Overview

Employee Scheduling is a part of the Sparkrock 2016 solution and allows employees and unit supervisors to manage their unit schedules, bid on and fill shifts, handle shift absences, and otherwise manage shift-based work assignments.

To use scheduling, you must have implemented the Payroll Administration granule, and all employees who are going to use scheduling must have Employee Center users configured in the Sparkrock 2016 back end. This is necessary to establish the positions and pay cycles used by scheduling.

Note: Employee Scheduling in Sparkrock 2016 uses entirely new tables from the previous Scheduling solution. There is no conversion process, it is necessary to re-implement to move to the new employee scheduling solution. Please speak with your Project Manager or support representative for more information.

How Employee Scheduling Handles Overnight Shifts

An overnight shift is any shift that spans midnight (for example, 8 pm to 8 am). With overnight shifts its important to use the actual date worked when calculating overtime and performing other payroll calculations. This can be a challenge with overnight shifts as they transfer to payroll with the date the shift started.

When the system encounters an overnight shift, it checks to see if an activity has a start time after midnight. If an activity has a start time after midnight, when transferred to Payroll Journal Line enter work date that is the shift's Work Date +1 (the next day). Activities that cross midnight will be allocated to the day in which they BEGIN. 

When creating overnight shifts, the best practice is to split activities at midnight.

A note about Daylight Savings Time (DST)

Like most modern computing systems, Employee Scheduling shift dates and times are stored internally in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). UTC does not implement daylight savings time, thus it is best practice for shifts not to span the DST changeover time (typically 2:00 am) on the days of the changeover, so that shift and activity durations can be computed correctly.