While employees work throughout the work week, you may need to round their time punches to the nearest few minutes or a specific time, such as to the nearest 15 minutes for easier payroll calculations or to establish when a location can "begin" working. These roundings can be based on an employee's shift, their work location, or in general.
After a time record has been rounded, the new rounded time record will be permanent. Disabling any of the "Rounding" policies will not revert a time record to its original time. If you were to change the time rounding settings after a time record has already been rounded, it will not look at the original time and will only look at the newly rounded time for any further roundings.
Adjusting a Policy Can Affect Current/Previous Pay Periods
When making changes to a policy group, be aware of how it can affect the time cards for the current and previous pay periods. After adjusting a policy, the current pay period for employees assigned to the policy group will be automatically recalculated to reflect the new policy changes such as different overtime calculations or time roundings.
Previous pay periods will be unaffected by policy changes, except when doing any of the following:
- Time card modifications such as new records synced from ExakTime Mobile/JobClocks, time record edits, or deletions will recalculate the time card based on the current policies.
- Manually recalculating a time card from a previous pay period.
Consult Legal Counsel
If you are unsure of the legality of any of these Policies or what is expected for your region/union, it is advised to consult with your legal counsel before enabling any of them.
Current Policy Options
There are currently three sets of rounding policies that can affect an employee's time card:
- Shifts - Shift policies will apply to a time record if the time record falls into a shift or if a time record is labeled as belonging to a shift.
- Locations - Location policies will apply to a time record with the location if they would not be affected by a shift policy.
- Employees - Employee policies will apply to all of an employee's records if they are not already affected by a shift or location policy.
If you are unfamiliar with where these policies are located, you can expand any of the sections below for navigation steps to the respect policy:
- Go to Manage and click on Policies from the top menu bar.
- Select a policy group.
- The policy options can be found towards the right.
- Go to Manage, then click on Locations.
- Click the pencil icon to the left of any location.
- Within the location details, click Policies.
- The policies will be listed for the location.
- Go to Manage and click on Policies.
- Click on the Shifts tab.
- Select an existing Shift or create a new Shift.
- Click the Policies tab.
- The policies will be listed for the shift.
Interactions between Multiple Rounding Options
If multiple In/Out Roundings and Time Range Roundings are enabled from various sources such as Shift, Location, and Employee policies, there is an order of when and how they are applied.
- The In/Out Roundings will occur first in the order of the shift, location, and then the employee, depending on what is enabled.
- After In/Out Rounding, the Time Range Rounding will apply in the same order of the shift, location, and then the employee, depending on what is enabled.
- If a rounding has been applied to a time punch/record, the subsequent version of the same rounding will not apply. For example, if the Location In/Out Rounding is applied to a time record, the Employee In/Out Rounding will not apply as the Location is higher in the priority.
The order of policy application has been listed below with Shift In/Out rounding applying first:
- Shift In/Out Rounding
- Location In/Out Rounding
- Employee In/Out Rounding
- Shift Time Range Rounding
- Location Time Range Rounding
- Employee Time Range Rounding
Types of Rounding Options
There are currently two types of roundings that can be applied to a time card at the shift, location, or employee level:
In/Out Roundings
In/Out roundings will round an employee's punches to the nearest set of minutes. It can also be set up to only apply to the first and last punch of the day with a threshold of how long their workday generally is. A common setting is to the nearest 15 minutes.
How this rounding setting works is that an employee's clock in would first go to the nearest minute (an employee clocking in at 7:06 and 38 seconds would round to 7:07 AM), then it would round to the nearest specified minutes.
For example with a 'nearest 15-minute rounding', If an employee's clock in/out is at 7:07 AM, it would round to 7:00 AM. If an employee's clock in is at 7:08 AM, it would round to 7:15 AM.
Time Range Rounding
Time range rounding is intended for when employees' start/end time cannot occur before or exceed a certain time frame.
After specifying the time range for a punch in or out, any punches that occur during the time window are rounded to the specific time you want. This allows the employee to clock in early before their day starts if they get there early, but do not receive the extra time.
It is best to let your employees know that if they were to clocking in/out within a certain time range, they are not expected to be paid for the time.
In the example below, if there is a clock in between 7 AM and 8 AM, the time punches are adjusted to 8 AM instead.