Advanced shifts, rosters and overtime rules for operations teams

Operations teams where people work shifts rather than a standard day: retail, manufacturing, hospitality, support desks, clinics, anywhere there is a roster on a wall and a rotation that has to be fair. The buyer is usually an operations or plant manager rather than HR. Offices where everyone works the same hours do not need it, because the free core already handles a two-tap punch, timesheets and approvals for them. The signal that you need it is that somebody is currently maintaining next week’s roster in a spreadsheet and arguing about overtime after the fact.

No. Two-tap punch in and out, the attendance month view, timesheets and approvals are part of the free core, on every plan including the free one, and are not affected by whether this module is enabled. This module adds the layer above that: shift definitions, roster scheduling, rotation patterns, swap requests and overtime rules, and it makes the day status shift-aware. If you turn it off, the core punch keeps behaving exactly as it did before.

No. Biometric devices, kiosk mode and geo-fencing are not shipped. They are a deferred surface with a stated trigger rather than a v1 feature, and none of them exists today. The module handles shifts, rosters, rotations, swaps and overtime in software, and punching happens in the app, including on a phone. If your workforce needs terminals at the door, that boundary is worth knowing before you buy rather than after, which is why it is written here rather than left out.

A paid plan first, because paid modules cannot be enabled on the free plan. Then your work locations need their timezones set in the core, because shift boundaries are computed from them. The module’s own setup is the shift definitions: timings, breaks, grace periods, half-day thresholds and overnight crossover behaviour, then rotation patterns, then the overtime rules and what approved overtime turns into. Definitions are versioned, and a roster pins the version it was built from, so a later edit never rewrites a past week. The first roster is the slow one; after that you are copying patterns.

It does no covert tracking of any kind: every capture mechanism is disclosed to the employee inside the product, and attendance exception flags are visible to the person they describe rather than kept as a hidden score. It does not replace the core punch, which stays free on every plan. It computes no money: approved overtime becomes compensatory time off or a payroll input, and what an hour of overtime is worth is your payroll partner’s arithmetic, not ours. And biometric devices, kiosk mode and geo-fencing are not built.

It extends the core’s attendance day-status model rather than forking it, so a day’s status still comes from one place with one set of precedence rules and the core punch is unchanged. It reads the core leave calendar, so approved leave suppresses a shift expectation instead of showing as an absence, and swap and overtime approvals run through the core workflow engine. Compensatory time off produced by approved overtime lands in the core leave ledger as a balance the employee can then apply for. It requires no other paid module. Where the Payroll module is enabled, overtime outcomes are one of the inputs compiled and handed to your payroll partner, and the core’s period locking governs everything payroll-facing so a locked period cannot be quietly rewritten.

Shifts, rosters, rotations, swaps and overtime rules stop being reachable, and billing stops at the end of the current period rather than on the day. The core attendance everyone uses carries on exactly as before, which is the whole point of keeping the punch in the free core: turning this off downgrades your scheduling, it does not stop people recording attendance. Your shift and roster data is not deleted; it is retained on a schedule and restored if you re-enable within that window. A full workspace export includes module data whether or not the module is currently enabled.