How to Set Up Shifts and Overtime for Attendance

Attendance software cannot decide your rules. It can only apply them. If shift timings are vague, overtime has no approval and nobody knows what counts as late, the best machine will simply record the confusion faster. This guide walks through the decisions to make on paper first, so the configuration takes an hour instead of a month of disagreements.

Step 1: Define each shift

For every shift write down the name, start time, end time, break length and whether a break is paid. A typical business might have a general shift, a morning and evening shift and a night shift. For each, decide the earliest time a punch counts for that shift and the latest. For example, a person arriving an hour before the start is still on that shift, not the previous one.

Step 2: Handle night shifts correctly

A night shift that starts in the evening and ends the next morning belongs to the day it started. Make sure your system credits the hours to that date. Otherwise a worker who arrives at 10 pm on one day and leaves at 6 am the next appears to have two incomplete days. This is one of the most frequent errors in simple attendance sheets.

Step 3: Choose grace and late rules

Decide a grace period, such as a few minutes, during which a later arrival is not marked late. Then define what happens beyond it. Typical options are a late mark, half-day deduction after a number of lates in a month, or a warning letter. Write this in your policy and communicate it to staff. Machines are fair only if the rule is applied equally from the director down.

Step 4: Define weekly off and holidays

Nepali workplaces commonly observe Saturday as the weekly off day, though some businesses, shops and hospitals work differently or offer rotating off days. Record the weekly off for each department. Load the public holiday calendar of the fiscal year, noting which apply to your organisation. A day worked on an off day or a public holiday needs a rule: substitute leave, extra pay or both. Check the position with the Labour Act and your contracts before finalising.

Step 5: Write the overtime policy

Question	Typical decision
When does overtime start?	After the shift end plus a minimum threshold
Who approves?	Department head, before or within a day after
Is there a daily or monthly cap?	Set according to law and your own limits
How is it paid?	Pay rate or time off, per contract
Is work on a holiday separate?	Usually a different rate or substitute leave

Overtime rates and limits come from the law and your agreements, so confirm them and enter them as configurable settings, never as numbers buried in a formula.

Step 6: Plan corrections

Every attendance system needs a path for missed punches: forgot the card, device offline, field visit. Define who can correct, in what time window and with what proof. A correction should show the original value, the new value, the reason and the approver. Without this you will either refuse legitimate corrections or allow silent edits.

Step 7: Link to leave and payroll

Approved leave should turn an absence into a leave day automatically. Unapproved absence stays as absent. Approved overtime should flow into salary. This is where a connected HR system and payroll pay off, because the same attendance record serves leave, salary and discipline.

Step 8: Test with real people

Select three employees with different patterns: a regular day worker, a night shift worker and a person who often works late. Enter a week of punches and check the daily totals by hand. Adjust until the system's result matches what you and the employees would agree is fair. Then roll out.

Common configuration mistakes

• Setting grace so large that late marking becomes meaningless
• Counting overtime from the first minute with no threshold
• Forgetting the break, so every worker appears to work an extra half hour
• Not assigning rotating shifts in advance
• Letting managers edit without a log

A worked example of a night shift

Imagine a night shift from 10 pm to 6 am with a 30 minute unpaid break and a ten minute grace period. A worker punches in at 9:55 pm and out at 6:20 am the next day. The system credits the day to the date of the start. It records no late mark, because the arrival was before the start time. The worker's worked time after the break is just under eight hours. The extra twenty minutes after the shift end is below the overtime threshold of, say, thirty minutes, so it is not paid as overtime unless the manager approves it. All of this should be visible on the daily report, and the worker should be able to see the same numbers. If your rules differ, change the settings; the point is that the logic is explicit.

Rotating rosters

If staff rotate between day, evening and night weekly, prepare the roster in advance and enter it in the system instead of fixing shifts afterwards. Publish it at least a week before. Allow shift swaps only with manager approval and record them, so that overtime and night allowance are calculated for the person who actually worked.

Next step

Fill in the shift table and overtime table above for your own workplace and bring them to the demo. We will set up your rules in our attendance management software so you can test them with sample punches before any real data goes in.

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