In some situations, you can have employees who work non-standard hours involving two or more blocks of work on the same day. For example, an employee may work shifts, or have hours that involve more than one start time in the same day.

The most common example is a shift worker who finishes a shift in the morning and begins their next shift in the evening.

EXAMPLE: 

Suppose that a night-shift employee works three days in a row. In a case like this, the employee's start and end times occur on two different dates.

• Monday night 7PM – 7AM, with a one-hour break
• Tuesday night 7PM – 7AM, with a one-hour break
• Wednesday night 7PM – 7AM, with a one-hour break

The employee's Total Working Time for each day is:

• Monday: 5 hours
• Tuesday: 7 hours + 5 hours - 1 hour break = 11 hours
• Wednesday: 7 hours + 5 hours - 1 hour break = 11 hours
• Thursday: 7 hours -1 hour break = 6 hours

  Total = 33 hours

A working pattern can reflect only a single block of work in each day. Because of this, there is a particular way of ensuring that the correct Total Working Hours values are recorded by the payroll system.

In the working pattern defined below, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday each only reflect 5 hours of the employee's work. Subtracting an hour of break time, this gives a total of 12 hours in the week, rather than 33 hours.

To ensure that the correct total working hours is reflected in the working pattern, you need to manually edit the Total Working Time column.

1. On the menu bar, click Company/Payroll then click Working Patterns.
2. Select the relevant working pattern, then click Edit.
3. Select the Edit 'Total Working Time' values check box.
4. Make the necessary changes to the values in the Total Working Time column.

In our example, the correct working times will total 33 hours.

1. Click Save, then click OK.
2. To close the Working Patterns window, click Cancel.

You have ensured that the working pattern records the correct Total Working Hours for every employee to whom the working pattern is assigned.