How to set up shifts, grace periods and half days

Accurate attendance starts with accurate rules. If your shifts, grace periods and day thresholds are vague, someone ends up correcting attendance by hand every week, and every correction is a chance for a dispute. This guide walks through designing those rules and setting them up so attendance is marked correctly the moment someone punches out.

Step 1: List the working patterns you actually have

Most organisations have more than one pattern, even if they think of themselves as running a single shift. Make a list of each distinct pattern, for example:

• General: 09:30 to 18:30, Monday to Friday.
• Support early: 07:00 to 16:00, Monday to Saturday with a weekly off on Sunday.
• Night operations: 21:00 to 06:00, crossing midnight.

For each one, note the start and end time, the working days, and which teams or people follow it. Keep the list as short as possible; a dozen near-identical shifts are hard to maintain and easy to assign wrongly.

Step 2: Decide the grace period

The grace period is how many minutes after the shift start someone can punch in without being marked late. It absorbs normal variation such as a slow lift or a delayed bus, and stops minor lateness from cluttering reports.

Common choices are 10 or 15 minutes. Pick a number that reflects real commuting conditions and apply it consistently. A grace period that is too short creates a stream of late marks nobody acts on; one that is too long quietly moves the real start time.

Step 3: Define half-day and full-day thresholds

Next, decide how many worked hours make a full day and how many make a half day. For an eight-hour working day, a typical setup is a full day at eight hours and a half day at four. Anything below the half-day threshold is usually treated as absent, because a very short stint of work does not amount to a working day.

Be explicit about how breaks count. If lunch is unpaid, an employee who is in the office from 09:30 to 18:30 with an hour's lunch has worked eight hours. If some breaks are paid, they should count towards worked time.

A worked example

1. Shift 09:30 to 18:30, grace 15 minutes, half day after 4 hours, full day after 8 hours.
2. Punch in at 09:40: within grace, not late.
3. Punch in at 09:50: late by 20 minutes.
4. Work 5 hours in total: half day.
5. Work 8 hours 10 minutes: full day.
6. Work 30 minutes: below half day, marked absent.

Step 4: Create the shifts

In BeeWorkforce, go to Shifts and add one shift per working pattern. For each, enter:

1. Name: something people will recognise, such as "General 09:30".
2. Start and End: in the company's time zone. An end time earlier than the start is treated as an overnight shift.
3. Grace (minutes): from step 2.
4. Half day after and Full day after (hours): from step 3.
5. Work days: tick the days this shift works. Unticked days become weekly offs.

Mark the shift most people follow as the default. Anyone without a specific shift will follow the default, which keeps new joiners covered automatically.

Step 5: Assign shifts to people

Assign the non-default shifts to the people who work them, from each employee's profile. Double-check team by team: a single person on the wrong shift will show up as late every day, and that is the kind of error that erodes trust in the whole system.

Step 6: Set up break types

If your organisation has distinct breaks, such as a lunch break and short tea breaks, create them under Settings → Breaks. For each, choose whether it is paid or unpaid and how many times it can be taken per day. Paid breaks count towards worked time; unpaid ones do not. Employees then pick the break type when they start a break, which makes break reports far more meaningful.

Step 7: Add holidays and leave rules

A day can only be correctly marked absent if the system knows it was a working day. Add public holidays for the year, and make sure approved leave is recorded in the system rather than in a separate spreadsheet. Days covered by a holiday, a weekly off or approved leave are then excluded from absence counts automatically.

Step 8: Test before you announce

Run a short pilot with a few people from different shifts. Ask them to punch in and out normally for a week, then check the daily board and their attendance history together:

• Are late marks appearing only when they should?
• Are half days and full days being recognised correctly?
• Do overnight shifts land on the right date?
• Are holidays and weekly offs shown correctly instead of absences?

Fix anything that looks wrong before the whole company starts relying on the numbers.

Troubleshooting common problems

• Everyone on a shift shows as late: check the shift's start time and the company's time zone.
• Night workers' hours land on the wrong day: make sure the shift's end time is earlier than its start, so it is treated as overnight.
• People show as absent on a holiday: add the holiday to the holiday list for that year.
• Someone is marked absent on approved leave: check that the leave was approved in the system, not just agreed verbally.
• Half days appear when people worked a full day: check whether breaks are being counted as paid or unpaid as intended.

Most problems come from one of these settings rather than from the punches themselves, so check the rules before editing individual records.

Step 9: Communicate the rules

Finally, share a short summary with everyone: their shift times, the grace period, what counts as a half day, and how breaks are treated. When people understand how attendance is calculated, they are far less likely to dispute it, and far more likely to point out genuine mistakes.