Prior to setting up Deviation Rules in Planday, we encourage you to visit the Fair Work Commission Awards finder page or contact the Fair Work Ombudsman to discuss this further. Getting this right is very important and sets the foundation for paying your employees correctly. You should also seek any independent legal advice as appropriate for your business. Please also note that overriding the breaks or hours required for your employee could be in breach of your compliance obligations. You should seek independent legal advice as appropriate for your business.

Punch Clock deviation rules can help you automate some of your administrative tasks for shifts that differ from their scheduled punch times. Once you have configured the rules, Planday keeps track of your employees' hours and the changes between their actual working hours and their scheduled hours. The deviations will show as suggestions along the rest of the shift in the timesheet approval to be approved by an admin or schedule manager.

With deviation rules, you can configure Planday to automatically:

To begin with, create a deviation rule by going to Settings > Punch Clock > Advanced > Deviations from scheduled time > Create.

After clicking on Create, you can choose which scenarios you want to track and what you want to happen when the selected scenario occurs. You can make changes at a later time if the initial setup does not suit your scheduling needs.

Name - This will be used as the name displayed in the deviation rules list. Choose something descriptive, that can remind you what the rule is used for at a quick glance. As an example, you could name a rule that tracks when an employee leaves

after the end of a shift, as "After-shift overtime"

Deviation type - The different deviation types describe different scenarios where you can define what should happen when the scenario occurs. Below you can read more about what the different types are used for.

Final shift type - Defines the Shift type that will be applied to the new shift made by the deviation. For example, if an employee stamps out too late, it can generate overtime according to a deviation rule. See the example below for this use case.

Minimum length - Defines the minimum number of minutes the deviation must be before this rule processes it. 0 means that the rule affects all deviations.

Start of shift - Defines from where in a deviation this rule should start, as time in minutes. 0 means that the rule should apply to the whole deviation.

Length - Defines how long a deviation of this rule should be treated, as time in minutes. 60 would mean 1hr.

Depending on your requirements, you can choose to limit your Deviation Rules to only apply under certain conditions. You can set them using the following settings. By default, the rule applies to All shifts and employees.

Shift types - Apply the rule only to specific Shift types.

Departments - Apply the deviation rule only to certain Departments.

Employee groups - Limit the deviation to only certain groups of employees by selecting an Employee group.

Employee types - Apply the rule only to some Employee types.

Remember to click on Save and continue the same process for all desired Deviation rules that you create.

To show how deviation rules work in practice, here is an example with the type Shift length exceeded.

First, the rule is created by going to Settings > Punch clock > Advanced > Deviations from scheduled time > Create.

This deviation type is used when you want to specify what should happen when employees have been at work for too long. You want to count their hours as overtime by applying a Shift type.

The Minimum length is set to 15. This is the minimum number of minutes the shift must be exceeded before the rule takes effect.

The length is set to 120 minutes which indicates that the rule is valid for up to 2 hours.

⬆️ In the example above, the employee has a shift from 4 pm - 9 pm. He stamps in 30 minutes before the start of the shift and stamps out 35 minutes after the end time of the shift. This gives a total of 1 hour and 5 minutes affected by the above deviation rule.

Under Timesheets (1) > click on the timesheet entry (2), you can see how the shift is divided up if the deviation rule is used. The first 5 hours have the shift type Normal and the remaining time of 1.05 hours has automatically been given the shift type Overtime (3).

When the shift is approved, you can see the division in the shift schedule as shown below:

See related articles: