1) Overview
2) Autumn change (clocks move back)
3) Spring change (clocks move forward)
1) Overview
Easy Employer handles daylight savings automatically through logic that has been built into the system. This means that if a shift is affected by the daylight savings change, an additional hour is added or removed from it automatically.
It is key to remember how the clocks move during this change. An easy way to remember it is 'Spring forward, Fall back' (Fall being an alternate word for Autumn).
In Spring the clocks move forward one hour at 2 am, therefore one hour will be lost out of a shift that crosses that threshold. A shift being worked at the start of the daylight savings will be an hour shorter than normal.
On the other hand, in Autumn the clocks move back at 2 am adding one extra hour to the day. This means that an 8 hour shift on this day will have to pay 9 hours if it crosses this threshold.
In these cases, the shifts times in Easy Employer won't reflect any change, but the duration of the shift will.
IMPORTANT:
Whether daylight savings applies or not to an Organisation is determined by the account's time zone settings. If the account is set to a location where daylight savings is observed, it then applies across the entire organisation, even for those sites that operate in states that do not observe it.
In other words, when daylight savings applies to the account, it applies to all sites in the Organisation regardless of their location, and automatic adjustments to the duration of shifts affected by the daylight saving change, even on sites where such adjustment is not necessary, are inevitable, and manual changes to these shifts will be required during payroll processing.
2) Autumn change (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 ('D:') is 9 hours. This has happened because at 3:00 am the clocks moved back to 2:00 am adding an additional hour to this shift.
NOTE:
If a shift ends at 2 am on the day daylight savings occurs, no issue exists if the shift is clocked by the user at exactly that time. This can potentially be confusing for some users, as there are effectively two 2 am periods on this day (as clocks move back an hour at 3 am, reverting to 2 am).
In this situation the time clock records the correct duration that a user has clocked. For example, User 1 could have clocked out at the first 2 am interval, while User 2 clocked out at the second. In this case, and assuming both users started at the same time, User 1 would have one hour less against the shift duration than User 2, even though both time shifts have the same end time (2 am). The system automatically records the correct shift duration for the clocked shifts.
3) Spring change (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.