Approving hours and timesheets

How Paddl works out what was worked, what the flags mean, and how to correct a line.

3 min readUpdated Today
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Under Rota > Timesheets you get a pay period per person per site, built overnight by comparing the shifts you published against the times people actually clocked in and out.

How a period is put together

Every night Paddl rebuilds each open period from scratch. Each line is one of three things:

  • A shift with clock-ins against it, which is the ordinary case and the only one with a variance.

  • A shift nobody clocked in for, which shows as a no-show and pays nothing until you say otherwise.

  • A clock-in with no shift, which is unrostered work. Common, legitimate, and paid.

Your period length comes from the site settings: weekly, fortnightly, four-weekly or monthly.

Breaks

If someone clocks out for their break and back in, the gap is the break they took. If they stay clocked in through it, which is what usually happens, the unpaid break on the shift is deducted anyway. Otherwise every shift would show a phantom hour of overtime and you would be paying for a break twice over.

The flags

Flag

What to do

No show

Nobody clocked in. Check what happened before approving zero.

Still clocked in

The clock-in never closed. The line is not finished.

Closed automatically

Paddl closed it at the rostered end plus half an hour, because nobody clocked out. Worth a look.

Over 12 hours

Almost always a forgotten clock-out rather than a real day.

Carried from a closed period

Work that arrived after its own period was locked, so it landed here instead.

Unrostered

They worked without a shift on the rota. Usually fine.

Location unverified

The clock-in had no location, or was away from the site.

Correcting a line

Press Adjust on any line and type the hours to pay. Type it as 7h 30m, 7:30 or 450. A reason is required, and that is on purpose: the reason is what tells the nightly rebuild the figure was typed by a person, and it is the record of why pay differs from what the clock said. Without it the correction would be recomputed away overnight.

Approving and locking

Approve when the period looks right. Editing a line afterwards reopens the period and clears the approval, so the name against it always belongs to whoever signed off the figures that are actually there.

Locking is the owner's call and comes after approval. A locked period is evidence: nothing rewrites it, the nightly rebuild leaves it alone, and a clock-in that arrives late lands in the next period with a flag rather than quietly reopening a signed-off week.

Nothing here is live. Reconciliation runs overnight, so a period still being worked shows the figures as at last night. Check-ins from today appear tomorrow morning.

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