How time and pay work
This section covers how employees, shifts, and attendance come together to produce payroll. The key idea: pay is built on the shift, not on attendance — attendance adjusts the base downward but never adds to it.
This page lays out the parts and the calculation; the linked pages cover the day-to-day steps.
The four moving parts
Employees
Per-store records of who works for you, each with an hourly wage. Shifts and attendance both reference an employee — and so do the Salary entries on the Expenses side.
Shifts
Planned work periods — who is scheduled when. The shift is also the base for payroll: an employee's daily pay starts from the scheduled shift duration × the hourly wage.
Attendance
Actual clock-in / clock-out records. Staff record their own from the portal; admins can fix up missed punches. Attendance is what payroll compares against the planned shift — late starts and early outs become deductions.
Payroll
The periodic summary. For each day, payroll takes the shift's planned duration as the base and subtracts late minutes, early-out minutes, and break minutes against actual attendance. Pressing Register as Expense posts a Salary entry per employee into Expenses.
How pay is calculated
For each day an employee is scheduled, payroll starts from the planned shift duration and subtracts what actually didn't happen on the shop floor:
- Late minutes — clock-in after shift start
- Early-out minutes — clock-out before shift end
- Break minutes — resting time within the shift
The deductions follow the actual attendance record:
- Late minutes — the time between the shift start and the actual clock-in, if positive.
- Early-out minutes — the time between the actual clock-out and the shift end, if positive.
- Break minutes — the resting time within the shift (see the tip below).
A few things this model deliberately implies:
- Working past the shift end does not increase pay — the shift duration caps the payable time. The model rewards planning the shift accurately upfront.
- A day with attendance but no shift can't be paid through this section — payroll needs a shift to know what to pay against. Add the shift for the day, then re-run.
- A day with a shift but no attendance is marked Absent and pays nothing.
Each attendance record has a break minutes field that determines how much of the shift counts as unpaid resting time.
- Auto (default) — when the field is left blank, the system applies a built-in rule: if the day's payable time exceeds 6 hours, 60 minutes of break is deducted; otherwise no break deduction.
- Explicit — enter a specific value (including
0) to override the auto rule. Useful for short shifts that still want a break recorded, or for full shifts with a different break length.
The flow, end to end
Payroll feeds straight into Expenses
At the end of a pay period, the admin reviews the days on the payroll screen, fixes anything off, and clicks Register as Expense. Each employee's pay lands as a Salary entry under Labor, and from there behaves like any other expense.
See Payroll for the screen itself, and Salary ↔ Employees for the link from the Expenses side.
Read next
Shift management
Plan who works when — the shifts that payroll uses as its calculation base.
Clock in & out
The staff portal flow — how a shift gets clocked in, paused for a break, and clocked out.
Payroll
Review the period's records, then click Register as Expense to post the Salary entries to Expenses.