Working time accounting in manufacturing: a guide

In a plant that runs around the clock on two 12-hour shifts, working time accounting is more than a present or absent mark. For every shift you need to know several things at once.

• Planned and actual hours. How many hours were on the schedule and how many the person actually worked, including late arrivals, early departures and staying after the shift ended.
• Hours over a reference period. With rotating shifts no two weeks look alike: one has four shifts, the next has two. So hours are compared with the standard not week by week but over a reference period — a month, a quarter or another period your plant has set.
• Night hours. A night shift from 20:00 to 08:00 partly falls into night time and crosses midnight, so its hours belong to two calendar days.
• Breaks. Rest and meal breaks are usually not counted as working time. What matters is that the rule is written down and the same for every shift.
• Overtime. Actual extra work and approved overtime are different things: the first is a fact, the second is a manager’s decision.
• The timesheet. The period total that payroll uses to calculate pay.

Many jurisdictions allow working hours to be averaged over a reference period where continuous production makes a fixed daily or weekly length impossible. The general idea is the same everywhere: total hours over the period must not exceed the standard hours for that period.

How long the period is, who has to agree to it, how night work and overtime are defined and paid, and which timesheet format is required all differ by country and sometimes by collective agreement.

This is general information, not legal advice. Agree your plant’s rules — reference period, breaks, night hours, overtime approval — with your legal adviser and payroll team before you rely on the numbers.

• Recorded after the fact. Arrival times are written from memory at the end of the shift or the week, and “08:00” in the log often means “roughly on time”.
• Night shifts across midnight. In a spreadsheet the 20:00–08:00 shift splits over two days and is easy to count twice or not at all.
• Corrections without a trace. In a spreadsheet cell the new value simply replaces the old one. A month later nobody can say who changed 10 hours to 12, or why.
• Several sources. The gate log, the supervisor’s schedule, messenger chats and payroll’s timesheet disagree, and the differences are sorted out by phone.
• Overtime after the fact. Staying late is agreed verbally and then appears in or disappears from the timesheet depending on who fills it in.
• Broken formulas. One pasted value or a shifted row, and the monthly total is wrong for a whole department.

As a result, payroll receives a timesheet it cannot trust without manual checks, and workers argue about their hours.

Trust in a digital record rests on a few properties.

• Event time, not entry time. The record is made at the moment of arrival, departure or break, and the system stores the exact instant together with the site’s time zone.
• Place. Where the mark was made: the gate, the area, the terminal.
• Author and channel. Who made the record — the worker, the supervisor or an automatic closure — and how.
• Corrections with a reason. Mistakes are inevitable, so a correction must be possible, but with a reason, an author and a time.
• History that does not change. The original record is never overwritten: the correction is added on top, and anyone with access sees both.
• Open questions. If a departure was not recorded, the system does not invent a time; it marks it as unknown for follow-up.

This example is fictional. The pattern is two days, two nights, four days off; a shift lasts 12 hours, of which one hour of breaks is not counted as working time. That makes 11 planned working hours per shift and 44 hours in a week with four shifts. The example counts 22:00–06:00 as night time.

• Monday, day shift 08:00–20:00. QR arrival at 07:52, departure at 20:06. Worked 11 h as planned.
• Tuesday, day shift. Arrival at 08:14 — 14 minutes late. Worked 10 h 46 min.
• Wednesday, night shift 20:00–08:00. Worked 11 h, including 40 minutes of downtime for missing material, recorded as a separate category. Both breaks fell at night, so night hours: 7.
• Thursday, night shift. No departure recorded. The shift was closed automatically with time counted to the planned end at 08:00, and the actual departure was marked unknown. The supervisor found out that the worker stayed until 09:30 waiting for the area to be accepted and entered a correction with that reason. Worked 12 h 30 min, including 1 h 30 min of extra work that the production head approved as overtime. Night hours: 7.
• Friday to Sunday. Days off.

Week total: planned 44 h, actual 45 h 16 min, night 14 h, late 14 min, downtime 40 min within working time, overtime 1 h 30 min, one correction with a reason.

44 hours in one week is more than 40, but when hours are averaged over a reference period, the standard is compared with the total for the whole period, not with a single week.

• Pick one department and one reference period. Moving the whole plant at once usually creates more questions than answers.
• Write down the rules: shift and break lengths, what counts as late, how overtime is approved, who may correct time.
• Publish the schedule before the period starts: actual hours cannot be compared without a plan.
• Run the new records alongside the old ones for one period and go through every difference: a recording error or a different rule.
• At the end of the period, ask payroll to close the timesheet from the new data and note what was missing.
• Only then extend it to other departments.

In Vakhta a worker scans the QR code on the terminal at the gate with their phone, and the Telegram bot records the arrival and links it to the shift in the published schedule. During the shift, time is split into intervals: work, preparation, service, break, meal, downtime. Departure is recorded by QR after the report; if it is missing, the shift is closed automatically with time counted to the planned end, and the actual departure is marked unknown.

The Time and discipline report shows planned and actual hours, late arrivals, breaks and downtime, with actual extra work and approved overtime kept separate, and has an export for payroll. A supervisor or HR corrects time with a reason; original records do not change, and the correction history is kept. Vakhta does not replace your payroll software: payments and taxes stay there.

1. Period: reference period and department
2. Worker: full name, employee number, position
3. Schedule: standard hours for the reference period
4. Shift: start date and type — day or night
5. Shift: planned start and end
6. Actual: arrival and departure with source — QR, supervisor, unknown
7. Actual: breaks and meals not counted as working time
8. Actual: hours worked
9. Actual: of which night hours
10. Actual: downtime not caused by the worker
11. Deviations: late arrival and early departure
12. Overtime: actual extra work and approved hours, separately
13. Absence: vacation, sick leave, day off, with the basis
14. Correction: what changed, by whom, when and why
15. Total: hours worked in the period against the standard
16. Sign-off: who checked the timesheet and when