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Examples of commonly used Data Center formulas
Examples of commonly used Data Center formulas

Industry based KPIs that could help you make better business decisions when scheduling

Patrick Gruhn avatar
Written by Patrick Gruhn
Updated over a week ago

🎯 For Admins. This feature, formally called Planning metrics, is included in the Pro Plan and up. Reach out to our support team if you'd like to try it out.


Whether in retail, health care, or the hospitality industry, your schedule data can give useful insights into how your business is performing. However, it might be as evident how and what to use to get meaningful insights into how well and efficiently your business is performing.

Here's a list of examples for you to use as a starting point.

  • track the staff you need: by inputting how many employees you need to have working per day in a Data set and compare that with the number of assigned shifts for the same day using a formula.

    Could be useful for cafes, restaurants, bars or pubs, health care facilities, hotels, logistics or security, fitness and leisure facilities, cinemas, amusement parks.

  • track working hours: a Formula can help you compare the assigned shift hours with the hours tracked with Punch Clock (imported in a Data set).

    Could be useful for businesses that can be affected by spontaneous events like those offering logistics or security services. health care facilities or hotels.

  • spot the most profitable times: a Formula can be used to calculate your profit through an operation that takes into account your sales revenue (imported in a Data set from a POS system, for example), your staff cost (could be calculated as the hourly multiplied with the number of hours from assigned shifts) and other costs (imported in a Data set from your bookkeeping records).
    If your restaurant applies lunch or dinner deals or your bar hosts themed parties, a setup like this would highlight if the deals or parties are adding the value you expected.
    Schedule cost will be available soon, as a Schedule element, within Formulas.

    Could be useful for cafes, restaurants, bars or pubs, health care facilities, hotels, logistics or security, fitness and leisure facilities, cinemas, and amusement parks.

  • keep an eye on your ticket prices: if you set up a simple Planning metric that inspects ticket sales (imported in a Data set, for instance) against your payroll costs (which could be either calculated from the Schedule data in a Formula or imported in a Data set from your payroll tool), you can make sure that your tickets and deals are set at the optimal price point. Depending on your setup, you might be able to spot differences in ticket sales per day or per employee.

    Could be useful for cinemas, amusement parks, larger bars or pubs.

  • make sure that you are always prepared: if your business is highly influenced by unpredictable events (for instance, a sudden increase in the number of admissions at a health care facility), a simple Formula setup would be able to calculate how many employees you will need at work for the upcoming period based on your demand (imported in a Data set).
    For instance, if every 6 new admissions at your facility would indicate that 2 more employees are needed in your Schedule.
    This is a small variation to the demand planning scenario described in detail in this article.

    Could be useful for health care facilities, hotels, logistics businesses.

It is very likely that none of the examples above describes something that fits your business or organisation. You could still use them as a guideline for mapping out which data point would be useful for you.

You can also take a look at our step-by-step guide for setting up Data Center formulas for shift planning (demand planning).

If you have a specific metric or example you'd like to set up, you can always contact our support team for assistance.

Start by thinking of what data would be most valuable to know when you are assigning shifts or planning ahead. Then break it down into parts and see whether there is a way to gather the information you need.

The only thing you would have to do is to assemble a combination of metrics (Data sets or Formulas) and Schedule elements containing that information and show it in your schedule, so Planday can do the work for you.


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