Shift Details

1Purpose #

• Defines a working-day pattern that employees are assigned to; attendance processing compares each day's punches against it.
• Decides what a day earns — the full-day, half-day and overtime attendance types — and the rules that qualify them.
• It does not assign anyone to a shift; that is done in shift assignment. It also does not hold the holiday list, which is the Holiday Settings master.

2Your first shift, step by step #

Before starting here, make sure attendance types exist (the Attendance Type master) — a shift's whole point is to award them, and the pickers on this page read from that master.

Suppose the office works 9:00 to 17:30 with a half-hour lunch, Sundays off. The page opens in Add mode.

1. Type General Shift into Shift Name and GEN into Short Name . Both are required, both must be unique — the short name is what compact attendance registers print.
2. Under Working Hours, set In Time 09:00 and Out Time 17:30, then Break Out 13:00 and Break In 13:30 (out to lunch, back from lunch). Watch Min Full-day Hrs : the page works it out as you type — 8 hours here — and half-day as half of that. Type over either if your rule differs.
3. Give In Grace and Out Grace in minutes — say 10 and 10 — meaning a 9:08 arrival is not yet late.
4. Leave Week Off as Sunday , or name another day.
5. Under Attendance Types Awarded, pick what a completed day earns — typically Present for full day, Half Day for half, and an OT type for overtime.
6. Punch windows can wait on day one: they matter once a punching device feeds the system, and an empty window simply means no restriction yet.
7. If overtime applies, switch OT eligible ON and set its window and conversion hours; otherwise skip the whole section.
8. Rules can also wait: Add Rule is for advanced per-attendance-type formulas, and most shifts run without any.
9. Press Save (F5) and confirm. The shift and any rules are saved together — if anything is wrong, nothing is half-saved.

A night shift is the same except Crosses midnight must be ON, so a 21:00 in and a 05:30 out are understood as one night's work rather than nonsense.

Employees meet this shift through shift assignment; nothing on this page assigns anyone. When a shift is being replaced, switch Is Inactive ON rather than deleting it — attendance already processed against it keeps its history, and the shift just stops appearing in pickers.

3How to use it #

1. Find (F2) lists every shift; pick one to load it with its rules.
2. Add (F3) starts a new shift with the cursor in Shift Name.
3. Fill Working Hours first — full-day and half-day hours are calculated as you type and can then be overridden.
4. Add Rule appends an attendance-type rule; Remove marks one for deletion on the next save.
5. Save (F5) commits the shift and its rules together in one transaction.

4Field details #

• Shift Name and Short Name are both required and both must be unique — the short name is what compact attendance reports print.
• In / Out Time bound the working day; Break Out / Break In is the unpaid break deducted from it.
• In / Out Grace are minutes of lateness or early leaving forgiven before a mark is raised.
• Min Full-day / Half-day Hrs decide what a day earns. They are derived from the times and grace minutes, and stay editable.
• Week Off names the weekly non-working day for this shift. It is per shift, which is why it is not in the holiday calendar. A NEW shift pre-fills it from the payroll Week-Off Days setting (first day) while the Default Week Off for new shifts setting is on; otherwise it starts as Sunday. Either way it stays editable.
• In/Out Marking is how punches arrive — device based by default.
• Crosses midnight marks a shift whose out punch falls on the next calendar day; without it those punches cannot be paired.
• Punch Windows are the spans in which a punch counts as that event. Device Open / Close bound when the reader accepts punches at all.
• Overtime : OT eligible turns it on, the OT window and times bound it, the conversion-hours fields set how attendance converts to OT, and the two max-hours fields cap week-off and holiday work.
• Is Inactive retires a shift — it stops appearing in pickers while its history is kept.
• Rules : each row names an attendance type, how its value is worked out, and the condition under which it applies.

5Shortcut keys #

• F2 Find · F3 Add · F4 Modify · F5 Save · Esc Cancel.
• Enter moves to the next field; from the last one it lands on Save.
• Keys belong to the focused copy of the page; a dialog's own keys win while it is open.

6Why is a pick-list empty? #

• In/Out Marking offers the usual capture methods and also accepts a typed value.

7Rules and integrity #

• Two unique names. Shift Name is the table's primary key and Short Name has its own unique index, so both are checked before saving and again on the server.
• Time sanity. Out Time can never equal In Time; the break (Break Out to Break In) must lie inside the shift's In-Out window; and Min Half-day Hrs can not exceed the shift's In-to-Out span. All three are overnight-aware — an overnight shift is measured across midnight — and all three are checked on the page first and repeated by the server with the same message.
• Payroll settings add shift rules (Payroll Settings page, Attendance & Shift group): Allow overnight shifts — when off, an Out Time not later than the In Time (and the Crosses-midnight switch) is refused; when on, an earlier Out Time simply means the shift crosses midnight. Maximum shift duration caps the In-to-Out span in hours (0 = no cap). Warn on duplicate shift timings makes saving a shift whose In/Out equal an existing shift's ask for confirmation — a warning, not a block. These rows appear after the shift-rules settings seed script has run; a database without them behaves as before (everything allowed, no warnings).
• Every rule row must name an attendance type; blank rows are refused rather than silently dropped.
• Rules save row by row. Editing a shift does not delete and re-insert its rules, so their identities survive — anything referencing a rule stays valid.
• The shift and its rules save in one transaction : if a rule fails, the shift changes roll back with it.
• Deleting a shift removes its rules too. Attendance already processed against it keeps the result it was given, so retire a shift with Is Inactive rather than deleting it once it has history.
• Permission triggers record who created and changed each row, and a delete-cleanup trigger removes linked documents.