How Do I Control My Flower Shop Payroll?

Along with COGS, Payroll represents the biggest risk to your florist profitability. We pay our team biweekly and score our payroll against our revenue every two weeks so we have the data on hand to make swift decisions. While some floral industry "experts" will throw out a blanket number (think "30% of sales") we dive a little deeper into the process to identify what part of the team needs support.

If you're working off of the blanket  method and your payroll comes to 35% you might make a kneejerk reaction to reduce the hours of one of you delivery drivers. What if your delivery department is already understaffed? What if you have too many in sales on the phones? You don't have the information to make an informed decision!

We break each store into three categories:

1. Designers/Production 

2. Customer Service Reps/Sales

3. Drivers/Delivery

We've included a few recent payscores from our stores in an excel format below so you can download them and input your own data. One note to keep in mind - you need a detailed sales report to complete this task. Your driver pay should only be scored against your delivery income. Your designer pay should only be scored against your production revenue (i.e. - do not include wire out revenue). Your sales pay should only be scored against the sales they produce (we do include wire income in this since they have to process the order and communicate with the sending florist).

With this detailed data we now know which department is heavy (or light!) and can make neccesary changes to the schedule. If this feels like a daunting task just click the red button below to ask for help!