ingredients.
As a fully-integrated food and beverage company, Folkart is involved in numerous enterprises — from owning and managing its own bars and restaurants to managing properties like Mordecai, Lucky Dorr at Wrigley Field, and a new Billy Sunday in Charlotte, North Carolina opening in spring 2019. Depending on the season, Folkart manages a workforce that varies from 300 to 600 employees across all of its locations.
According to Amy Biller, Operations Manager at Folkart since 2012, payroll at Folkart can be complex because it manages employees with multiple job roles that often have different hours and pay rates. Add in income earned as tips by front-of-house employees and the situation can become even more complicated, especially when it comes to income tax reporting compliance.
Biller says the company took a major step forward during the past year when it implemented the Dolce Connector for ADP®. The connector, which is available on ADP Marketplace, allowed Folkart to connect its existing Dolce time and labor management solution with the ADP platform from all of their locations. The integration has allowed Biller to reduce the time she spends on managing and running payroll from a minimum of 32 hours a month to less than eight hours.
"The Dolce Connector for ADP has given us a true savings advantage," Biller explains. "At one point, I was processing payroll for seven locations, so having the ability to use the automatic data transfer from Dolce to ADP is a true productivity boost."
Before the Dolce Connector, Biller would load time and attendance data into an Excel file and then copy and paste them into ADP, which was a very time-consuming manual task. Folkart is now saving time with a one-click payroll process, which eliminates the need for manual data entry. The organization is also leveraging Dolce for tips distribution and cash auto gratuity for tip pooling based on hours, percentage, server ownership, downstream tip and manual overrides.
"We are saving time and money because now it's easier to manage employees across multiple units with varying wages and roles, overtime, and POS integration of sales and tips with employee name matching across payroll," says Biller.
Folkart's initial integration of Dolce with ADP was an "instant success," says Biller, who handles many of the company's behind-the-scenes operations, from managing payroll to working with local food vendors and in-house managers and chefs. Now that the two systems are integrated, payroll accuracy and compliance have risen to even greater levels.
"Dolce and ADP work so well together," Biller says. "The time it takes me to manage payroll has been considerably reduced."
A real-world example of the value granted by the Dolce and ADP integration is how it helps Folkart comply with the new Chicago Paid Sick Leave Ordinance. Currently, Biller must manually decide if someone has banked enough hours of sick time to be paid out. Dolce is in the final stages of configuring its platform so that the correct numbers are automatically calculated for each employee.
"This will save me at least an hour every payroll in determining if an employee is eligible for sick time pay, and will help to keep our business compliant with the Chicago sick time ordinance," she says.
"Overall, having our payroll system from ADP integrated with our time and labor management solution from Dolce has really helped us with the critical, complex payroll management challenge," Biller continues. "That means I can spend less time on back-end processes and more time on the important financial issues for our restaurants — a true recipe for success."
ADP Marketplace Partner
ADP Client: Folk Art Management, Chicago
Industry: Hospitality
Number of employees: 600
ADP Marketplace Partner: Dolce
Dolce is a leader in workforce management technology, driving profits and optimizing workflow. Dolce's Labor Center connects and integrates scheduling, timekeeping, labor budget, POS integration, tips distribution, labor compliance, payroll publishing to RUN Powered by ADP® and ADP Workforce Now®.
Learn more about Dolce: https://marketplace.adp.com/dolce
Note: Each ADP Marketplace solution has passed a world-class security assessment to help safeguard the confidentiality and integrity of your employee data. Security Magazine Ranked ADP's Security Program 1st among all Business Services Organizations in 2017.*
*The 2017 Security 500 Rankings by Security Magazine