Core concepts

Shifts, scheduling & leave

Shifts define when each person is expected to work. They shape how time is labelled — productive hours inside a shift, overtime outside it — and they anchor scheduling and leave. Shifts are a Startup-and-up capability; the personal schedule calendar is available on every plan.

The Shifts page is where you define shift templates (start and end times, plus optional breaks and overnight support) and assign them to your team across specific dates. The Schedule page shows the resulting calendar — a personal view for everyone, and team views for managers.

No shift means overtime, not 9-to-5

This is the rule that matters most. TimerOS does not assume a default 09:00–18:00 day. When someone works outside their configured shift hours, the desktop tracker remaps their states: productive becomes overtime, and idle or break become off-work (off-work is never counted or sent). A day with no shift assigned is treated as time outside any shift — so that work is credited as overtime, not as a hidden default schedule.

Freelancer & no-shift workspaces
A workspace without the Shifts feature tracks the whole day as regular time instead of overtime. In that mode, productive stays productive rather than flipping to overtime. See time states for the full breakdown.

Timezone-aware shift windows

Shift windows are evaluated against each employee’s canonical timezone, not the machine clock — an anti-tamper measure. If the timezone is unset, the tracker falls back to the local clock. You can set your timezone in desktop Settings or on the website under workspace settings.

Assigning shifts

  • Build reusable shift templates with start/end times and optional breaks.
  • Assign templates to team members; assigned shifts appear in each person’s Schedule calendar.
  • Overnight shifts are supported because shift evaluation is a time-window check rather than a fixed daytime block; each shift is evaluated as a single contiguous window per day.

Leave, time-off & approvals

Leave and time-off requests are approved from a pending-requests panel on the Shifts page (Startup and up), where an authorized manager approves or rejects them. Pre-approved leave and balance tracking are part of the shifts and scheduling domain surfaced inside the desktop dashboard. Leave decisions also surface on the Approvals page: time-off requests share its Pending and My Requests tabs, so a team leader or above can approve or reject leave from either place. The Approvals page itself covers a broader set of workspace actions — org-structure changes, employee transfers, and project, billing, and shift-assignment requests among them.

Tier & honesty note
Shifts and Approvals require Startup or above; the Schedule page itself is available on every plan, while its team and organization views are gated by your role and access level rather than by plan. Leave writes are enforced server-side along the same access ladder as the rest of scheduling — members act on their own leave only, team leaders within their team, managers within their department, and C-level across the whole workspace. Reach out at [email protected] with questions.