How to track clock-in and clock-out times
06.09.2026
Tracking clock-in and clock-out times looks simple at first: the time in, the time out, and the difference between them. In practice this is exactly where most companies get lost - breaks, shift changes, business trips, remote work and corrections all complicate the calculation. This guide explains how the hours should be tracked, which details are usually overlooked, and the approach that makes the process manageable.
What is being tracked
The values being tracked are four moments: the start of the working day, the beginning and end of the break, and the end of the working day. Once the schedule is applied to them, four figures emerge:
- Planned hours - what the schedule requires.
- Actual hours - what the real records produce.
- Lateness and early leave - deviation from the plan.
- Overtime - time worked beyond the plan.
Without this set of four the report stays incomplete: knowing only the actual hours tells you nothing about whether the employee was late.
The details most often missed
The following cases exist in almost every company and are frequently reflected incorrectly:
- Night shifts. The date changes at midnight and one shift is split across two days.
- The lunch break. In some companies it counts as working time, in others it does not - the rule must be written.
- Business trips and field work. The employee does not come to the office but the day still counts.
- Partial days. Half-day leave, medical certificates, training.
- Forgotten check-outs. There is an entry but no exit - what should the system do?
The last point matters most. If the rule is not defined in advance, dozens of such cases are resolved by hand every month and confidence in the report falls.
The cost of manual tracking
A spreadsheet works for a small team. Past thirty people the hidden costs appear: filling in the sheet, investigating mismatches, agreeing corrections and assembling the report.
| Operation | Manual | Automatic |
|---|---|---|
| Daily record | Written by hand | Created instantly |
| Hour calculation | Formula or calculator | Automatic, by schedule |
| Correction | No trace | Who and when is recorded |
| Monthly report | Hours of work | A few minutes |
How automatic tracking is set up
- Schedules are written: standard, shift and flexible patterns separately.
- The break rule is defined - included in working time or not.
- A lateness threshold is set (for example ten minutes).
- Recording points are defined.
- Correction rights are granted to a small number of people for exceptions.
These five steps are set up once and touched again only when a schedule changes. The calculation logic itself is covered in more depth on the automatic working time calculation page.
A practical example
At a marketing agency 25 people worked flexibly: arrival was free between 9:00 and 11:00, with a daily norm of eight hours. The spreadsheet could not model this correctly because it had no concept of lateness - only a daily target.
During the move to a system the rule was written explicitly: arrival up to 11:00 is not lateness, and the key figure is the eight-hour daily norm. A month later the report showed that half the team averaged more than eight hours a day, yet none of it had ever been recorded as overtime.
The schedule was reviewed and overtime began to be tracked separately. The lesson is that automatic tracking reveals not only lateness but also the opposite side - unpaid extra hours.
Communicating with the team
Tracking hours can create anxiety. There are three practical ways to prevent it:
- Announce the rule in advance and in writing.
- Give employees access to their own records.
- Provide a clear route for correction requests.
With those three in place the system is read as a shared record-keeping tool rather than a monitoring device.
Accounting for breaks
The break is the most disputed element of hour calculation, because departments within the same company apply it differently. Three approaches exist, and all three are legitimate - the mistake is not writing the choice down.
In the first, a fixed deduction is applied: one hour per working day regardless of records. It is the simplest option but does not always reflect reality. In the second, the break is recorded by check-in and check-out - accurate, but it requires two extra records a day. In the third, the break counts as working time because the employee stays on site.
Whichever is chosen, the decision must be made once and applied identically everywhere. Otherwise two people in the same role can differ by twenty hours a month, and when that difference reaches pay it produces complaints.
Remote and field work
Employees working away from the office need a separate approach, and two models work in practice.
The first is point-based: the employee checks in when arriving at a site and when leaving it. This produces hour allocation per site, which is an additional benefit for service companies - it shows how much time each client actually consumed.
The second is task-based: time is recorded against the work performed. This is closer to project accounting and suits creative teams.
For remote workers the essential rule is that the concepts of norm and overtime must remain. Without them the working day becomes unbounded, which is the most frequently documented problem of remote work.
Handing the report to payroll
The final purpose of tracking hours is pay, and this stage is often overlooked. Records are collected accurately, the calculation is correct, and then the result is manually reworked to fit the payroll template.
To remove that repeated task the format should be agreed once with the payroll team: which columns are needed, how hours are rounded, whether overtime appears on a separate line, and whether night hours are separated.
The agreement is a single meeting; the saving repeats every month. In practice some companies that automate tracking skip this step and give back a large part of the time they gained.
What to measure
Four indicators are enough to judge the quality of tracking: the monthly number of incomplete records, the share of manually corrected rows, the average gap between plan and fact, and the date the report becomes ready.
Comparing these before the rollout and three months later makes the result undeniable. The second one deserves particular attention: if the correction share stays high, the problem is not employee discipline but the way recording is organised - the position of the point, the clarity of the rule or the absence of reminders.
The next step
If hours are currently kept in a spreadsheet, it is easier to start the change in one department. Let the records be collected automatically for a month, then compare them with the old sheet. The difference is usually larger than expected.
QRGate makes this possible without additional hardware. See what QRGate can do or calculate the price.
