Shifts allow you to set up periods of time for employees to better divide their workday and/or "bundle" up an employee's hours to properly calculate their overtime. It will also consolidate work spanning through midnight to go to the initial day worked.

Table of Contents

• Example Use of Shifts
• Enabling Shifts
• Permissions for Shifts
• Shift Pay Codes
• Creating a Shift
• Assigning a Shift to an Employee
• How it Appears on the Time Card

Example Use of Shifts

Shifts can be used to label an employee's hours to their respective shifts, "bundle" up an employee's hours, and help calculate an employee's hours for the day/week.

In the example below, we have an employee that has worked the day and night shifts on a single day.

• The time records that fall into the day shift and night shift have been labeled appropriately.
• The shift has "bundled" up the hours for the night shift so they are part of the initial day worked, instead of being separated into two different days for the days actually worked. This allows the employee's daily overtime to calculate as you would expect based on all the hours worked for their "work day".

For additional examples of shifts and how they can be used, you can refer to the following article.

Enabling Shifts

Enabling shifts is done from the Company Settings of your ExakTime Connect account.

• Go to Manage and click on Company Settings.

  

• Click on the Optional Features tab and enable Shifts.
  • Adjust the Off Clock Tolerance as needed. This allows employees to have gaps between time records so employees can clock out for unpaid time such as a break/lunch and Connect considers the separate time records to be part of the same shift.
  • For example, an employee is working the day shift but will be working late and their time would overlap with the night shift. They clock out for 45 minutes for a long lunch and clock back in to continue work. If the Off Clock Tolerance is set to 2 hours, ExakTime Connect will consider the before-lunch time and after-lunch time to be part of the same shift. If the Off Clock Tolerance is set to 30 minutes, the before-lunch time and after-lunch time can be considered different shifts, such as a day shift and a night shift.

  

  

• Click Save.

Permissions for Shifts

Administrators will have access to Shifts by default. Other employees can be given permission to Shifts via Security Roles. 

• Go to Manage and click on Security Roles.

  

• Click the ExakTime Connect tab.

  

• Click on the role that should have access or create a new role. 

  

• In the permissions to the right, enable the settings for policies and/or shift pay codes.

  

• Click Save at the bottom. 

Shift Pay Codes

Shift pay codes allow you to associate a specific type of pay code with a shift and also note if the pay code could be paid or not. For example, if an employee is normally scheduled with a day shift, but is asked to work a night shift, you can set up a premium shift pay code.

Shift pay codes are primarily used for reference in ExakTime Connect and do not affect AccountLinx when exporting records. 

• Go to Manage and click on Shift Pay Codes.

  

• You will see a list of previously created pay codes if any.

  

• Click Add Shift Pay Code.

  

• Enter the name for the Shift Pay Code. You can also enter an ID, enter a description, and if the pay code should be paid or not.

  

Creating a Shift

Shifts are set up by dictating the time frame for the start and end of a shift, what pay code the shift should be associated with, and if the shift should apply to employees with other default shifts. Overtime and time roundings can also be set up for anyone that qualifies for the shift.

Setting Up Shift

• Go to Manage and click on Policies.

  

• Click on the Shifts tab.

  

• Click Add Shift.

  

• Enter the required information to set up your shift parameters.

  

  • Give the shift a name (i.e. Day Shift, Night Shift, Swing Shift, etc.)

    

  • Specify when the shift starts & ends. A grace period must be set up to allow punches before or after the start/end time to be considered part of the shift.
    • For example, the start of the Day shift is 8 AM and has a grace period of 30 minutes. If the employee clocks in any time between 7:30 AM and 8:30 AM, they are considered to be part of that shift.

    

  • (Optional) Specify the pay code for the shift.

    

  • Use the provided checkboxes to include employees that have a specific Default Shift. By default, a shift will only apply to employees that have the shift set as their default. If you select "None", then any employees without a specified shift can have the current shift apply to them.

    • For example, if you are setting up a Graveyard shift and your Day shift employees may also work the Graveyard shift, then you would select the Day shift so any employees that have a default Day shift can also have the Graveyard shift policy applied to them.

    

Set Up Shift Policies

Shift policies are used like Employee and Location policies to help calculate an employee's overtime and time roundings based on what shift an employee worked. 

• Click the Policies tab for the selected shift. 

  

• Enable and adjust the available overtime and rounding settings. If you are unfamiliar with overtime/rounding policies, you can refer to the Shift Policies article.

  

• Press Save at the bottom when finished. 

Assigning a Default Shift to an Employee

Assigning a Shift to an employee as their Default Shift will allow ExakTime to label a time record as the respective shift if it meets the shift requirements.

If an employee does not have a "Default Shift", then the Shift will not apply to their time records, even if their time record is within the threshold, unless if the Shift is set to apply to employees that do not have any default shift.

• Go to Manage and click Employees.

  

• Click the pencil icon towards the left of an employee entry.

  

• Specify the "Default Shift" from the drop-down menu of the Employment Information section.

  

• Click Save at the bottom when finished. 

How it Appears on the Time Card

As employees clock in/out and/or when time is manually added to the time card, the appropriate shift and pay code will be automatically associated with the time record(s) in their respective columns, if the time records are eligible for the Shift. The shift and pay code can be manually adjusted if needed and override the shift/pay code that the system automatically assigned. 

Please Note

• When adjusting the time records, please be aware of the dates during your adjustments as records for the following day can appear on the initial day.
• If you have an auto-lunch policy enabled for your employees, the auto-lunch will view each shift as a separate work session. For example, if the employee works a day shift and a night shift, they can receive an auto-lunch for the day shift and one for the night shift.
• If the Shift and Pay Code columns need to be added or removed, you can use the column manager button and adjust them as needed.