Having managed three coffee shops, Le Quoc Hung, 31, residing in Hai Chau District understands better than anyone about the difficulties of operating an F&B (food and beverage). Therefore, he and his colleagues have jointly developed and put into operation a service job management application called Bestaff.

The Bestaff app makes it easier to manage service industry jobs. Employees of Tekup Solutions Co., Ltd. are seem working at the office. Photo: M.QUE

Having opened the first coffee shop in 2011, Hung, Bestaff Project Team Leader of Tekup Solutions Co., Ltd. in Hai Chau District, has experience in operating three cafes. Several years go, what always worried him is that manual human resource management was very difficult and time –consuming.

Specifically, the cafe staff were mostly students, so the work schedule was not fixed and the arrangement of shifts takes a long time because it was necessary to synthesize the busy or free time of many staffer.

In addition, staff who are students often had unexpected problems such as studying overtime and personal affairs.

In addition, the timekeeping for employees, based only on the machines available on the market at that time, did not meet the high-level authentication requirements, and was only based on fingerprints.

Another problem in human resource management was the storage of records and papers that are easily lost or damaged.

Therefore, in January 2020, Mr. Hung and his associates built up software to solve the above-mentioned inadequacies. In May 2021, Bestaff, an automatic timekeeping and automatic shift division was launched on the market in both smartphone and website platforms.

Accordingly, Bestaff divides two functions for owners /managers and employees. First, the store owner goes to Bestaff's website to create initial information about the store and employees. After the installation is complete, invitations will be sent to the employee's email to download the Bestaff app for use.

When employees start using the app, they will choose the time frames they can go to work next week. The manager only needs to press “automatic shift division” on the management page and a full work schedule applied to all employees at each work position will be released immediately.

If an employee is unusually busy, he/she can propose a replacement right on Bestaff.

If the employee agrees, when ‘the substitute’ comes to the shop to work and the app will automatically timekeeper for this person without complicated procedures.

In addition, employees can apply for leave, view announcements, salaries, and bonuses right on the app based on the amount of work they go to work, rather than waiting until the end of the month to know.

As for the manager, most of the difficulties of previous manual work have been solved. Specifically, when the timekeeper is made on the phone, the application will locate the coordinates to identify whether or not the employee is present at the store, and the app also requires the employee to take a photo of "check-in" as needed.

Every time an employee finishes timekeeping, the employee's salary will be calculated immediately, not waiting until the end of the month to know the exact salary.

The salary calculation can be set so specifically that the same job position as a service worker or a receptionist, but it can be divided into many different salary levels depending on the installation made by the store manager. 

In addition, the working process and employee profile data are also stored by the application.

In general, Bestaff quite well meets the requirements of intensive management for service sectors such as F&B industry and accommodation establishments so shortly after its debut. This app has offered services on trial basis to more than 100 F&B stores, establishments located in Ha Noi, Ho Chi Minh City and Da Nang.

Hung said, Bestaff is completely free for customers to use during its ongoing trial operation through which, the app’s operation team can receive customers' constructive suggestions and feedback to improve this product.

It is expected that, in June 2022, Bestaff will be officially commercialised with many upgraded features such as faster operating software and internal communication features to each small group.

In particular, in the near future, Bestaff will cooperate with a unit in the camera field to build a face recognition attendance feature.

Reporting by MAI QUE – Translating by A.THU