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Sanitisation rules

Sanitisation applies rounding rules to clock-in and clock-out events to automatically trim or adjust them when calculating payable hours.

Amelia Andrews avatar
Written by Amelia Andrews
Updated over 3 years ago

Sanitisation is a set of customisable rules that are used to adjust employees' actual start and finish times, for the purpose of calculating correct payable hours. 

An example rule might be: if someone turns up early, only pay them from when their shift is due to start. To apply a rule like this, we first need to marry up shifts with clock-in and clock-out events. That's the only way of knowing whether or not someone was early or late.

This happens in the attendance section, where you can compare the scheduled start or finish time with the actual start or finish time. The sanitised start and finish time is also displayed alongside, so you can see the effect of sanitisation in real-time.

Sanitisation is also applied when you sign-off a day or week, so the result is visible in all reports that reference actual hours worked, such as Cost Control and Payroll timesheets. That's why it's crucial to resolve any attendance issues before you sign-off.

⚡️ Sanitisation is a really powerful way of optimising your labour spend by accurately paying people for the hours they work. It's baked into the sign-off process, so it happens automatically.

Customising your rules

Sanitisation rules are fully customisable and can apply to someone's actual start time, actual finish time and break duration.

❗️ Reach out to us if you'd like your sanitisation rules changed.

Example rules include:

  • Do not pay employees for early clock-ins - only from the scheduled start time

  • Pay the employee up until their clock-out - whether it was early or late

  • Deduct any unpaid breaks from payable hours

  • Round-up breaks to the scheduled length if what was taken was shorter than planned

  • Round the clock-out to the nearest 5 minutes in favour of the employee

Overtime

If a shift is associated with a pay rule that has an overtime policy, and someone clocks-in early or clocks-out late, overtime may be due.

❗️ Your sanitisation rules always apply first, before any overtime policies. This means Rotaready looks for overtime on the sanitised start and finish times, not the raw clock-in and out times.

This can be confusing, so try to think of it as a linear process where each step feeds into the next:

  1. A shift is married up with a clock-in and clock-out

  2. Sanitisation calculates a new start and finish time

  3. Optionally, if the shift has a pay rule with an overtime policy, the new start and finish time is used to calculate a scheduled duration and an overtime duration (which may be payable at different pay rates).

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