Guest Shift – Someone Stepping In Without Employment

Sometimes someone works a shift without being employed by you: a stand-in, a partner stepping in during an emergency, someone from a sister restaurant. The law requires that the person appears in the staff register – but the hours should not become payroll or tips with you.

That is exactly the situation guest shifts exist for.

What a guest shift is

A guest shift is a time entry marked as "this person has no employment". The shift:

• stays visible in the staff register, as the law requires
• is not counted as employee worked time anywhere
• cannot be approved – it is already fully handled

In short: the register should match reality, the payroll basis should not.

That it is its own state, rather than just a note, is deliberate. A guest shift counted as ordinary working time would end up in the payroll export file and in the tip distribution – that is money to someone who is not employed by you, and a smaller share for those who are. With its own marker every view counts the same way, and the figures add up.

How to mark a shift as a guest shift

1. Go to Staff ▸ Time ▸ Reported time.
2. Expand the employee and find the day.
3. Click Status on the row.
4. Choose Mark as guest shift.

The entry gets a purple Guest shift marker. If the day has several time entries you can mark one of them and leave the other as ordinary work.

The action requires the Edit schedule permission.

What changes when you do it

The guest shift hours disappear from:

• The payroll basis and the payroll export file
• Tip distribution – a guest shift earns no share of tips
• Time ▸ Summary and Time ▸ Monthly overview
• The calculation period ("hours left in the period")
• The employee own monthly total in the staff portal

The hours therefore remain as a registration, but they are not attributed to the employee. It is the same rule everywhere, so a guest shift never gives you different figures in different views.

How the guest shift looks to the person who punched

The person sees their punch in the staff portal marked Guest shift, and the hours are not included in the monthly total there. That is deliberate: had they been counted, the person would have seen an hour figure nobody intended to pay out.

In the staff register the guest shift looks exactly like any other shift – a clock-in and a clock-out with name, identity number, time and device. That is the whole point. The Tax Agency requirement covers everyone working on the premises, regardless of employment form, and an inspector should find the person there.

Undoing a guest shift

If you marked the wrong one: Status ▸ Reset. The entry returns to Pending and counts as ordinary working time again.

Guest shift or something else?

Three decisions look alike but mean quite different things:

Choose Guest shift when the work really was performed but is not your payroll cost. Choose Void only when the shift should never have been registered at all – for example the wrong person or the wrong code.

Things to keep in mind

• The person must still exist in the staff registry with an identity number to be able to clock in – that is the staff register requirement, not the employment.
• Compensation for a stand-in is handled outside the Vendion payroll basis. How it should be reported for tax is for you and your accounting adviser.
• A guest shift cannot be approved, and the Approve selected bulk button skips it. That is deliberate – a considered decision should not be undone by a mass-action button.
• If a day has both a guest shift and a regular shift, only the regular one counts towards hours, but both remain in the register.
• Prefer marking afterwards over not punching at all. A shift that was never registered is a hole in the staff register; a guest shift is a correct registration with the right label.