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: set your team's working pattern and Team Leave Report: a record of approved leave. 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: ordinary hours, overtime & authorised time.

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.

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, up to the weekly overtime cap.
• Under the weekly contract - the missing hours are a shortfall, which is deducted.

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)

• 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 (plus any overtime trimmed by the weekly cap). The amber number is your to-do list.
• Declined — beyond-schedule hours a manager refused. Not paid. It can only be undone by the audited Revert decline… action, which needs a reason.
• Deficient / Shortfall — time an employee fell short of their schedule (worked less than expected).
• Missing — scheduled hours that were not worked and are not paid. This is shortfall only: unpaid leave was approved, so it is not counted here. Shown per row and clickable to see exactly which days. Already net of any overtime/extra work elsewhere in the period - a day's dip covered by overtime on another day doesn't count.
• Overtime — authorised hours that push a person past their weekly ordinary contract. Calculated automatically, per week, and capped 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.

The decisions you can make on a day

• Approve - "this extra time was real, pay it." All of that day's pending minutes move into Authorised immediately and count toward weekly overtime once the week passes the ordinary contract.
• Approve part… - authorise only some of the day's pending minutes. The Approve part of this day dialog asks for Minutes to approve and a Reason (required) explaining why the employee is not getting the full amount. The remainder stays pending - it is never silently written off.
• Decline - "this should not be paid." After a confirmation ("Write off … for this day? This is final.") the minutes are written off into Declined.
• Revert decline… - the audited undo. Available on any day that has declined minutes; the Revert decline dialog returns them to the pending bucket for a fresh decision and needs a Reason (required).
• Correct day classification… - for a day that was stamped wrongly in the past (for example a rest day recorded as a working day). Audited, and only for people with the recalculation permission.

Approve and Decline only appear once the day is complete. While a day is still in progress the row reads "In progress — review once the day ends".

Walking through the screen

1. Choose a period

The buttons at the top - Today, Week, Month, Custom, Pay group - set the window. Use the ‹ › arrows to step back and forward through weeks, months or pay cycles, or pick a Custom From/To range. Pay group shows a picker for which pay group's cut-off cycle to use (for example 26th to 25th) and then steps whole cycles - the quickest way to see exactly what a pay run will include. A longer window (Month/Custom/Pay group) 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 - 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 - 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 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 - the same view you land on from My Hours if it's your own). Each completed day with pending minutes has Approve and Decline buttons, and every day has a 3-dot menu with Approve part…, Revert decline… (when there are declined minutes), Correct day classification…, Adjust schedule (for a custom-scheduled day), Edit punches, and Recalculate day.

Above the day-by-day grid, a "Pay breakdown · this cycle" table gives the same at-a-glance summary for that one employee's current pay-group cut-off cycle - grouped into five bands:

• Hours - Ordinary (scheduled), Worked, and Authorised.
• Pay calculation - the ×1 ordinary portion, ×1.5 and Sunday ×2 overtime, the combined weighted Total OT, Payable, and Total payable (including paid leave).
• Status - whether the employee's schedule is overtime-eligible, and any unpaid "Extra" hours on a schedule that isn't.
• Not paid - Missing (click it for the same day-by-day breakdown described below), Unauthorised (with a chat icon to message the employee's manager, when that's someone else), and Declined.
• Leave - leave days taken, unpaid leave, and absent days for the cycle.

A caption under the table also shows the cycle's overtime split (weekday/Saturday/Sunday/public holiday) and any overtime carried in from or out to the next cycle. The Breakdown also has period-wide Approve all pending and Decline all pending buttons.

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, revert a decline, 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 the shortfall (days worked under the schedule), already net of any overtime or extra work elsewhere in the period, so a day's dip that's covered by overtime on another day doesn't count. Unpaid leave is not part of it - unpaid leave was approved, so it is reported under Leave instead. Missing is 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 - on the Team Hours list, or on the "Pay breakdown" table in the Breakdown view - to open the Scheduled hours not worked / not paid dialog. A reconciliation line at the top shows the per-day dips below schedule, the amount offset by other-day / overtime work, and the net missing (not paid) figure - the days listed can total more than the net figure because a day worked at or above schedule cancels out a weekday dip. Below it, Worked under scheduled hours lists each short day with its Scheduled, Worked and Missing minutes.

From the Team Hours list, click any date in that dialog 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 matter, settled per the weekly rule).

How the Pay breakdown compares with Hours and pay

The Pay breakdown table above the day grid is the same row of figures HR sees for this person on Employee hours for HR, the report whose page is headed Hours and pay. Both come out of one calculation, so the ordinary, worked, authorised, leave and not-paid figures agree between the two screens.

The Pay breakdown is the shorter view of the two. It leaves out the two public-holiday pay columns and the per-leave-type columns the report carries, showing a single Leave (days) total instead, and it adds the overtime split caption underneath, which the report does not have.

One difference is real rather than cosmetic. Overtime on the report is totalled over whole Monday to Sunday weeks, while the Pay breakdown totals everything over the pay cycle's cut-off. When a week straddles the cut-off, the two overtime figures - and the payable figures built on them - can legitimately differ. The ordinary hours still agree, so a gap between the two screens is normally an overtime week boundary rather than a mistake.

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.
• The weekly overtime cap trims approved time. Approved overtime beyond the weekly cap (10 hours by default) is moved back to unauthorised and is not paid, and the day is flagged. Plan the week, not just the day.
• Declines can be reverted, but only deliberately. Revert decline… is audited and needs a reason, so a decline is still a real decision - if in doubt, use Approve part… rather than declining everything.
• 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.

Related guides

• How working time is calculated: ordinary hours, overtime & authorised time - the full model behind these numbers (ordinary hours, overtime rates, authorised/declined, the weekly cap).
• Manage schedules: set your team's working pattern - 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.