New Module Could Help Restaurants Contend With Reporting Requirements Under ACA
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
HotSchedules Launches ACA Advisor Module to help manage status, scheduling, and labor costs.
Under the Affordable Care Act, there is an Employer Shared Responsibility Provision, or Employer Mandate, that requires businesses to provide healthcare coverage options to all full-time employees. According to ObamaCare Facts, “Employees who work at least 30 hours per week, or whose service hours equal at least 130 hours a month, for more than 120 days in a year are considered full-time.”
This requirement has posed quite a challenge to many restaurant owners, whose staff do not work the traditional 9 to 5 work weeks. Tracking schedules, maintaining records of who qualifies for “full-time” status at any given time, and conducting the required federal reporting are causing some headaches in the industry.
To help simplify the process, HotSchedules, an intuitive mobile and web-based employee scheduling solutions for the restaurant industry, has announced the release of its ACAdvisor module, aimed at helping employers successfully manage schedules and preserve employee hours, while controlling labor costs under the Affordable Care Act’s Employer Mandate.
According to the press release, the ACAdvisor module allows employers to track, manage and monitor ACA employment statuses and execute a cost-effective labor strategy in real-time through efficient and intelligent labor scheduling. The HotSchedules ACAdvisor module allows applicable large employers are able to bridge the gap between corporate-level strategy and store-level execution.
“After speaking with many owners as well as the hourly workers, we realized just how important it is that restaurants have instant visibility into scheduling data so that employees can continue to get their hours and employers can keep staffing their restaurants without worrying about sacrificing guest satisfaction or the additional labor costs,” David Cantu, Chief Revenue Officer said in the release.
The ACAdvisor module allows managers to view part-time and full-time statuses, measurement, administrative and stability periods, and hourly thresholds right from HotSchedules, in order to can make real-time decisions about schedules and ongoing shift trades. “It’s going to be a win-win for both the employers and their staffs,” Cantu added.
The ACAdvisor module works frictionlessly with the HotSchedules’ POS-Integrated version and includes custom ACA configuration, ACA status management, scheduling, and reporting and monitoring capabilities.
“We built the ACAdvisor module with the goal of bridging the gap between corporate-level strategy and store-level execution,” Casey Clinkenbeard, Vice President of Product Development, said in the release. “It lets corporate administrators and executives own their high-level ACA strategy and empower on-the-ground managers to schedule employees according to their employment status.”