Locking a period's schedules and clockings
Freeze a month, a week or a single day so that managers no longer edit data that has gone to payroll.
Once the worked hours are settled, editing a schedule or a clocking on a period that has already been transmitted creates a gap between what Shyfter shows and what your payroll office received. Locking prevents that: once locked, schedules and clockings can no longer be edited by managers.
Go to Payroll → Locking.
Do not confuse this with blocking a shift from the schedule, which protects one specific slot. Here you freeze a whole period, and a shift created afterwards is covered too.
First of all: enabling locking on the account
As long as locking is not enabled in Settings → Human resources → Payroll, the locks you set here prevent nothing: the system merely records what it would have refused. That is a useful observation period, which surfaces the legitimate job or integration nobody had thought of before anyone gets blocked. While it is disabled, the Locking screen does not even appear in the bar.
Two separate scopes
A lock covers one of the two, or both:
- Schedules: the shifts as planned.
- Clockings: the hours actually badged.
You can perfectly well lock a month's clockings while leaving the planning open, or the other way round.
Three scales
The screen offers three views, chosen at the top:
Month by month. The overview of the year: each month shows its state for schedules and for clockings. The buttons Lock the month's planning, Lock the month's clockings and Lock both act in one go.
By week. The month in detail, week by week, with one button per week and per scope. A week that straddles the next month is flagged: those days belong to the other month's closing.
By day. The finest grain. Click a day to unlock it, which creates an exception inside a locked month.
Three states read the same everywhere: Locked, Partial (only part of the period is taken) and Open.
The rule that decides
On a given date, the most specific line wins: a shift beats a day, a day beats a week, a week beats a month. At equal precision, the most recent wins. Reopening one day inside a locked month is therefore an exception, and the month's lock stays in place around it.
What escapes the lock
By product decision, two things are never blocked: live clocking (time clock, app, point of sale), because refusing a badge would stop an employee clocking in, and shifts coming from Update Pro, accepted as they are.
Who the lock blocks
The lock does not block everyone the same way. In Settings → Human resources → Payroll you choose, role by role and if need be person by person, who is prevented from editing a locked period. By default administrators go through and the other roles are blocked.
The history of changes
The History of changes button opens the list of every lock and every reopening, most recent first. Nothing is erased: reopening a day adds a line, it removes none.
Each line carries:
- Action: lock or reopening.
- Scope: schedules or clockings.
- Period: the range of dates covered.
- Granularity: month, week, day or shift.
- Source: the locking screen, the closing or the export, depending on what set the lock.
- Reason, By and On: the why, the author and the timestamp.