Approve timecards
Approving a timecard is the manager’s statement that the hours on it are what the employee actually worked. Payroll pays approved hours, so this is the last point at which a mistake is cheap to fix.
Review before you approve
Section titled “Review before you approve”Open Time tracking, pick the pay period, and work down the list. The things worth checking every time:
- Open punches (employees still clocked in). Anyone still clocked in from a previous day is a missed clock-out — see Fix a missed punch.
- Very long or very short shifts. A fourteen-hour day or a nine-minute day is usually a punch problem, not a scheduling one.
- Missing breaks. If your store’s rules expect a break and none was recorded, find out whether it was taken.
- Overtime. Overtime is calculated over the workweek defined in your store settings, which may not line up with the pay period boundary.
Approve
Section titled “Approve”Approve per employee or approve the whole period at once. Approval locks the timecard: punches on it can no longer be edited, which is what keeps a payroll run from being built on numbers that shift underneath it.
Unlocking
Section titled “Unlocking”If you approve and then find a problem, un-approve the timecard, correct it, and approve again — as long as payroll has not been submitted for that period. Once a payroll run is submitted, the period is closed and a correction means an off-cycle run instead of an edit. That is the whole reason approval comes first.
Then run payroll
Section titled “Then run payroll”With every timecard approved, the period is ready — see Run payroll.