When should you clock in and out? The plain answer: record your real start before you begin, and your real finish the moment you stop. Not from memory three days later.
You record these times yourself, which is how it should be. You are the one standing there, so you are the one who knows the exact minute the work started and stopped.
Put simply: the time you never recorded is the time you never worked, as far as any calculation is concerned. Log it as it happens and you avoid that argument completely.
Five extra minutes on every shift adds up to roughly two and a half hours a month. If you never wrote them down, those hours are gone, and you cannot claim what you cannot show.
Guessing hurts in the other direction too. Rough times make your totals wrong, so the difference between expected and actual hours shows up at the end of the month with no explanation you can point to.
If the work stops for half an hour because of a breakdown or a wait, record that too. Time spent on site under instruction is not the same as time spent off the floor and free.
Most workers who find a gap at the end of the month do one of these things:
The easiest method is to record at the moment itself, not later. One minute at arrival and one minute at the end keeps your record accurate for the whole month.
Shiftat-E lets you record your shifts and hours quickly from your phone and compare expected against actual hours before the month closes, while there is still time to fix a mistake.
Record arrival, actual start, break, handover, and finish. Five simple entries protect your pay, and none of them needs more than a few seconds of your time.
Ready to take control of your hours? Download Shiftat-E free from Google Play at this link to record your shifts and plan your leave from your phone.
