Time & Attendance
Set up work shifts and assign employees
Define each shift's hours, grace period, break and working days, then assign employees so attendance, lateness and overtime are judged against the right schedule.
3 min readLast updated
In this article
A shift tells the system when an employee is expected to work. Every attendance day is graded against it: whether the employee was late, left early, worked a half day or stayed for overtime, and whether a day without a punch counts as an absence or as a day off. Set up your shifts and assign every employee before the payroll period starts.
Before you start
Decide the company-wide fallbacks in HR Settings: the standard start time, working hours per day, weekend days and the late arrival tolerance. Employees with no shift are graded with these values. See HR settings.
Create a shift
Open People › Time & Attendance › Shift Management and select New Shift.
Enter the Name, and optionally the Name (Arabic).
Enter a Code. Each shift needs its own code.
Set the Start Time and End Time.
Set the Grace Period (min), from 0 to 60. Leave it empty to use the late arrival tolerance from HR Settings.
Set the Break Duration (min), from 0 to 120. The break is subtracted from the hours worked every day.
Tick the Working Days. Select at least one day.
Tick Night Shift for a shift that crosses midnight, add a Description if you need one, keep Active on and select Save.
The Hours column shows the scheduled hours: the time from start to end minus the break. When the end time is earlier than the start time, for example 22:00 to 06:00, the system reads the end as the next morning. It does this for every shift, so overnight hours are always calculated correctly. The Night Shift mark labels the shift as a night shift in the list.
Assign employees to a shift
In the shift's row, open the actions menu and select Assign Employees.
Select the employees and confirm with Assign Employees.
To take someone off the shift, find them under Currently assigned and select Remove from shift.
An employee belongs to one shift at a time. Assigning an employee to a new shift moves them off their previous one.
How the shift is used
Lateness. An employee is late when the clock-in is after the start time plus the grace period. The minutes are counted from the end of the grace period: with a 10-minute grace, arriving 13 minutes after the start is 3 minutes late.
Early departure. Leaving before the end time records the minutes missed.
Half day. A day is a half day when the hours worked, plus any approved hourly permission, are less than half of the scheduled hours.
Working days. A day outside the working days is a day off. No punch on that day is not an absence. Hours worked on a day off are recorded as rest-day hours and paid at the rest-day rate (see overtime).
Approved leave. Only the days inside the shift's working days are written to the attendance register as on leave.
What happens next
New attendance days use the employee's current shift. Days already recorded keep the shift they were graded with, so changing a shift's times or moving an employee does not rewrite past days.
Common questions
Can I delete a shift? Only while no attendance day refers to it. Otherwise the system answers that a shift with attendance records cannot be deleted. Turn Active off instead and move its employees to another shift.
What about employees with no shift? They are graded with the standard start time and working hours per day from HR Settings, and their days off are the company weekend days.