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Expected hours come from a person’s work schedule. Every timecard day is compared against them, and that comparison produces the day’s status.

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Where expected hours come from

Each day, TimeTracker resolves one schedule for you. It looks at:
  1. A schedule assigned to you personally.
  2. Otherwise, one assigned to your group.
  3. Otherwise, the workspace default.
Day exceptions – a holiday, a day off, replacement hours – are applied on top, provided they are at least as specific as the assignment they are changing. The result gives the day three things: Full detail: Working hours and days off.
If nobody assigns you a schedule, no expected hours resolve. Every day you work reads Unscheduled, and no day is ever marked Absent. The Time Clock needs schedules to be useful, which is why the app requires them.

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Expected is gross time

Scheduled is the total of your scheduled work periods. Breaks are not deducted from it. Your actual breaks are shown in their own Break column and are already excluded from Worked, because a break is the gap between two sessions. So a 09:00–17:00 schedule shows Scheduled 8h even if you always take an hour for lunch. Take that hour and you will sit at roughly −1h variance every day. Plan the schedule around what you expect people to be present for.

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Your timezone comes from the schedule

A schedule template carries its own timezone. That is the timezone your scheduled start and end times are read in. This matters for a distributed team. If Ana Ferreira’s schedule template is set to Lisbon time, her 09:00 start means 09:00 in Lisbon – not 09:00 in the workspace’s timezone.
Two different timezones are in play, and they answer different questions:
  • Which day a shift belongs to – the workspace timezone.
  • What “09:00 start” means – the schedule template’s timezone.
See Schedule timezones and Dates, times and timezones.

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The grace window

A five-minute grace window applies to lateness, leaving early, and overtime. That means:
  • Clocking in up to five minutes late still reads Present.
  • Late by 0 means “within grace”, not “exactly on time”.
  • Only the minutes beyond the grace window are counted as late.
Clock in nine minutes after your scheduled start and the day is Late by four minutes.

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The eight day statuses

A day can qualify for more than one – Late and Left early, for example. The most decision-worthy one becomes the main badge, in the order shown above, and the rest appear beside it. Present is only ever shown on its own.
A non-working day with no work at all produces no row. An off day for everyone does not fill your timecard with empty entries.

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How absence is decided

You cannot be called absent halfway through the day. So absence is finalised after the day ends. A daily job runs through the previous calendar day, in each workspace’s timezone, and recalculates every member’s summary for it. Someone scheduled to work who never clocked in gets an Absent day at that point. Client-portal contacts are skipped – they never clock.
A day inside a submitted or approved timecard is never silently recalculated. It is the record the person submitted and a manager signed off on. Reopen or withdraw the period to make it recompute.

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Variance

It is shown as +1h 15m or −39m. A negative variance is red. A day with no schedule shows a dash instead.

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Example

Northwind Studio’s standard schedule is 09:00–17:00, Monday to Friday, eight hours a day.
  • Monday’s three minutes late are inside grace, so it is Present.
  • Tuesday is 22 minutes late; grace takes five off, so the day records 17 actionable late minutes and reads Late.
  • Wednesday is only marked Absent after the day ended.
  • Thursday’s overtime is 2h 30m beyond expected, well past grace.
  • Saturday is not a working day, so there is nothing to compare against.

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Permissions

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Common questions

Nobody has assigned you a schedule. Ask an owner or admin – see Assign a schedule.
Your breaks. Scheduled is gross time and does not deduct them. If people take an hour for lunch, either accept the daily gap or build the schedule around it.
The grace window is five minutes. It is not a per-workspace setting today.
Leave shows up as a day exception on the schedule, which makes the day non-working. A non-working day with no work produces no row, so it is not marked absent. See Request time off.
Editing its shifts recomputes it. Days inside submitted or approved periods are frozen and will not change.
No. A holiday makes the day non-working, so there is nothing to be absent from. See Holidays.

Timecards

Where the statuses appear.

Working hours and days off

Building the schedule behind expected hours.

Schedule timezones

Which timezone a start time is read in.

Expected vs tracked hours

The same comparison on timesheets.