Shift allowances
Introduction to Shift Allowances
A shift allowance is a guest financial allowance or credit for meal packages such as breakfast or dinner, which are defined by work period or shift. So for example a guest may have a shift allowance of GBP 20.00 to be used against dinner, which is configured as shift number 3.
Posting against Shift Allowances
The principal behind posting against shift allowances is very simply in interfacing terms, the ePOS system can either pass ‘-1’ in the ShiftNo field, which means that the posting logic will not attempt to look up any available allowance, or else can pass any other integer into the field and the posting logic will check for an allowance with the corresponding integer.
When a product is created in the PMS, a shift allowance enumerate and various rules and use cases can be associated with it which will result in a shift allowance being recorded in a lookup table with a ‘for date’.
When a room posting is transacted with a specified shift number, if an allowance with a matching 'for date' and integer is found in the lookup table, then the allowance value will be subtracted from the posting value, absorbing the transaction up to the full amount of the shift allowance. Any transaction value in excess of the shift allowance will be posted as a remainder.
The most basic logic required in the ePOS system would be to have a configurable time-related grid to determine which enumerate should be passed in to the posting method, e.g. as follows:
| Shift number | Shift name | Shift time |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Breakfast | 06:00:00 – 09:59:59 |
| 2 | Lunch | 10:00:00 – 16:59:59 |
| 3 | Dinner | 17:00:00 – 23:59:59 |
| 4 | Night | 00:00:00 – 05:59:59 |
From the perspective of the ePOS developer, the submission of a shift enumerate can be kept very simple as almost all other shift-related logic can already be handled in the PMS by using rules, based upon sales analysis code.
As an example, some systems will always pass a '-1' (do not attempt to reference an allowance) if the posting is a 'wet' product, as typically hotel meal allowances do not include drinks. However, if everything in the basket has a ‘3’ passed in to the posting method regardless, the exclusion of drinks from the calculation could be handled by the PMS logic by assigning a list of ‘allowed codes’ that can be configured against each product.
The only thing that we can’t handle in the PMS logic is the configuration of the shift times, so the ePOS must be configured to send a ‘1’ during breakfast service, ‘2’ during lunch service, ‘3’ during evening service, etc.
These times and enumerates need to be soft-coded, as the PMS allows for the configuration of as many ‘shifts’ as is required for the operation. Four shifts is typical, but not rigid by any means.