Situation

"I have a shift that works nights 16:00 to 00:30 with a half hour meal. They work Mon, Tue, Wed, Thur, Sat, Off Fri and Sun." 

"What is the best way to set up their daily and weekly shifts in the system?"

Payroll Shift - An analysis

First let's look at some of the Payroll Shift information that's immediately obvious from the above information.

1) This is a basic 7 day night shift. It's a 7 day Rolling Shift Cycle simply because that's the way in which it is described. (If it had been described as "Two days on, one day off" then it would be a 3 day cycle.)

Tip : Any shift that is described using days of the week is normally a 7 day (or 14 day, 21 day etc) cycle.

2) It's a "night shift" - ie the boundaries of the day are not at midnight (since they're still there working at midnight.).

Arbitrarily pick a time when they're definitely not at work. This is usually closer to the start time than the end time (since people tend to work late rather than early). So I'll guess 12:00 midday is a good time for them. This is the Overlap Hours setting - ie it's set to 12.

3) There are 2 possible options for an employee during the week.

• come to work
• take the day off

Some sites may have more possibilities. For example there might be a "short" day in the week - people often go home earlier on Fridays and so on. But in this case there are 2 possible options for the day, so we need to make 2 Daily Shifts.

Daily Shift 1 - The Day Off

Let's do the simple shift first. Since on the day off the employee isn't expected at work it's pretty easy to create a simple empty day.

Now the biggest challenge here is simply the lack of information. What's supposed to happen on a day off if the employee does come to work? For the purposes of this example I've simply made it up - you would obviously need to substitute the details that occur at your site.

Not much exciting to see here - I've used OT 1.5 from 12:00 to 16:00 and then again from 30:00 (06:00) to 36:00 (12:00). In between I've sandwiched some OT2.

Remember this is all here to cater for the case where the employee does come to work, even though it's his day off.

Tip : Notice that I've used the 12 hour offset we took note of in the previous section, and notice also that my day is a nice regular 24 hours long. This isn't necessarily required, but it makes things much neater.

The only other interesting part about this day is that there is no schedule. ie He's not expected to work, so the employee schedule is empty.

Daily Shift 1 - The Day Off

Again not too many details to go on, so I'll make them up.

Pretty standard day. Again I've filled in the slots from 12:00 to 36:00.  On this day however, because it is a working day, there is a schedule.

I've highlighted the 3 most interesting things about this particular setup.

Firstly the schedule itself. Because it goes over midnight the finish time is larger than 24:00. This simply means that it goes into the following day.

The second key point is the Must be Out By time. Notice the red line that marks where this is on the time line.

Lastly always have a look at the blue arrows below the time line. They show you at a glance if you've got anything drastically out of order, or if you haven't used the right times etc.

Payroll Shift - Putting it all together

First add the shift.

Notice the Overlap Hours, and Rolling Shift Cycle as we first spotted in the description. Notice also the Auto-Process Time. Again it's set later than usual, as soon as I'm confident that the whole shift must have clocked out.

The next bit again is a putting together of what we already know;

First the days are nicely 24 hours apart, notice all the starting times are offset by 12 hours from the normal 7 day week.

Then on the Shift Details tab you can populate each day with either the work day we created (the Non shift) or the day off (the Noff shift).

Discussion

This would probably not be the end of building this shift. There are lots more details that need to be fleshed out. Balancing, Rounding, Holidays - all of these need to be applied as necessary.

Nevertheless the above process forms the building blocks for the shift, and gives you a skeleton on which to hang all the details.