Chapter 35 — Shifts

A shift is the first thing attendance needs and the last thing most workspaces look at. Operentra creates one on signup so that nothing is empty, and that starter shift is deliberately forgiving: it marks everyone present. This chapter is how to make shifts that describe your real working patterns, how each attendance mode behaves, what the salary switch does, and how people are placed on shifts and moved between them.

What this chapter covers

• 35.1 Creating a shift: hours, break, grace, weekly off days
• 35.2 Attendance modes: punch required, auto-present, punch not required
• 35.3 "Attendance affects salary" and fixed-pay shifts
• 35.4 Default shift and default leave group
• 35.5 Placing employees on shifts
• 35.6 Why the starter Office Shift marks everyone present, and when to change it

The concept

A shift is a pattern, not a roster: it says what a normal day looks like for the people on it, and the record of who is on which shift, from when, is kept separately. That split is what lets a company have three shifts and three hundred people, move a person from days to nights on a date, and still grade every past day against the shift that applied then.

Two decisions are hidden in every shift. The first is how presence is established: by a punch, by assumption, or not at all. The second is whether presence drives pay: for most staff an absence costs a day, for a director on a retainer it does not. Both belong on the shift, because they describe a kind of job rather than a person.

How Operentra handles it

• Attendance › Shifts lists every shift with its hours, weekly-off days, mode, leave group and the Default badge; Add Shift and Edit open the same form. attendance.manage edits shifts; attendance.view_all reads them.
• The form: name (unique), start and end time, break in minutes, grace in minutes, weekly-off day chips, attendance mode, the attendance-affects-salary switch, a default leave group, and "Set as default shift".
• Three modes: Punch Required (no punch, Absent), Auto-Present (a nightly job writes the day Present with the shift's times; a real punch overrides it), Punch Not Required (exempt: no rows on working days, punches ignored, full pay).
• Attendance affects salary is on by default and locked off for Punch Not Required; off, the shift is a fixed-pay shift and payroll ignores absences, half days and lates for the people on it. Leave balances still deduct.
• One default shift: new employees created without a shift get it; payroll refuses to approve while the workspace has no default or any employee has no shift.
• A default leave group per shift: employees inherit it unless they have their own; "None" falls back to the company default group.
• Employees are placed on shifts with dates: on creation, or later with Change Shift on the employee page, which closes the previous assignment the day before; the Shift Assignment History shows every row and lets HR correct a date or delete a mistaken row, with the affected days regraded.
• Editing an auto-present shift's weekly-off days, hours, break or mode rewrites the last ninety days of its automatic rows so the calendar matches the new pattern; punched, marked and regularized days are never touched.
• A shift cannot be deleted once anyone has ever been on it.

Walkthrough

Northwind has the one shift every workspace starts with, Office Shift: 09:00 to 17:00, a 60-minute break, 15 minutes' grace, Saturday and Sunday off, Auto-Present, attendance affecting salary, the default, and carrying the workspace's default leave group. All fifty people are on it from their joining dates. That is the exact situation 35.6 warns about, and the walkthrough builds the two shifts a company like Northwind actually needs.

35.1 Creating a shift: hours, break, grace, weekly off days

Add Shift opens the form.

Field	What it does
Shift Name	Unique in the workspace; "Morning Shift" is the placeholder
Start Time, End Time	The expected day. An end before the start is an overnight shift and is handled as one: lateness, early leaving and hours are measured across midnight
Break (min)	Unpaid minutes taken out of the worked time; 60 by default, up to 480
Grace (min)	Minutes after the start before a punch counts as late; 15 by default, up to 120. The same grace applies to leaving early. It overrides the company-wide grace in Attendance Settings
Weekly Off	Day chips, Sunday to Saturday. The hint says it: residential staff none, a driver Sunday only, office Saturday and Sunday
Attendance Mode	35.2
Attendance affects salary	35.3
Default Leave Group	35.4
Set as default shift	35.4

Make "Engineering 10 to 6": 10:00 to 18:00, break 60, grace 10, Saturday and Sunday off, Punch Required. Then "Support Night": 22:00 to 06:00, break 45, grace 15, Friday and Saturday off, Punch Required. The list shows each with its hours, weekly-off days as short day names ("Sat, Sun"), the mode, and the leave group.

The weekly-off days are the shift's, and they matter twice: attendance writes Weekend rows and skips reminders on them, and payroll takes an employee's rest days from their shift, falling back to the Week Off Days in Attendance Settings only for someone on no shift at all.

35.2 Attendance modes: punch required, auto-present, punch not required

The mode decides what a working day with no punch means.

Mode	A working day with no punch	A real punch
Punch Required	Absent. Late, early leaving and overtime come from the punches	Graded against the shift
Auto-Present	Present, written overnight with the shift's start and end as the times; the row's source is Auto	Overrides the synthetic times; a punch past the grace is graded late like anyone else
Punch Not Required	No row at all; the day is Exempt in views and counts as worked in payroll. Leave, holiday and weekend rows are still written	Ignored for status (kept in the logs for audit)

Auto-Present is for people whose presence is not in question but whose day is still paid by attendance: residential staff, a driver who starts from the owner's house, a guard. It is also, as 35.6 explains, the starter mode. Punch Not Required is for people whose attendance is not tracked at all: founders, senior management, contractors on a retainer. Missing-punch reminders never go to either; regularization requests are refused for the exempt.

The mode descriptions on the form say the same in one line each, and the Shift Assignment History shows an Auto Present or Exempt tag next to those shifts.

35.3 "Attendance affects salary" and fixed-pay shifts

Attendance affects salary is on by default: an absence costs a day, a half day half, and lates past the monthly tolerance a day each (Chapter 34). Turn it off for a shift of people paid a fixed amount whatever the calendar says, and the shift wears a Fixed Pay tag in the list: payroll pays the month in full for everyone on it, ignoring absences, half days and lates. Leave applications still deduct leave balance, and unpaid leave is still unpaid.

For Punch Not Required the switch is locked off, with the form saying why: that mode writes no rows on working days, so a shift that was exempt and still "affected by attendance" would have nothing to count and would pay nothing. Choose Auto-Present if you need an untracked shift whose pay still follows the calendar.

35.4 Default shift and default leave group

Exactly one shift should carry the Default badge. It is the shift every new employee lands on when the Shift field on the Add Employee form is left blank (Chapter 16), including bulk imports (Chapter 17), so nobody is created without a working pattern. Set as Default on another shift moves the badge; the form's "Set as default shift" switch does the same, and either way the previous default loses the badge, so there is never more than one. There can be none, if the only default is edited with the switch off; payroll's pre-flight (Chapter 55) refuses to approve while there is no default shift or an employee with no shift at all, because such a person would be read as absent all month.

Default Leave Group on a shift is the leave policy its people inherit (Chapter 46): an employee created with Leave Group left as "Inherit from shift" takes it, an employee given a group of their own keeps that. "None (company default)" on the shift means the workspace's default leave group applies instead. Northwind's Office Shift carries the workspace's default group, which is why every employee has leave without anyone choosing it.

35.5 Placing employees on shifts

The Shift field on the Add Employee form is optional; left blank, the default shift applies from the joining date. Afterwards the employee page's Shift card shows the current shift and offers two buttons.

Change Shift (or Assign Shift for someone with none) opens the Assign Shift dialog: pick a shift (the default is marked), read its timings, break and grace, set Effective From, and assign. Any open assignment is closed the day before the new date, so a person is on one shift at a time and every past day keeps the shift that applied.

View history opens the Shift Assignment History: every row with its range, tagged Active, Past or Upcoming, and for each a way to edit the dates or delete the row. Both carry a warning worth reading: saving regrades every attendance row in the affected range against the shift in force on each date, so late minutes, early leaving, overtime and statuses may change for past days; deleting is permanent. Overlapping ranges are refused.

Move one Northwind engineer to "Engineering 10 to 6" from next Monday and read the history: the Office Shift row closes on Sunday, the new row is Upcoming until Monday.

35.6 Why the starter Office Shift marks everyone present, and when to change it

A new workspace has no terminal, no GPS site and no habit of marking attendance, and a Punch Required shift on day one would mark every employee absent every day until one of those existed. So the seeded Office Shift is Auto-Present: everyone is Present overnight, payroll has a full month to work with, and attendance can be switched on when the capture method is ready.

The cost is that punches do not decide attendance on it. A terminal can be installed and syncing and the month still reads Present for the person who never came, because the synthetic row is already there and only a real punch past the grace changes it. Northwind is in this state: a terminal at the Austin entrance, biometric rows on most days, and a shift that would have marked any missing day Present anyway.

The moment to change it is when a capture method is set up: the capture card on Attendance Settings (Chapter 36) names every Auto-Present shift and offers Require punches, which switches them to Punch Required after a confirmation; days already marked are not changed, and from then on a working day without a punch is Absent. Keep Auto-Present only for the shifts that mean it, and give those a name that says so.

What happens next

• Attendance Settings (Chapter 36) hold the company-wide rules the shift's grace overrides and the ladder it feeds.
• The nightly job writes Auto-Present days at 00:30 workspace time for the previous day; the calendar rows for weekends and holidays come from the shift's days off and the holiday list.
• Payroll reads each employee's shift for their rest days and the fixed-pay flag (Chapter 54).

What the employee sees

Nothing of the shift as such: the portal does not name it. What they see is its effect, their attendance days with a status, times and source (Chapter 85), and, on a GPS workspace, a punch card that disappears for anyone on an exempt shift (Chapter 41). A person moved to a new shift is graded against it from the effective date without being told.

Common mistakes

1. Leaving the starter shift Auto-Present after the terminal is in. Missing days read Present. Use Require punches.
2. Making a shift for one person's exception. A shift is a pattern; a one-off is a regularization or a rest-day swap (Chapter 38).
3. Deleting a shift that was ever used. Refused, because past days were graded against it. Leave it and move people off it.
4. Switching the only default off. New hires then get no shift and payroll's pre-flight blocks; make another shift the default first.
5. Changing a shift's hours and expecting past punched days to move. Only automatic rows of an Auto-Present shift are rewritten, and only for the last ninety days. Punched days keep their grading.
6. Backdating a shift change without reading the warning. The history edit regrades every day in the range; that is the point, but check the month's statuses after.
7. Setting Attendance affects salary off to "fix" one bad month. It is a shift-wide policy for retainers; the fix for one month is a regularization or the Force lock.
8. Choosing Punch Not Required for someone whose pay should follow the calendar. It is always fixed pay; Auto-Present is the untracked mode that still pays by the calendar.

Practice

Use your own trial workspace, not a customer's.

1. Open Attendance › Shifts and read the starter shift: hours, break, grace, days off, mode, the Default badge, the leave group.
2. Add "Engineering 10 to 6" and "Support Night" as above. Read the list, then edit Support Night's break and read the list again.
3. Add a third shift with Punch Not Required and read what happens to the salary switch. Then try to delete the starter shift.
4. Open an employee, use Change Shift with an effective date next Monday, then View history. Edit the new row's date, read the warning, and delete the row.
5. Open Attendance Settings and read the capture card's notice about Auto-Present shifts. Do not click Require punches on a workspace whose attendance you are not ready to capture.

Quiz

1. What does each attendance mode do with a working day that has no punch?

Punch Required marks it Absent; Auto-Present writes it Present with the shift's times; Punch Not Required writes nothing and the day is Exempt and paid.

2. What changes when Attendance affects salary is off?

The shift becomes fixed pay: payroll ignores absences, half days and lates for its people. Leave balances still deduct. The switch is locked off for Punch Not Required.

3. Who gets the default shift, and why does payroll care?

Every employee created without a shift, including imports. Payroll refuses to approve while there is no default shift or an employee without one, because that person would read as absent all month.

4. What happens to the old assignment when you Change Shift from a date?

It is closed the day before the new effective date, so the employee is on one shift at a time and past days keep the shift that applied.

5. When should the starter Office Shift stop being Auto-Present?

As soon as a capture method is set up, through Require punches on the capture card; until then a missing day would read Absent for everyone.