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 you configure in time tracking policies. 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. 

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

Personio supports reporting on overnight attendance periods. An overnight attendance period typically starts on one calendar day and ends on the next (for example, a shift that starts on Monday at 22:00 and ends on Tuesday at 06:00). The attributes below support this logic and are important for overnight reporting:

• As well as the attribute Attendance start date, you can also find an attribute for Attendance end date. This attribute is particularly relevant for reporting on overnight periods, as it lets you show shifts that span two dates. 
• The attributes Attendance start time and Attendance end time allow for further granularity. You can also filter by these attributes to identify and show only overnight attendance periods. For example, if your overnight workers typically start their shifts at 22:00, you might apply the filter "Attendance start time is on or after 22:00".
• The attribute Attendance attribution date refers to the calendar day that the tracked hours belong to, which might not necessarily be the same as the attendance start date. Personio applies a certain logic when attributing tracked hours to calendar days. Refer to the section above to learn about attribution logic.

To report on overnight attendance periods, create a report and apply the attributes above as needed. When you set the report's time period via the calendar icon, the system uses the Attendance attribution date attribute to determine which attendance entries to display.

More information

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

• Create work schedules
• Submit a flexible work schedule
• Track your working hours