Wage %

Region Wage Percent – Actual vs Plan

In Quarter 4 of 2015, I was in charge of distributing payroll budgets and hours to the NE region as well as

keeping track of the region’s payroll. What I learned was that as a whole, the region was over spending in almost

all six districts in regards to wage %, but underspending in hours budgets. It was becoming increasingly clear that

the budgets being allocated by the company where not enough to operate on and were causing managers to have

more of a reactive planning mentality rather than a proactive strategic one. The bigger stores were finding

themselves under-staffed for the holiday floor moves, the mass transfers, the holiday trainings and even for the

Black Friday holiday weekend. Instead of planning ahead to a proper budget, managers and associates were being

forced to work overtime to execute the needs of the operation, therefore costing more to the bottom line than

had they been budgeted properly from the start.

Due to the fact that the lump sum of wage dollars given was less than that of LY, even though sales,

workloads and new store openings had increased, I found that I was going to have a hard time controlling budgets

in December. The company was also expecting a .5% decrease in wage percent regardless of the above

mentioned. Below you will find the actual vs budget wage tracker for October and November. You will notice that

each district is overspent in actual payroll %. Sales plans were set at 7% to 20% increases over LY and company

allocated payroll budgets were set a .5% decrease.

YTD Profit and Loss

Another project I was able to work on this semester was putting together the profit and loss statements

for the two largest districts in the region. This was an eye opening and extremely valuable skill for me to hone in

on as managing and speaking to a P&L is a requirement in business. What I learned was to manage it two very

different ends of the spectrum. In the first market, stability,...