This article provides an introduction to overnight time tracking in Personio. With overnight time tracking, your employees can track shifts that cross midnight as a single, continuous time entry. This ensures accurate time tracking, compliance rule application, and payroll processing for night shift workers. It also means less manual work for you, as it eliminates the need for workarounds.

Access overnight time tracking

• As an Administrator, you can configure work schedule settings from Settings > Time off & attendance > Attendance.
• Employees can track their working hours, including overnight shifts, from Time Off & Attendance > Attendance. This feature is available to all employee roles with propose permissions for Attendance data.

Create work schedules for overnight workers

You can create work schedules to reflect the real working hours of your overnight workers. This is particularly useful for employees on work schedules with fixed start and end times. By creating fixed overnight work schedules, you can better ensure accuracy across time tracking, time off requests, and compensation.

Learn how to create work schedules for overnight workers.

Understand the workday split threshold

The workday split threshold is a setting in work schedules. It defines how long a break can be during a night shift before the system treats it as the start of a new workday. The setting applies to both daytime and overnight workers but is particularly important to overnight work. 

Learn more about the workday split threshold.

Understand overnight time tracking and attribution logic

Employees can track overnight shifts (shifts that cross midnight) as one continuous time entry. Review the attribution logic and how this works in the different scenarios provided.

Understand attribution logic

Personio applies a certain logic when attributing tracked hours to calendar days. To understand this logic, review the use cases and examples below.

Personio saves an employee’s time entry to the day the shift starts if:

• They have a fixed work schedule that starts on one day and finishes on another, or
• Their work schedule has target hours only

For example, consider an employee who starts their shift on Monday at 22:00 and finishes on Tuesday at 06:00. Personio saves their shift to Monday. This helps ensure their time tracking entries, time off requests, and compensation are accurate.

In the employee’s time entry, you can see a +1 label next to the time they finish. This indicates that the shift ended on the following day. For example, an overnight time entry might be Monday, 1 January, 22:00–06:00(+1).

Examples:

Personio saves the employee’s time entry to the day they were scheduled to work if:

• They have an early morning work schedule, or 
• Their schedule starts at midnight and they start tracking time before midnight

When this happens, Personio uses a -1 label to indicate that the period started on the previous day.

Example:

Personio can also save a tracked period to a different day: 

It does this if it determines that the time belongs to the other day’s shift. This can happen if the employee takes a half day off, for example.

Understand how time off works for overnight shifts

Overnight work schedules with fixed start and end times

Personio aligns time off with overnight shifts so that expectations and balances stay accurate, especially for night‑shift workers.

For full-day and half‑day time off:

• The system attributes the request to the shift.
• The time off covers the relevant portion of that overnight shift.
• The reduction in target hours always applies to the shift start day.

For hourly time off periods:

• The request applies to when the time off will occur
• The reduction of  target hours always applies to the shift start day

Examples:

Overnight work schedules with target hours only (no start and end times)

For schedules without explicit start and end times, the behavior remains unchanged. For example, “Monday to Friday, eight target hours per day”. All time off reduces the target hours of the calendar day it’s requested for.

Examples:

Report on overnight attendance periods

Reports you create in the Analytics area don’t yet consider the logic for overnight periods.  For example:

• Tracked period: April 7, work 02:00 (+1) – 06:00 (+1)
• Displayed in reports: April 8, period start 02:00, period end 06:00

We plan to address this limitation later in the year. As a temporary solution, you can access a CSV export from the Attendance tab of each employee profile via the gear icon. This export includes all data related to overnight periods with +1 and -1 labels.

More information

To learn more about overnight time tracking, refer to the following resources:

• Create work schedules
• Track your working hours
• Summary of work schedule settings 
• Review your attendance data 
• Submit a flexible work schedule