Approve Time Automatically

Every punch must be approved before it becomes pay. If someone clocks in three minutes before their shift and out four minutes after, it is rarely worth your time to look at it. The Approve time automatically setting lets you set a limit for what may pass on its own.

How to set it

1. Go to Staff ▸ Settings ▸ Schedule and time.
2. Find Approve time automatically.
3. Enter the number of minutes of deviation you accept. Five minutes is a common start.
4. 0 means off – then you review every single time entry yourself.

The setting requires the Edit payroll permission.

What actually has to match

Approval happens at clock-out, and three conditions must be met:

1. The threshold is set to more than zero minutes.
2. The entry belongs to a published shift. A draft is your sketch – it approves nothing.
3. Both the clock-in and the clock-out are within the threshold of the shift start and end respectively.

If you set 5 minutes and someone clocks in 2 minutes late but out 20 minutes late, the entry is therefore not approved. It lands with you in Time, which is exactly the point.

Seeing what was approved automatically

In Staff ▸ Time ▸ Reported time such entries are marked Approved · auto, as opposed to Approved which means a human pressed the button. The difference is therefore visible afterwards, both for you and in a review with an employee.

To undo an automatic approval: Status ▸ Undo approval.

What it does not do

• It does not flag unusual shifts. A shift matching the schedule is approved even if the schedule itself was odd.
• It never approves a shift without a schedule. Unscheduled work always lands with you.
• It never approves an ongoing shift, a zero-minute entry, a guest shift or a voided shift.
• It corrects nothing. A forgotten clock-out is not closed automatically – the system does not know when the person went home.

The bulk button Approve selected (±10 min) in Time is a separate thing: it has its own fixed ten-minute threshold, cannot be changed, and exists to work through a period afterwards. It also skips everything already handled – voided shifts, guest shifts and entries already approved.

What the threshold assumes about the schedule

The automation compares against the shift, that is against the schedule. That has two practical consequences:

• Publish the schedule in time. An unpublished shift does not exist for the automation, and all its time entries land with you.
• A schedule that does not match creates work. If shifts are set 17:00–22:00 but staff always start at 16:45, every entry will deviate – either you fix the schedule or raise the threshold, but do not raise it to avoid seeing a problem you should really solve in the schedule.

Why the threshold matters for payroll

Unapproved time blocks the payroll file. If you try to create the file with entries that are not approved you get a message with names and hours, and the file is not created. The hours remain and are visible in the table – no time disappears – but the export stops.

If the threshold stays at zero you therefore have to approve every single punch before the payroll run. If you miss one, it surfaces on the day payroll is due, which is the worst possible moment.

And if the payroll period is already locked, the time cannot be approved at all: you must unlock the period, approve in Time, and lock it again.

Which number should I choose?

There is no single right answer, but two things to weigh:

• A low value (0–3 min) – you see everything, but also get a lot to do. Reasonable with few employees or when you have just started using the time clock.
• A higher value (5–15 min) – you only see the real deviations. Reasonable once you have an established routine and trust the schedule.

Do not set the threshold higher than the deviation you are actually prepared to pay out without looking at it.

You can change the number at any time. It applies going forward, at future clock-outs – already saved time entries are not approved retroactively because you raised the threshold.