Pictured above: Subway Development Agent and franchisee, James Fleck.

Subway franchisee James Fleck is already seeing cost savings amounting to thousands of pounds a month thanks to new technology from retail IT solutions provider PXtech.

James, who has two outlets in Evesham, has recently implemented PXtech's Plan & Pay, software specifically designed to manage labour activity and costs while freeing-up significant administration time.

Plan & Pay provides the tools to schedule staff rotas, and when it comes to working out the payroll, offers automatic reconciliation which compares staff clock-in times with the rotas to make sure staff are only paid for when they are there, and when the business owner wants them to be working.

James is also the Subway Development Agent overseeing 60 stores for the Five Counties territory, and has reported a saving of £2,400 each month, meaning that he will save more than £28,000 over a financial year.

He commented: "By letting you see how to optimise your labour cost when you build the schedule, and by automatically verifying the clock-in times against the schedule, it enables you to manage outgoings effectively across a number of outlets.

"As a multi-store owner, Plan & Pay has been instrumental in enabling us to standardise our operations, and has made it easier for us to keep control of the management of the businesses whilst saving us a lot of valuable time and money on costly payroll administration and staff overtime."

Based in Derby, PXtech specialises in delivering integrated management information systems across a number of business sectors.

Plan & Pay can be integrated into one or multiple stores using the PXportal, a system which collates data in realtime from EPoS systems and displays it in a workable format accessible by the user from any computer, anywhere in the world.

PXtech managing director, Richard Dorf said: "We continually strive to assess the requirements of our client base, so that we are able to develop software to meet their specific needs as and when.

"In this case, we believe that we have produced a product which recognises the importance of planning and time management when running a successful business, and aims to provide a cost-effective long-term solution which will not interfere with current practices or infrastructure."