Running a restaurant involves managing many moving parts, and onboarding new hires and setting up payroll can be particularly time-consuming. Fortunately, integrating Toast with Sling offers a powerful solution to simplify these processes. This guide will walk you through how to leverage Toast and Sling, focusing on the crucial aspect of Toast Payroll Import New Hire Guide, to create a seamless and efficient system for your restaurant.
Understanding the Toast & Sling Integration for Payroll and New Hires
Integrating Toast and Sling creates a unified platform that streamlines various aspects of restaurant management, including employee data, timesheets, sales, and schedules. For restaurant owners and managers, this integration significantly reduces administrative overhead, especially when it comes to managing payroll for new employees.
Here’s a breakdown of what data syncs between Toast and Sling:
- Employee Data: Automatically sync employee names, positions, locations, and wages from Toast to Sling, ensuring your employee database is always up-to-date across both platforms. This is critical for accurate payroll setup for new hires.
- Timesheets: Bi-directional syncing of timecards between Toast and Sling. This allows you to compare scheduled vs. actual hours, analyze labor costs, and easily export timesheets for payroll processing, essential for both existing and new staff.
- Sales Data: Import sales data from your Toast POS into Sling. This integration allows for better labor cost optimization by comparing projected vs. actual sales and labor percentages, helping you build efficient schedules, especially when considering new employee onboarding and associated labor costs.
- Schedules: Export shift data from Sling to Toast. This enables schedule enforcement through the Toast POS time clock, preventing early clock-ins and time theft, ensuring accurate labor tracking from day one for new employees.
Setting Up Your Sling Account to Integrate with Toast for New Hire Payroll
To begin streamlining your new hire payroll process, you need to connect your Toast account with Sling. Here’s a step-by-step guide:
Step 1: Access the Sling Integration via Toast Dashboard
Navigate to your Toast dashboard and locate the ‘Scheduling’ tab. Click on it to start the Sling account creation process. This is your gateway to simplifying your toast payroll import new hire guide workflow.
Step 2: Select Toast Locations for Sling Integration
After clicking ‘Try Now,’ you’ll be directed to a page where you can select the Toast locations you want to connect to your Sling account. You have the option to connect multiple locations to a single Sling account or create separate accounts for each, depending on your restaurant’s structure.
Step 3: Create or Connect Your Sling Account
A new tab will open, prompting you to either create a new Sling account or connect an existing one to your selected Toast location(s). Ensure pop-ups are enabled in your browser for this step to function correctly.
Step 4A: Connecting to an Existing Sling Account
If you choose to connect to an existing Sling account, sign in using your Sling email and password. You’ll then be presented with a list of your Sling accounts to select the appropriate one for integration.
Step 4B: Creating a New Sling Account
If you opt to create a new Sling account, you’ll be asked to provide an email address and create a secure password. Ensure your password meets the specified complexity requirements.
Step 5: Integration Completion
Once you’ve created or connected your Sling account, it will load, and a pop-up message will confirm that the integration with Toast is complete.
🎉 Congratulations! Your Toast and Sling accounts are now connected. 🎉
Sling will immediately begin importing data, including employee details, timesheets, and sales data (up to 30 days prior). For toast payroll import new hire guide purposes, any new employees added in Toast will automatically sync to Sling with the next update, ensuring your new hires are quickly integrated into your scheduling and time tracking system. Updates to wages, timesheets, and sales in Toast will also automatically update in Sling. However, deleting data in Toast will not remove it from Sling.
Important Notes on Data Sync:
- Email address changes in Toast require manual updates in Sling.
- Wage updates in Sling will reflect the current date as the effective date, not a planned future date from Toast.
- Refunds or voided payments in Toast will update sales data in Sling.
- “Jobs” in Toast are synced as “Positions” in Sling, and these are applied to employee profiles during the initial setup, streamlining the toast payroll import new hire guide process by ensuring consistent job titles across platforms.
Enforcing Schedule Compliance for New Employees
Schedule enforcement is a crucial feature for managing labor costs and ensuring new employees adhere to their scheduled hours. Sling allows you to export schedule data to Toast, enabling you to prevent early clock-ins on your Toast POS system.
Step 1: Access Timesheet Management in Toast
In your Toast account, navigate to ‘Employees’ and scroll down to ‘Timesheet Management.’ Select ‘UI options: Shift Review.’
Step 2: Enable Schedule Enforcement
Within ‘UI Options: Shift Review,’ scroll to the ‘Time Clock’ section and enable the ‘Enforce Scheduling’ option. Remember to ‘Save & Publish’ your changes.
Adjusting Schedule Enforcement Settings
To further customize schedule enforcement, navigate to ‘Employees’ and select ‘Schedule Enforcement’ in Toast. Here, you can adjust grace periods for early and late clock-ins/outs, with a limit of up to 90 minutes.
Ensure that your early clock-in settings in Toast match your Time Clock Settings in Sling. You may need to enable the Sling mobile time clock or kiosk temporarily to access the full settings suite, even if you don’t plan to use these features regularly.
For more detailed information, refer to this article on schedule enforcement.
Data synchronization between Sling and Toast occurs automatically every 15 minutes. For immediate updates, you can manually sync data as frequently as every 5 minutes via the integrations tab in Sling settings.
Verifying Data Import for Accurate New Hire Payroll
After connecting Sling and Toast, it’s essential to verify that data is syncing correctly, especially when setting up payroll for new employees.
Employees:
Check the ‘Employees’ tab in Sling to ensure new hire profiles have been imported accurately. Verify names, contact information, positions (“jobs” from Toast), locations, and wages.
Positions:
Confirm that all “Jobs” from Toast are listed under the ‘Positions’ tab in Sling. New positions added in Toast will sync to Sling, but positions created in Sling are not exported back to Toast.
Locations:
Verify that all locations from Toast are imported under the ‘Locations’ tab in Sling. New locations added in Toast will also sync to Sling, prompting the locations mapping tool to ensure proper connection. Locations created in Sling are not exported to Toast.
Wages:
Check the ‘Labor cost’ tab in Sling to confirm that employee wages have been imported correctly. You can also verify wage details within each employee profile under the ‘Wages’ tab.
Timesheets:
Review the ‘Time clock’ tab in Sling to ensure clock-in and clock-out activity from Toast is syncing properly.
By scrolling horizontally on the timesheets page, you can view additional details, including the source of each entry (Toast clock-in, Sling schedule, Sling time clock).
Timesheet data aggregates into the payroll report, allowing you to review total hours and gross wages for each pay period. This is crucial for accurate and efficient payroll, especially when managing new employees as part of your toast payroll import new hire guide strategy.
Sales:
Sales data from Toast will populate in the ‘actual sales’ column of the sales report in Sling, updating automatically every 15 minutes.
Managers in Sling require admin-granted access to labor cost data to view wage and sales information and access labor, payroll, and sales reports. Admin access can be granted under the labor cost settings tab.
Creating Schedules in Sling for Efficient Staff Management
Once data verification is complete, you can begin scheduling in Sling. Shifts created here can be sent to Toast to enforce schedule adherence, ensuring accurate time tracking for all employees, including new hires.
The full schedule view in Sling provides a comprehensive overview of all schedule data. Create new shifts by clicking the ‘Create shift’ button or by hovering over the calendar to reveal the add ‘[+]’ button.
Shift creation can be context-sensitive; clicking on a specific employee’s row or date may pre-populate some shift details. Time, location, and position are mandatory fields, while other details are optional.
Leaving the employee field blank creates an unassigned shift, useful for planning coverage needs. Unassigned shifts (blue) are only visible to admins and managers, while available shifts (green) are visible to employees assigned to the relevant position and location, allowing for efficient shift claiming, particularly helpful during new hire onboarding.
For a comprehensive overview of scheduling features and options, watch this video:
Video: How to schedule shifts in Sling
For more scheduling information, explore this collection of articles from the Help Center: ✏️ Schedules
Reviewing and Editing Timesheets for Payroll Accuracy
Before processing payroll, reviewing and editing timesheets is crucial. Ensure you understand the bi-directional time sync settings in both Sling (Settings -> Time Clock) and Toast (Employee Management -> Schedule Enforcement) to optimize your toast payroll import new hire guide process.
To enforce schedule-based clock-ins/outs with manager approval exceptions, configure Toast’s Timesheet Management -> UI Options: Time Clock settings.
Timesheet changes made in Toast will sync to Sling and overwrite any previous data. Review timesheets in Sling under the ‘Time Clock’ tab, selecting your desired date range and applying filters for locations, positions, or groups.
Use the ‘Columns’ filter to identify duplicate entries, showing both scheduled and actual clock-in/out times for comparison.
Timesheet data can be printed or exported. This data feeds directly into the payroll report for easy processing.
Important Note: Currently, Sling does not directly integrate with Toast Payroll. Payroll data from Sling is accessible via Toast Web through the Sling/Toast integration and can integrate with Toast Payroll from there, if you utilize Toast Payroll services.
Running Payroll Reports for Efficient Compensation Management
Once timesheets are finalized, you can generate and export payroll data from the ‘payroll report’ tab in Sling.
Apply filters as needed, similar to timesheet reports, to refine your payroll data.
Customize report columns to display only relevant data for your payroll processing needs.
Export payroll data in .csv or .xls format for seamless import into your payroll application, simplifying your toast payroll import new hire guide workflow and ongoing payroll management.
Configuring Company, Schedule, and Labor Cost Settings
Before fully utilizing Sling, review and adjust company, schedule, and labor cost settings to align with your restaurant’s operations. These settings are adjustable only by Sling account admins.
Company Settings:
Company settings apply company-wide and define feature and information access for employees, including messaging, newsfeed, and task features.
Schedule Settings:
Schedule settings control schedule appearance and accessible scheduling features, including hours of operation, work week start, schedule visibility, and break settings. Sling’s end-of-day cutoff is adjustable, unlike Toast’s fixed 4 AM cutoff.
Break Settings
Sling’s break settings offer extensive customization. Choose between ‘Standard Breaks’ (paid/unpaid, duration) or ‘Automated Breaks’ with advanced options for meal and rest breaks, paid/unpaid configurations, break durations, and employee break waivers.
Labor Cost Settings:
Labor cost settings define pay periods, overtime rules, labor cost percentage goals, and manager access to labor cost data. These settings are crucial for effective labor management and budget control, especially when factoring in new hire payroll.
Pay period settings determine the date ranges used in payroll and timesheet reports.
Sling supports weekly, daily, and daily double overtime calculations.
Enable holiday pay and define the extra rate if you offer premium pay for holidays.
Set a labor percentage goal to receive alerts when scheduling exceeds your target labor cost %.
Grant managers access to labor cost data as needed. Managers only see data for their assigned locations and never see wage information for other managers or admins.
Projected Sales Integration
For Scheduling Pro subscribers, Sling can import projected sales data from Toast, leveraging historical and seasonal trends for forecasting. Sync projected sales from the Schedule page in week view using the new icon in the top right corner.
Projected sales and labor cost data are viewable on the schedule page in week mode, filtered to a single location. Manual adjustments to sales projections are possible for improved accuracy.
Personalizing Preferences and Notifications
Customize your individual Sling account appearance and notification settings under Settings > Preferences and Settings > Notifications. These settings are user-specific.
Preferences:
Preferences settings allow you to personalize time format, name format, shift appearance, and more.
Notifications:
Notifications settings let you choose which alerts you receive and how, via email, push notifications, or SMS (shift alarms only via SMS). Users manage their own notification preferences.
Notification types include:
- Shift alarms: Up to three reminders via email, push, or SMS.
- Dashboard notifications: For account updates, visible on the Sling dashboard.
- Message notifications: For private and group messages.
- Newsfeed notifications: For updates on followed newsfeed pages.
- Employee activity notifications: (Admin option) To monitor employee activity.
Disconnecting the Toast and Sling Integration
If needed, you can disconnect the integration from either Sling or Toast without data loss. Disconnecting stops future syncing but preserves existing data. Re-establishing the integration will resume syncing from where you left off, ensuring flexibility in managing your toast payroll import new hire guide and overall system.
Disconnecting from Sling:
Go to Settings > Integrations, click options next to Toast, and select ‘disconnect.’
Disconnecting from Toast:
In Toast, go to the Scheduling tab, click the 3-dot option for the location, and select ‘Disconnect.’
F.A.Q.’s and Helpful Hints for Toast & Sling Integration
- Data syncs automatically every 15 minutes and manually every 5 minutes.
- ‘Queued’ Toast sync status in Sling indicates backlog; manual sync resolves this.
- Employee profiles synced from Toast cannot be deleted but can be deactivated.
- Pre-existing Sling employee profiles may duplicate upon Toast integration; these can be merged.
- Admins/managers can adjust new employee emails in Sling until verification; users update verified emails in their profile.
- PTO does not sync between Sling and Toast.
- The Sling mobile app is available on Apple App Store and Google Play Store as ‘Sling: Employee Scheduling app.’
- Users from Toast are initially imported as ‘Employee’ system roles in Sling and may require role adjustment by admins/managers.
- Video demos are available in Sling’s help articles; search ‘Video’ or see: https://support.getsling.com/en/?q=video and https://support.getsling.com/en/articles/2961944-full-demo.
By following this comprehensive guide, you can effectively integrate Toast and Sling to optimize your restaurant’s operations, especially concerning toast payroll import new hire guide processes, employee scheduling, and time management. This integration will save time, reduce errors, and improve overall efficiency, allowing you to focus on providing excellent service and growing your restaurant business.
