With the reopening of borders and sectors across Southeast Asia, retail food and beverage (F&B) is ramping up again. However, many small and medium enterprises (SMEs) looking to ride this wave of pent-up demand find themselves bogged down with familiar foes: pen and paper.
Small businesses that are dependent on shift-based or part-time workers are still stuck with manual and inefficient human resource work. In response, shift management startup StaffAny is offering its free Start-Up Plan to all businesses with less than 25 workers or operating less than a year. The plan, which was initially offered to larger scale companies in March, was so popular that StaffAny is widening its reach to smaller businesses as well with over 400 sign-ups within a month.
As staff clock in via the StaffAny app, tabulation and consolidation automatically happens on the back-end, enabling owners and managers to focus on delivering core services rather than onerous administrative paperwork. Manual staff management using spreadsheets and punch cards is prone to costly errors, not scalable or standardized, and does not give business owners cost visibility, thereby crippling their forward-planning activities and competitiveness. This outdated pen and paper method can lead to overscheduling, attendance inaccuracies, time theft, or excessive overtime payments.
StaffAny Co-Founder and CEO Janson Seah said: “These inefficiencies lead to millions of dollars and hundreds of hours lost annually. As such, we launched our StartUp Plan to empower all startups to digitize, and help them move from the hassle of using pen and paper to a digitized workflow that saves time, money, and headache.” Singapore’s rising inflation (5.4 percent in March and April 2022) has been accompanied by higher wages, putting increased pressure on productivity – especially in small businesses already hard-hit by the Great Resignation labor crunch. Coupled with manual operations, these phenomena pose a great challenge to economic innovations; especially scalability.
Migrating from pen and paper to StaffAny’s digitized platform has resulted in customers seeing up to 3 percent lower hourly labor costs, i.e. up to S$24,000 annually in some cases. To date, StaffAny has saved more than 507,000-man hours and tracked over 17.6 million hours.
Wei Jian, owner of Covet Coffee, said: “ StaffAny’s Start Up Plan saved us an incredible amount of time, from manually inputting details into Excel spreadsheets, counting the hours to ensure accuracy and matching the clock-in hours. It also saves us the massive headache of planning ahead, with all the HR information displayed on a single platform.” The launch of the Startup Plan comes two months after StaffAny successfully closed a S$4.6 million Series A funding round led by GGV Capital in January 2022. SMEs keen to move their roster planning to a centralized digital platform, free of charge, may visit www.staffany.com to learn more.