Labor Efficiency turns your time-clock hours and payroll rates into a single at-a-glance picture of how much each part of the plant costs to run — and how productive it is. One screen answers "where is my labor money going, and is each department pulling its weight?"
Where: Reports → Production → Labor Report · Who: Admins only (it shows wages)
What it answers
The Labor Efficiency report puts three things that normally live in separate places — hours worked, wages paid, and production & sales — side by side, broken down by department. In one view an owner or manager can see:
How many regular and overtime hours each employee logged, and in which department
What each department costs in wages
How many pieces each department produced, and its throughput per labor-hour (PPLH)
Each department's sales, and its Labor % — wages as a share of the sales it generated
Revenue basis — sales are measured on net revenue.
The report at a glance
Top — the employee × department grid. One row per employee. Each department is a pair of columns, Reg (regular) and OT (overtime) hours, so you can see exactly where a person spent their time. The far-right Total Pay column is that employee's wages across everything they worked.
Bottom — the department rollup (footer). Each metric below is literally the column total of the people above it — Wages, Pieces, Hours, PPLH, Dept Sales, and Labor % — plus a Total column for the whole store.
Example — a week for a small plant
Top: employee × department hours + pay
Employee | Rate | Dry Cleaning — Reg | Dry Cleaning — OT | Laundered Shirts — Reg | Laundered Shirts — OT | Wash & Fold — Reg | Wash & Fold — OT | Overhead — Reg | Overhead — OT | Total Pay |
Maria Lopez | $18.00 | 32.00 | 4.00 |
|
|
|
|
|
| $684.00 |
James Carter | $16.00 |
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| 38.00 | 2.00 |
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|
|
| $656.00 |
Ana Ruiz | $15.00 |
|
|
|
| 20.00 |
| 18.00 |
| $570.00 |
Maria's Total Pay = 32 reg hrs × $18 + 4 OT hrs × $27 (1.5×) = $684.00.
Bottom: department rollup
| Dry Cleaning | Laundered Shirts | Wash & Fold | Overhead | Total |
Wages | $684.00 | $656.00 | $300.00 | $270.00 | $1,910.00 |
Pieces | 1,440 | 2,000 | 600 | — | 4,040 |
Hours | 36.00 | 40.00 | 20.00 | 18.00 | 114.00 |
PPLH | 40.0 | 50.0 | 30.0 | — | 35.4 |
Dept Sales | $6,200.00 | $3,100.00 | $1,800.00 | $11,100.00* | $11,100.00 |
Labor % | 11.0% | 21.2% | 16.7% | 2.4% | 17.2% |
💡 In this example Laundered Shirts is the most productive line (50 pieces/hour) but also the most labor-heavy at 21.2% — worth a look. The plant overall spends 17.2 cents of labor for every sales dollar.
Metric glossary
Metric | What it means |
Reg / OT | Regular vs. overtime hours an employee worked in that department. Overtime is priced at 1.5× the employee's rate; doubletime, where it applies, at 2×. |
Total Pay | An employee's total wages for the period across every department they worked (regular + OT + DT). |
Wages | Total wages the department paid out for the period — the sum of the pay of everyone who worked in it. |
Pieces | How many garments/items that department assembled (completed) in the period. |
Hours | Total labor-hours clocked to the department (reg + OT + DT). |
PPLH (Pieces Per Labor-Hour) | Throughput: Pieces ÷ Hours. A department productivity gauge — higher is more output per paid hour. |
Dept Sales | The revenue generated by the department's sales for the period. Uses net revenue |
Labor % | Wages ÷ Dept Sales, as a percentage — the headline efficiency number. Lower means labor is a smaller slice of the revenue it produced. |
How "Overhead" works
Some jobs don't produce any specific department directly — front-counter, maintenance, management. Their labor is real, but there's no single department to charge it against. The report handles this with a dedicated Overhead column:
Overhead labor shows its Wages and Hours like any other column.
It has no Pieces and no PPLH (nothing to count), so those show —.
Its Labor % is measured against total store sales, not one department — the same way the operator sheets treat it. That's why the Overhead Dept Sales cell shows the store total with an asterisk (
*), and a note under the table explains it.
Marking a job as overhead is a deliberate choice (see setup), so it's never confused with a job someone simply forgot to configure.
Setup — what makes the numbers appear
The report assembles itself from data you already capture, but three settings feed it. If a column looks empty or a Labor % shows —, one of these is usually the reason.
1. Employee hourly rate
Each employee has an hourly pay rate on their admin profile. Wages = hours × rate (with the OT/DT multipliers). The rate is sensitive, so it is visible only to Admins (masked with a Show toggle) and cannot be read or edited by non-admin roles.
2. Map jobs to financial departments
In Payroll Settings → Jobs, each time-clock Job can be assigned one or more Financial Departments (the GL sales accounts). This is the join that lets the report line up hours on a job with sales and pieces from a department.
A financial department belongs to at most one job, so sales are never double-counted. Departments already claimed by another job are hidden from the picker.
A job may own several departments; its column then measures labor against those departments' combined sales.
3. Overhead jobs
Leave a job's Financial Department field blank (the picker reads "Overhead (no department sales)") to route its labor into the Overhead column described above.
⚠️Pieces and sales come from assembled sale items, windowed on their assembly date. Departments whose work isn't piece-assembled (e.g. weight-based Wash & Fold in some setups) may show pieces as — (empty) while still contributing wages and hours.
Good to know
Admin-only. Because it exposes wages, the whole report is gated to Admin (and SMRT super-admin) users — in the sidebar, the command palette, and the API.
Department-level pieces, not per-employee. PPLH is a department throughput metric; the report deliberately does not attribute pieces to an individual.
Everyone still counts. If an employee who logged hours can't be resolved (e.g. later deleted), their hours and wages still roll into the department and store totals under a placeholder name, so the footer always reconciles with the rows above.
Store total spans everything. The Total column includes sales from departments not yet mapped to a job, so the store total is always complete even while you're still configuring jobs.
On the roadmap
Per-department Labor % goals — a target you set per department, with the footer flagging when a department runs over it. The rollup is already laid out to host these.
📸The tables above are an illustrative worked example. Live product screenshots can be dropped in here for marketing use — ask and they can be captured from a seeded demo store.