Recap: SheSays Singapore Event

Screen Shot 2016-01-30 at 6.10.20 PMI had the pleasure of sitting on a panel at the latest SheSays Singapore event held at the amazing co-working space, JustCo.

The women’s only event was called – Make It Happen: Your Career – and was standing room only. The event was described as “Whatever stage you are in, job hunting, changing industries, looking for growth opportunities at work or wanting to finally take the plunge into building your own business, you want solutions and you want clarity. If you’re looking for direction, guidance and an answer to – “What do I do next?”, this session is for you!

Screen Shot 2016-01-30 at 6.09.44 PMThere were four panelists including myself. The other three were;

Mina Lee – Former Chief of Staff at Xiaome
Mina Lee was most recently Chief of Staff for Xiaomi Southeast Asia, helping them set up and expand in the region and was Acting GM of Xiaomi Indonesia.

Andrea Edwards, Director of Content Marketing & Training at Novus Media
Andrea is a globally award-winning communications professional with more than 20 years’ experience working all over the world, including 12 years in Asia Pacific.

Stanimira Koleva, Senior Vice President at Software AG
Stanimira, oversees the business of Software AG in the region of Asia Pacific and Japan. She joined Software AG as Senior Vice President in July 2015.

The event was a success, with lots of questions from the room and the moderators about career paths, finding your vision, personal branding, social media, and constant learning. Meera Jane Navaratnam, one of the SheSays organizers in Singapore wrote a great recap of the event.

SheSays hosts events every month. Check out their Facebook page for details of their next one if you are interested in attending.

If you are looking for a new role, we are always hiring. Join us!

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Announcing Leave Management by PayrollHero

We’re excited to unveil the new Leave Management app for PayrollHero. We have been working on this added functionality for the last few months and are excited to launch it to the world.

Want to learn more about pricing, full feature set and how you can add it to your account? Contact us at sales@payrollhero.com for more details.

Apply for Leave

Within the Leave Management platform, employees can apply for days off by selecting the dates they want, the type of leave that it is (sick, vacation, etc) and the reason for the leave.

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Leave Balances

Managers can log in and see their subordinates leave types and how many leaves they have left. This is also where a manager can edit the number of leaves per employee.

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My Leave History

Employees can view their leave history quickly and easily by clicking on My Leave History. Within this page, employees can view their past leaves, if they were approved or declined and the type of leave.

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Reject Leave Requests

Managers can reject employee leave requests through the upcoming leave page. Within this page it shows leave requests with the pertinent details. Managers can reject the leave request and include a note as to why.

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Reach out to us at sales@payrollhero.com to learn more!

Or check out our websites here to know more about PayrollHero: Philippines, Singapore or Global.

Why Assuming Payroll Is A Big Mistake

What is assuming payroll? Does your company do it? How much does it cost you?

Assuming Payroll

Assuming payroll is a term we use when a company pays employees in advance of the completed pay period, assuming the employee will make it to work between payment and actual calculation of payroll.

For example, Wayne Enterprises pays Bruce a whole month’s salary on January 25 assuming that Bruce will work the next five days. On January 27, Bruce had an emergency situation which led to him missing work. Since he already had been paid, Wayne Enterprises will have to deduct his salary in the next month, to make up for him missing work.

Why is it done?

Since this is clearly a complex way of paying employees, why is it done? Firstly, it gave companies time to go through the tedious calculations for generating payroll. Secondly, back in the day when Wayne Enterprises handed cheques to its employees, Bruce had to go down to the bank and cash it in. Since all companies paid their employees at the end of the month, employees would spend hours at the bank just to cash in a cheque. Paying them in advance solved the problem. The opportunity cost of deducting an employee’s salary next month was far lower than paying after generating payroll.

Today, in the twenty first century, that argument does not hold anymore. Wayne Enterprises uses GIRO and other electronic payment methods to pay its employees. The opportunity cost of deducting from the next month’s salary is now much higher.

Some companies still stick to the old way of doing payroll. When we dug a little deeper and asked our clients why they did it, they said it was because their board of directors had left the rule as it was made many years ago.

Let’s help fix the problem

Our client success head, Kieran Peppiatt, has seen through a number of companies changing their system of Assuming Payroll to the regular kind:

“Many of our customers have seen cost savings by changing from the assuming payroll method to the regular one. It’s more efficient, easier and more accurate.”

PayrollHero calculates deductions but we always advocate doing payroll the regular way. It eliminates any chance of inaccuracy and makes the payroll process smoother for your HR manager. When you have a high churn rate, it is even more important to adopt the regular method.

Download a one page Assuming Payroll info sheet below:

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Why You Shouldn’t Assume Payroll – PayrollHero

Embrace Technology, Grow Your Business

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At PayrollHero, we are always pushing for a tech enabled world for our clients. There are plenty of good things that come out of automating processes in your restaurant or retail business.

To name a few: it’s more efficient and saves time, which means there is a higher turnover of customers; there is less room for error; business owners spend less on manpower so overall costs go down.

All around the world we see a preference towards adopting technology. On one hand, it is because minimum wages are expected to rise (like in the US) while on the other hand, a shortage of labour supply is forcing business owners to adopt technology (like in Japan or Singapore).

All in all, the shift towards automation is inevitable. We thought it would be helpful to give you some tips on how to stay ahead of the curve.

Apps, apps, apps

We can’t stress on this enough. There is an app for everything today. Here is a non-exhaustive list on everything that you can safely outsource to an app:

  • Point of Sale Systems: Square is the most famous POS system. It works worldwide, which makes it easier for you to monitor sales if you run businesses in multiple countries
  • Loyalty apps: We’ve talked about Perx before. Loyalty apps help in bringing in more customers and increase foot traffic in your store.
  • Reservations: Chope is the rockstar of reservations in Southeast Asia. The Asian version of OpenTable runs in Hong Kong, Singapore and other countries in the regions, making it the perfect vendor for booking reservations in your restaurant.
  • Inventory Management: Another Southeast Asian favourite, Trade Gecko is your go-to app for managing inventory. With a clean and user-friendly interface, it takes very little for a business owner to realize that inventory management is a nightmare that is solved deftly by Trade Gecko.
  • Food Delivery: FoodPanda takes care of delivering food to your customers, while Slurp is another POS system that helps customers order food remotely. Slurp helps you take orders but doesn’t deliver food itself.

We have a whole other blogpost devoted towards these apps. You can check it out here.

Revamping the menu

Laminated menu cards are a thing of the past. Restaurants like Fish and Co. use tablets for their menus. With a few taps, your customer’s order goes straight to the kitchen. Tablet menus prevent errors in ordering. It is also much easier to change menus on a tablet than to print new menus each time you want to add a dish or change prices.

Feedback systems

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Does that little device look familiar to you? You have probably seen that at airports all over the world. For a feedback system, this one is pretty elementary but it does the trick. One look at it, and your immediate response would be to click on the button that reflects what you feel. It’s an instantaneous feedback loop that can be used by almost any business.

Food bloggers

This one is more of a marketing idea. While it is not really about automating your restaurant, it is about using technology to get your business out there. Tourist destinations, like Singapore, are big on food blogs for suggestions to restaurants.

Some of the famous bloggers have a huge following on Facebook and Instagram. The idea is to get these food bloggers to write a review on your restaurant and let social media take care of the rest. Of course, you need to be confident about getting a solid review!

We hope these ideas encourage you to embrace technology. There is no downside to adopting tech while the upside will result in cost minimization and big returns for your business. Let us know if you have any more suggestions!

Marketing your Restaurant in Singapore

pablo (26)Singapore is a fairly saturated market when it comes to the restaurant industry. With high turnover of employees and ever increasing rates for rental space, there are a lot of things that restaurant owners need to worry about. We think that getting your restaurant’s name out to the masses should not be one of them. We’ve got you some easy tips to throw your restaurant into the limelight in Singapore.

Social Media is Everything

If you haven’t figured that out by now, you should get on that ASAP (right after you read this, of course). Singapore loves its apps – social media tops the list on go-to apps. While many restaurants are available on social media platforms, they make the mistake of “simply existing” on Facebook instead of actually creating a social media footprint. It is not enough to sign up to Twitter, follow a bunch of celebrities and change passwords every once in a while. You would rather be proactive and take charge of your restaurant’s image than let the masses do it for you when they realize you are not responding to them, right? For example, Changi Airport is a social media rock star. Their Facebook page is super interactive; Changi responds directly with any customer who writes a good or bad review on their page. Their most recent Star Wars campaign was hugely successful partly because of how well they marketed it on Facebook and other social media channels.

Campaigning on Instagram

There are a number of ways you can expand your social media footprint. For restaurants, there are some obvious channels that can give you bang for buck. For example, apps like Instagram and Pinterest suit restaurants very well because pictures tease the visual senses of your viewers. Trust me, nothing is more powerful than a chocolate lava cake on Instagram. You can have an Instagram campaign with your very own hashtag so you can track your popularity better.

Loyalty Apps

Singapore loves discounts (who doesn’t, really). Loyalty apps – number 2 on Singapore’s favourite type of apps – allow you to get rid of loyalty cards and offer promotions directly through the app. All you need is an iPad to display the QR code for your customers to scan. Your promotions get featured on the app and are sure to increase foot traffic in your restaurant.

Partnerships with companies that deliver food

Instead of allocating resources towards home delivery, you can outsource that to one of the many food delivery companies in Singapore. This has two benefits: Firstly you do not need to worry about the myriad of responsibilities that come with maintaining the resources for delivering food: vehicles, manpower, operating costs, etc. Your food delivery company will take care of it. Secondly, and this is more relevant to bringing your company some recognition, these companies feature you on their website or app. You will be reaching out to a customer base that is beyond your delivery radius with minimal effort.

Sponsorship with universities

This one is for restaurants that are around universities, colleges and schools and want to attract the young crowd. Many restaurants team up with organisations in school to provide welfare drives to students during exams. The concept is to give a little before you receive a lot. Students are always looking for new places to eat around their universities. They are also the most reliable demographic when it comes to word of mouth. Once a student finds a reasonably priced, good place to eat, you can be sure she will bring a whole team of hungry customers the next time around. All it takes is to sponsor a welfare drive and provide some free goodies or meals to students. The returns are guaranteed.

Finally, all these ideas work together in a market that is as tech loving as Singapore. Collaborating and reaching out through apps is definitely the way to go. We hope these ideas help you find your place in Singapore! Let us know about any new ideas that have worked for you!

How to Grow Your Business in 2016 with Social Media Marketing

Growing your business in 2016 won’t be a walk in the park. After all, more and more businesses are popping out literally every second. Make that 3 startups born every second!

Competition will surely be stiffer this year. You’re going to have to exert a lot more effort just to get noticed by potential customers.

It’s going to be an uphill climb just to increase foot traffic to your restaurant. After all, what’s stopping your target customer from checking out your competitor’s profile on Zomato (for restaurants) and choosing them instead?

But today, we’ll do our best to help you learn how you can beat out your competition and drive more sales with ZERO marketing budget.

Yes, you read that right! We’ll be teaching you tips and tricks to boost your sales this 2016 without having to spend a dime on ads.

Let’s begin!

Social Media Marketing

What You Need: 

  • Facebook, Instagram, Twitter Account
  • Time
  • Canva account (it’s free!)

How it Works:

Assuming you already have an account on these social media platforms, (if not, go ahead and make one now!), the first thing you have to do is optimize your profile.

Fill in the important details such as company info, a short bio, Operating Hours (for Facebook), and a link to your website.

Here’s a look at well-optimized Social Media pages of restaurants in the Philippines:

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Niner Ichi Nana’s Facebook page has everything filled up right: Profile Picture, Cover Photo, Contact Number, and official website.

Consumers nowadays want to know EVERYTHING about what you offer before they buy, so it’s best to have a link to your website so your potential customer can view your menu beforehand and get a better feel of what you have to offer.

It also helps that they know your operating hours and contact details.

Here’s a look at Chili’s Philippines Instagram Account:

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Nice looking posts, and as you can see up top, they have a link back to their website.

On Instagram, the Bio / Profile Description is the only place where you can place a link, so it’s a must to have a link back to your website in that section.

Once you’ve fixed up your Social Media Accounts, you can now post updates, and engage with your followers.

It doesn’t matter if you have 30 followers or 30,000; answering questions and providing valuable updates to your followers will go a long way.

Make sure you are posting good quality content on your Social Media pages. Invest on creating nice visuals as it has been proven that posts with images convert higher on Social Media than ones without. Humans are naturally visual creatures, so take advantage of that.

But of course, we did tell you at the start of this post that this guide will allow you to grow your business in 2016 without having to spend. Yet producing great social media posts with nice visuals will require hiring a Graphic Designer…

Not quite!

Thanks to Canva, you don’t need elite photoshop skills or a Graphic Designer on your payroll to produce high quality and visually appealing images.

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Canva in action.

As you can see in the image above, there are lots of free templates to choose from. You can also upload your own image, and add your own caption with tons of fonts to choose from.

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Here’s me adding a caption to an image I uploaded. It’s simple and easy, you can do it in less than 5 minutes!

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And the best part is that all of that is 100% FREE. Canva does offer a paid business version if you want to take things up a notch, so do check out their website for more details.

Now that you have your Social Media Accounts ready, and an awesome tool to do your visuals, now what?

Next step would be to post consistently, and keep growing your following. A good way to do this is to cross-promote your other Social Media profiles.

Here’s how Philippine fashion retail giant Penshoppe does it:

On Facebook:

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and Twitter:

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The brand is consistently cross-promoting their Social Media profiles which allows them to target and market to different kind of consumers. Do the same and you will be able to grow your fanbase faster.

Pro-Tip: Eventually, as you continue to post, you’ll be able to see when your customers are most active on Social Media. By using Facebook and Twitter’s in-house analytics system and your own experiments and tests, you’ll be able to maximize the reach of your posts even without spending on Social Media ads!

What’s the ROI?

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So what’s the ROI of Social Media Marketing?

While there’s no concrete answer to that, it’s not a secret that consumers love to do background checks before they even spend a single peso on your product.

This means that interested customers will be checking your website, Facebook, Instagram, and maybe even your Twitter account. And whatever impression they get from your online presence will dictate whether they want to buy from you.

So you may not be able to circle in a concrete number in terms of ROI, but social media marketing is crucial to growing your business.

You can literally gain customers or lose them just because of your online / social media presence. 

By taking these important measures, you can grow your restaurant or retail business in the Philippines this 2016 easily. Now start opening your accounts and get to work! 🙂

P.S. Watch out for our upcoming post on how you can use Zomato to market and drive customers to your restaurant in the Philippines.

Top 5 Dim Sum Restaurants in Singapore

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We love our dim sums and just can’t get enough of it. There are plenty of dim sum restaurants in Singapore – ranging from the hawker center style setting, to the Michelin star outlet.

In this post we bring to you, in no particular order, our Top 5 Dim Sum Choices in Singapore:

Tim Ho Wan

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(Credits to www.ladyironchef.com for the photo)

This Hong Kong based franchise’s char siew buns (BBQ pork buns) are to die for. While technically the original Hong Kong outlet was awarded a Michelin star, the Singaporean outlets live up to the name, as proved by the long waiting lines during lunch and dinner.

Perhaps the most affordable Michelin star restaurant chain, Tim Ho Wan serves a limited menu that covers the must-try dishes that any dim sum restaurant should have.

Pro-tip: For a quick and delicious THW experience, you could take-away the char siew buns for $4.50 for three pieces. Some BBQ pork buns while watching TV on your new Netflix account? Couldn’t ask for more….

Victor’s Kitchen

From the Michelin star restaurant to the hawker styled superstar: Victor’s Kitchen has featured in newspapers for years as one of Singapore’s best dim sum restaurants. The little restaurant is tucked away in Sunshine Plaza on Bencoolen Street but the waiting time during lunch hours can go up to an hour long.

Perhaps the best time to visit this place is around 3pm. The golden salted egg yolk lava bun wins hands down as the best dish on the menu.

Hua Ting Restaurant

Hua Ting is another favourite restaurant in Singapore. Reservations typically need to be made two days in advance. The baked mango with chicken tart is a popular dish along with the salted egg yolk lave buns. Hua Ting is slightly more expensive than Tim Ho Wan and Victor’s Kitchen, but certainly makes up for it with flavour.

Yi Dian Xin

Since we’ve covered salted egg yolks pretty comprehensively, let’s talk about some of the other popular dim sum dishes that Yi Dian Xin can boast about. The Xiao Long Bau (dim sum filled with soup) for $3 is worth a try for its delicious soup. Yi Dian Xin is an affordable option that give you value for money when it comes to taste

Peach Garden

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(Credits to www.tripadvisor.com for this photo)

Peach Garden is a great place for family dinners or business lunches. There are many outlets around Singapore. The restaurant is not traditionally Chinese, but a mix of Cantonese and Thai, which makes it a unique option in our list. Aside from great dim sums, Peach Garden also serves a delicious carrot cake in XO sauce. The high tea dim sum buffet is a must.


 

The best dim sum in the city is not restricted to a hawker center or a fancy restaurant. You can find a setting that tickles your fancy and you are sure to find great food that comes along with it.

Watch out for more Top 5 Suggestions from PayrollHero. We would love to hear more about where you get your dim sum fix!

9 Ways to Promote Your Restaurant in the Philippines 2016 Edition

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Promoting and growing a restaurant business is easier said than done.

On top of the day-to-day operations of running a restaurant, the actual marketing and getting the word out is also a crucial part of growing the business.

PayrollHero understands the challenges and pain points of restaurant owners. Managing an entire restaurant and keeping not just customers, but also employees, is a lot of work to do. So we’re doing our best to help out and give something back for restaurant owners in the Philippines.

We’ve prepared an infographic on how to promote your restaurant in the Philippines. It’s easy to do, and most importantly, you can take action today!

9 Ways to Promote Your Restaurant in the Philippines

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These tips may be just what you need to put your restaurant over the top this 2016.

If you’re a restaurant owner in the Philippines, you can share this with your marketing team or do the dirty work yourself. Eventually, your marketing efforts will pay off and you’ll see an increase in foot traffic to your restaurant.

BONUS: Here’s one restaurant in the Philippines who is nailing it on Social Media. Try and implement the same things to your business and sooner or later you’ll see results.

Keep it locked in on our blog as we offer more and more business tips for your growing your restaurant in 2016. So if you still haven’t, sign up below to be part of our weekly newsletter to get awesome updates delivered straight to your inbox!

If you want to chat about how else you can improve your restaurant processes, such as your HR and payroll, feel free to get in touch with us here: www.payrollhero.ph