This article contains the following topics:
- How daylight savings is handled in easyemployer
- Daylight savings clocks move back
- Daylight savings clocks move forward
How is daylight savings handled in easyemployer
Daylight savings is handled automatically in easyemployer. Daylight savings does not happen in all locations across Australia. There is some logic that has been built into the system to ensure daylight savings is handled correctly. Daylight savings is handled against an account meaning that daylight savings will be taken across an entire account when it has been enabled. This could be an issue if organisations have sites that operate in states that observe and don't observe daylight savings. If daylight savings is enabled for the account then it will be applied to all sites regardless of their location. This means that an additional hour will be added or removed from a shift that is affected by daylight savings.
A key thing to remember is how the clocks move. An easy way to remember this is 'Spring forward, Fall back' (Fall being an alternate word for Autumn). In Spring the clocks move forward meaning an hour will be lost, or a shift being worked during a daylight savings time change will be an hour shorter than normal. In Autumn the clocks move back by 1 hour at 2am. This means that an 8 hour shift on this day is will need to pay 9 hours if the shift crosses the 2am threshold.
The shifts times will not reflect any change but the duration will.
Daylight savings clocks move back
In the image below the shift begins at 10:00 pm and finishes at 6:00 am. This shift would normally be 8 hours in duration but in the example below the duration (next to the 'D:') is 9 hours. This has happened because at 3:00 am the clocks moved back to 2:00 am adding an additional hour in this shift.
NOTE: If a shift ends at 2 am on daylight savings no issue exists if the shift has been clocked by the user. This can be potentially confusing for users as there are effectively two 2 am periods on this day (as when the clocks move back an hour at 3 am it will revert to 2 am). In this situation the timeclock will record the correct duration that a user has clocked. For example a user 1 could have clocked out at the first 2 am interval while user 2 clocked out at the second. In this case user 1 would have one less hour against the shift duration than user 2. The easyemployer system will automatically record the shift duration for the clocked shifts.
Daylight savings clocks move forward
In the image below the shift has been clocked between 10:00 pm and finishes at 6:00 am. This shift's duration is only 7 hours instead of 8 hours. As daylight savings has caused the clocks to move forward an hour, this occurred at 2:00 am when the clock jumped to 3:00 am. The shift's duration is correct as an hour has been lost to daylight savings.
