Night Shifts

A common scenario that may occur on your ranch are employees whose schedules are flexible, where they may work during both the day and the night, depending on the day or week.

After lots of feedback, we have now added support for this scenario to PickTrace, in the form of Night Shifts.

If you have employees that work flexible, difficult-to-predict hours that stretch across all times of day, you can mark their Pay Group as being a "Night Shift."

By marking a Pay Group as a Night Shift, the behavior of PickTrace will update based on that selection.

If Night Shift is not on, the system will use 12am as the "Start of Day" time to see how far back to search if an employee has already been checked in or out. For example, if an employee gets checked in at 11pm when that employee’s badge is scanned with the intention of being checked out at 1 am, they will not be clocked out but will instead be clocked in again, creating two timesheets. This is because the Start of Day being set to midnight has cleared the record of the 11 pm check-in from the device.

Marking this Pay Group as a Night Shift will resolve this. In the above scenario, if Night Shift is marked as ON, the 1 am scan will be logged as a clock out, because this feature tells PickTrace to look back 24 hours to see whether there's a check-in or check-out record.

FAQ's

What is "Start of Day"
- This feature allows the user to define when the day starts for a specific Pay Group, this is commonly used for workers under the night shift scheme.
  The time set will be used as a start point for the next 24 hours regardless of the date where those hours end on.
How does the toggle works?
- This toggle ONLY affects the device and what it does is make it so that it looks back 17 hours and is not confined by the "start of day" in how far it will look back for a currently checked in timecards. E.x. right now start of day defaults to midnight, this means that if you check-in at 11 pm on Monday and then want to checkout or check into a different job at 2 am on Tuesday, the device would not connect that action with the 11 pm check-in because it will not look past the "start of day" boundary. The "Night shift" toggle says ignore the start of day boundary and instead look back a full 17 hours to see if there is a check-in related to this action.
Why the "Start of Day" can't be changed on a daily basis?
- Start of day should ideally never change once set and should definitely not change within a pay period. This affects the day an employee's hours are attributed to. E.g. if you set the start of day to be 2 pm, you are saying that the day does not begin until 2 pm in terms of their hours. So if on Monday you check-in at 10 am, our system will attribute those hours to Sunday, and all the hours from 2 pm on Monday until 2 pm on Tuesday would be considered "Monday's hours", it ALSO affects how far the device will look into the past searching for a related timecard.
Should both start of day and night shift toggle be active to take effect or with just adding one of them (the Start of Day / Night Shift) takes effect on the functionality?
- It depends on the client's needs, for the most part, the night shift toggle will solve the majority of the client's needs, but they just need to be aware it will then potentially "connect" timecards that should have been connected. E.g. if someone forgets to check out at 5 pm and then checks in the next day at 8 am, it might connect that those two timecards together
If the start of day is set but the toggle hasn’t been activated can this generate data errors or other potential issues
- No, Any of the features can be used individually depending on the client's needs.