The following settings can be used to configure your time tracking module and can be accessed via:

Administration -> Company -> Settings -> Time tracking settings

Note: Except where specified, all of the durations/thresholds etc. on this screen are recorded in minutes.

Breaks:

Minimum breaks duration – The minimum duration of breaks which will automatically be deducted from every employee’s working day once they have met the day length threshold.

Breaks day length threshold – The time which an employee must have worked before the minimum break’s duration Is applied.

For example, if employees must take a 30-minute break after working 4 hours, set the “Minimum breaks duration to “30” and the breaks day length threshold to 240 (Four Hours). 


Thresholds:

Clock in / out threshold – A period of leeway, or grace period, around the times which the employees are due to clock in and out.

For example, if employees were due to start and 9am but you were happy for them to clock in at 9:10, you may apply a 15-minute threshold; if employees did clock in at 9:10 their clock in time would be counted as 9am for the purposes of the calculation of the duration of the time worked.

Exceptions:

Exception rules – Determines how any exceptions are treated in relation to your clock in / out threshold.

For example, if your threshold is set to 10 minutes and the employee was due to start at 09:00. 

Only outside of threshold = If an employee clocks in at 09:13 (three minutes outside of the threshold) then this would cause an exception but if they clocked in at 09.09 this would not.

All = All time past the scheduled time (regardless of threshold) is treated as an exception hence could trigger an email as described below, for example.

Email on exception – If set to yes, any time exceptions will cause a system email to be sent to the employee's manager notifying them of this. 

Allow clearing of exceptions - when an exception is recorded against a clock record, this exception stays on the record even when the cause has been addressed. If you set this option to YES then the manager and above will be able to remove the exception flag once they are happy that the cause has been fixed and it will no longer show as having an exception.

Working Patterns:

Link to working patterns – Links the Time tracking module to the variable working patterns module allowing you to compare the amount of time that the employee “should” be working alongside their “Actual” time through time tracking and show both in the time tracking module.

Working patterns match threshold - Determines a threshold in minutes during which the system will match a working pattern entry against a time tracking entry.  This is useful for employees on split shifts who may have more than one time tracking entry in a single day.  For example, if set to 60 minutes, the system will look for a working pattern entry within 60 minutes of the time tracking entry and match accordingly.

Require working pattern match - when an employee clocks in, we will use the setting above in 'Working patterns match threshold' to try and find the relevant working pattern record to match the time record against so we can therefore get the expected start, end and duration. If we do not find a working pattern record then this does not, by default, cause an exception to be raised. If you wish not finding a matching working pattern record to generate an exception, you can set this to YES.

Require site on rota record - If set to YES, when adding a rota you will be required to specify a site per rota entry.  This will default to the chosen employee's site so will only need to be changed if different to the default.

Rules:

Allow clock in early - Determines if employees are able to clock in before their scheduled start time and for this time to be counted for the purposes of calculating the duration.

Allow clock out late – Determines if employees are able to clock out after their scheduled finish time and for this time to be counted for the purposes of calculating the duration.

Allow clock out post-midnight – Determines if the time tracking record can pass midnight.

For example, if an employee’s shift starts at 10pm and finishes at 2am the following morning, the "allow clock out post-midnight" setting will need to be enabled. This is to prevent an error message, caused by the start time being before the end time.

Allow clock in exceptions – Determines if the employees are able to clock in if they have failed to clock out previously. If set to "no", the employee will get an error message and will need to have their prior record closed off (a user with appropriate access will need to add an end time) before they can clock in again.

Allow clock in when time off booked - Determines whether users can clock in even if they have timeoff booked for the current date.

General Settings:

Require approval?  - Determines if time tracking records require approval. This requires a custom workflow of type Timeoff - Approval to be setup for this purpose.  There are 3 options available:

• Yes - all records
  Approval will be required for all time tracking records added.
• Yes - records with exceptions only.
  Approval will be required only for time tracking records which generate exceptions.  Those which do not generate exceptions are automatically approved.
• No
  Approval will not be required for any time tracking records added.

Bulk approve - If you choose "Yes", managers and approvers will be able to bulk approve time tracking from the list of time tracking entries.  Please note, this means it is possible for them to approve time tracking entries without ever actually viewing them!

Prevent editing of clock in/out time - Prevents the editing of the clock in/out time for time tracking records.  The total duration can still be edited.

Mixed working patterns and rotas - This setting allows the use of both working patterns and rotas to determine if an employee is working on a given day.  As it is possible for a user to have both a standard working pattern which applies to any given week and also a working pattern or rota which applies to a specific week, we will use both to determine if the date is a working day.

For example, if an employee has a working pattern (or their company has a working pattern) that specifies that they are working Monday to Friday, but a rota which has them working Monday to Thursday this week, by default Friday would not be considered a working day.  Enabling this setting combines the two sources of data and results in Friday being considered a working day.

Use Geolocation for web clock in/out - This allows the use of Geolocation to record the location at which a clock in/out occurs.  This is dependent on the data available from the device used to clock in/out.  The user will be asked by their browser or operating system for permission to share location information and, if they decline, no location will be recorded.

Valid IP addresses – Restricts clock in access so that they can only be created if an employee is connected to an approved network; this removes the ability for employees to clock in remotely from an non-valid IP address such as a mobile device.  This field accepts a comma-separated list of IPv4 addresses.

Auto logout (hours) – If an employee fails to clock out, they will be clocked out "by default" after this number of hours.

Auto archive (days) – The number of days after which time tracking records will be automatically moved to archived.

Alert email - This setting is reserved for future use and currently has no effect.

Rotas:

Rota department access - By default, managers can only build rotas for those below them in their hierarchy using the same hierarchy rules as the rest of the system.  Setting this to YES will allow a manager to build rotas for anyone in the same department including those above them.

Calculation of duration from time tracking:

The settings above, when combined with the employee clock in/out times and scheduled working times can be used to work out the total duration of a time record.  When doing so a number of factors are taken into account.  In ALL cases the actual clock time in and clock time out will be the time recorded during clock in/out.

Below are eight different scenarios and how the various options impact the total time calculation.

Early clock in - no threshold allowed
If allowed to clock in early then paid time is set to actual clock in time.
If not allowed to clock in early then paid time is set to scheduled start time and this causes an exception to be raised.

Late clock in - no threshold allowed
Paid time is set to actual clock in time and this causes an exception to be raised.

Early clock out - no threshold allowed
Paid time is set to actual clock out time and this causes an exception to be raised.

Late clock out - no threshold allowed
If allowed to clock out late then paid time is set to actual clock out time.
If not allowed to clock out late then paid time is set to scheduled end time and this causes an exception to be raised.

Early clock in - threshold is set and clocked time is within the threshold
If allowed to clock in early then paid time is set to actual clock in time.
If not allowed to clock in early then paid time is set to scheduled start time - if exception rules are set to All exceptions then this will cause an exception to be raised.

Late clock in - threshold is set and clocked time is within the threshold
Paid time is set to scheduled start time  - if exception rules are set to All exceptions then this will cause an exception to be raised.

Early clock out - threshold is set and clocked time is within the threshold
Paid time is set to actual clock out time  - if exception rules are set to All exceptions then this will cause an exception to be raised.

Late clock out - threshold is set and clocked time is within the threshold
If allowed to clock out late then paid time is set to actual clock out time.
If not allowed to clock out late then paid time is set to scheduled end time  - if exception rules are set to All exceptions then this will cause an exception to be raised.

Email when clock in fails to occur:

When you have linked time tracking with working patterns and enabled "Email manager on exception", the system will send an automated email when an employee is scheduled to clock in but does not do so.

At 00 and 30 minutes past every hour, the system looks for all working pattern records where the employee was due to clock in during the previous hour - for example, at 0800 we would look for those who were due to clock in from 0700.

As it is possible that someone may have been due to clock in at 7.55, we only look for those records where they were not due to clock in the previous 15 minutes so the actual range is 0700 to 0745, to prevent a premature alert for those whose scheduled time is close to the time of the check.

We then look to see if that employee has clocked in in the previous one hour - if they have not then this will send an email to the employee manager.

For example, if the employee was due to clock in at 0730 and we check at 0800 and they have not yet clocked in that would cause an alert to be sent.

If they had clocked in at 0720 that would NOT send an alert as we would assume they clocked in early for their scheduled time - if, however, they had clocked in at 0645 which is more than 15 minutes before their start time we would ignore this and still send the alert.

This does mean that, in certain limited circumstances, a manager may get an alert where the employee has clocked in more than 15 minutes early telling them the employee has failed to clock in but this is unavoidable. The only solution to this is to ensure the rota / working pattern is always accurate.