Manage hours: authorise and decline your team's time

What this guide covers

Manage hours is where a manager turns the hours their team actually worked into hours the company will pay. Every minute an employee works beyond their scheduled (ordinary) hours waits as unauthorised until a manager either approves it (pay it) or declines it (write it off). This guide explains that flow, the words on the screen, and exactly how to clear your team before payroll.

It is one of the Managers screens (People ? Managers). The sibling guides are Manage your team's leave, Manage schedules and the Leave report. For the meaning of attendance badges, see Attendance status field definitions; for the full pay model behind this screen, see How working time is calculated.

Who can open it: you must be a manager of at least one department (or an HR administrator). You only ever see the people in your own management chain. The screen lists all active employees in that chain - staff whose schedule doesn't allow overtime still appear (so you can review and clear their hours); they're simply tagged as not overtime-eligible, and any beyond-schedule time for them is unpaid extra rather than payable overtime.

The one idea behind the whole screen

Working time falls into two buckets:

Ordinary (scheduled) hours - the hours the employee is contracted to work. These are paid automatically; you do nothing.
Beyond-schedule hours - anything worked on top of the schedule. These are never paid automatically. They sit as unauthorised until you make a call.

Your job is to make that call. Here is the full life of a beyond-schedule hour:

Lifecycle of beyond-schedule hours: unauthorised, then a manager Approves to Authorised (paid), Declines to a final write-off, or marks a short day Reviewed (acknowledged, but the shortfall is still deducted)

It's a weekly total - and the goal is to land on it

The system does not judge each day on its own. It adds up the whole week and compares the total against the employee's weekly ordinary (contracted) hours. That weekly total is what matters:

Hit the weekly contract exactly - nothing extra to pay, nothing to deduct. This is the target.
Over the weekly contract - for staff who are overtime-eligible, the surplus authorised hours become overtime, which is paid at a higher rate.
Under the weekly contract - the missing hours are a shortfall, which is deducted.

The week measured as one total: hours up to the weekly ordinary contract are normal pay; hours above become overtime (costs more); a week below the contract is a shortfall that is deducted. The ideal is to land exactly on the contract line.

What a good manager actually aims for: both overtime and shortfall cost the business or the employee, so ideally you want neither. Your real job isn't to rubber-stamp extra hours - it's to make sure each person fulfils their weekly contracted hours: no more (which becomes paid overtime) and no less (which becomes a deduction).

Because the measure is the week as a whole, a quiet day and a busy day inside the same week can balance out. A short Tuesday offset by a longer Thursday can still land the week exactly on contract - better than declining the Tuesday and paying overtime on the Thursday. Look at the week's total, not just one day, before you approve overtime or accept a shortfall.

Definitions (the words on the screen)

Term	What it means
Expected (ordinary)	The hours the employee was scheduled/contracted to work in the period. The baseline.
Worked	The hours actually recorded from their clock-ins for the period.
Authorised	Beyond-schedule hours a manager has approved. These are paid and feed the weekly overtime tally.
Unauthorised	Beyond-schedule hours still pending a decision. The amber number is your to-do list.
Declined	Beyond-schedule hours a manager refused. A final write-off - never paid, and it cannot be undone.
Deficient / Shortfall	Time an employee fell short of their schedule (worked less than expected).
Missing	Scheduled hours that were not worked and not paid = shortfall + unpaid leave. Shown per row and clickable to see exactly which days (and each day's clock-in/out).
Reviewed	A short (deficient) day a manager has acknowledged so it drops off the to-do list. It does not add the missing hours back - if they weren't worked, the shortfall is still deducted. Reviewing isn't forgiving the time.
Overtime	Authorised hours that push a person past their weekly ordinary contract. Calculated automatically, per week.
Provisional vs Final	Because overtime is weekly, a week's overtime is only final once the whole week has elapsed and sits fully inside your selected period. Until then it is provisional and may still change.
Up to date	An employee row with nothing left pending - every beyond-schedule minute has been approved or declined.

Approve vs Decline vs Mark reviewed

These are the only three decisions, and they are not interchangeable:

Approve - "this extra time was real, pay it." The minutes move into Authorised and count toward weekly overtime once the week passes the ordinary contract.
Decline - "this should not be paid." The minutes are written off into Declined. This is final - there is no un-decline, so use it deliberately.
Mark reviewed - only for a day where the person worked short of their schedule. It records that you've seen the short day and clears it from your list. It does not restore the missing hours: if those hours weren't worked, the shortfall is still deducted from pay. Reviewing acknowledges the gap; it does not pay it.

Walking through the screen

Manage hours step by step: choose a period, pick a department or person, filter, read the row, then either Approve selected in bulk or open the Breakdown to act per day, until every row reads Up to date

1. Choose a period

The buttons at the top - Today � Week � Month � Custom - set the window. Use the < > arrows to step back and forward through weeks or months, or pick a Custom From/To range. A longer window (Month/Custom) is the easy way to spot someone who is under-time across a whole pay period.

A line under the toolbar tells you how many weeks the period spans and how many are final vs provisional.

2. Pick a department or a person

Use the Team Hierarchy tree on the left. Pick a single person to focus on them, or a department to load everyone beneath it (sub-departments included). The search box filters the tree by department or employee name. All active employees in your chain are listed - including staff who aren't overtime-eligible, so you can still review and clear their hours.

3. Narrow the list (optional)

The Filters button opens a sidebar. The most useful filter is "Only employees with unauthorised hours" - it hides everyone who is already up to date so you see only the rows that still need a decision. Active filters show as removable chips above the table, and the search box does a quick name/department match.

4. Read the row

Each employee row shows five figures - Expected ordinary, Worked, Authorised, Unauthorised and Missing - plus a status line:

? Up to date - nothing pending; leave it alone.
Authorise from <date> - there are pending hours starting on that date; this row needs you.

The Missing figure is scheduled time the person didn't work and isn't paid for (shortfall + unpaid leave) - see Why hours are "missing" below. Every row also has a Breakdown link (see step 5B) and, for the Week period, the name links to that week's review record.

5. Decide how to act - two ways

A - Approve in bulk (fast). Tick the checkbox on each row you are happy with and click Approve selected. This authorises all pending hours and marks any short days reviewed, for every selected person over the whole period, in one action. A progress bar runs while it works. Bulk approve cannot decline - it only ever says "yes."

B - Open the Breakdown (precise). Click Breakdown on a row to open that one person's day-by-day view (the per-person Manage Hours view). There you can, per day:

Approve - opens a dialog so you can authorise the exact number of minutes (handy when only part of the extra time was genuine).
Decline - writes off that day's pending hours (final, with a confirmation).
Mark reviewed - for a short day, to acknowledge it (the shortfall is still deducted; reviewing doesn't add the hours back).

The Breakdown also has period-wide Approve all pending and Decline all pending buttons, and shows running totals of Worked / Authorised / Pending / Declined.

When to use which: bulk Approve selected is for the common case where the extra time is legitimate and you just need to sign it off. Open the Breakdown whenever you need to decline something, pay only part of a day, or look at exactly which days drove the numbers.

6. Done when every row reads "? Up to date"

Once nothing is pending, the team's hours are ready for payroll. That is the finish line for the period.

Why hours are "missing"

The Missing figure answers "scheduled time that wasn't worked and isn't being paid." It is shortfall (days worked under the schedule) plus unpaid leave. It's there so an under-time person is visible before payroll - and it's read-only, a window into the data, not an action.

Click a row's Missing value to open a breakdown with two lists:

Worked under scheduled hours - each short day with its Scheduled, Worked and Missing minutes.
Unpaid leave - each unpaid-leave day and how much it removed.

From there, click any date to open that day's attendance - its status, worked / authorised / overtime / deficient totals, and the actual clock-in / clock-out punches (direction, time, device). This is the quickest way to see why a day came up short before you decide how to act.

Missing is not the same as Unauthorised. Unauthorised is extra time waiting for your approval; Missing is time the person didn't work (so there's nothing to approve - it's a shortfall/unpaid matter, settled per the weekly rule).

Good to know

Overtime is a weekly calculation. Approving only some days inside a period recomputes each week those days touch. A week's overtime is final only once the week has fully elapsed and is entirely inside your period; otherwise the figure is provisional and the screen says so.
Declines are permanent. There is no un-decline by design. If in doubt, approve fewer minutes rather than declining.
Payroll-locked (frozen) weeks can't be changed. Once a week is locked for pay, approve/decline no longer affect it.
Before the weekly-engine start date, earlier days are recorded only - no beyond-ordinary hours are calculated or approved for them. If your period straddles that date, the screen flags it and only the later days count.
Reports vs action. Manage hours is where you act. For read-only pay numbers across people, HR uses Employee hours for HR (Hours per Person) and Hours Analytics - those don't change anything.

How working time is calculated - the full model behind these numbers (ordinary hours, overtime rates, authorised/declined).
Manage schedules - set the ordinary hours this screen measures against.
Manage your team's leave - approve and reject leave for the same team.
Attendance status field definitions - what each attendance badge means.
Clock in and out remotely - how the worked hours are captured in the first place.