Time Clock Departments

You can create Time Clock Departments to help you track hours that were worked within each department. This is especially helpful if your staff have multiple rates of pay or if you separate out the payroll expense by department. Departments are optional and can be named anything that works well for your organization.

  • If you have multiple rates of pay for your staff depending on the type of work performed, it’s important to consider this when naming the departments. In most cases, you will want to name the departments similar to what the pay rates are based on. Example: Jen Smith works both as a teacher and in the office. Jen is paid a different rate for each: $15/hr Teacher and $10/hr Office. It would be best to name the Departments Teacher and Office. This will help when you transfer the total hours to the payroll processor because her total hours are already split between the departments.
  • If you have multiple programs and multiple rates of pay, your departments would most likely be named after the different programs. Example: Jen may work in the Dance department for $18/hr and the Gymnastics department for $16/hr.
  • If you have a single rate of pay per staff person, you may still want to create departments in order to keep track of how many hours are being worked in each department. 

Examples of department names might be by program (gym, dance, swim, office), by type of work activity (teaching, private, party, admin) or a combination of both (gym-teach, gym-private, dance-party, office-admin, etc.).  Note: Although the field will take up to 10 characters, only the first 5 characters are exported when you export the file.  Therefore, make sure that the first five characters of each Department name is UNIQUE.   

Assign Departments

  1. Point to Staff (menu) > Staff Portal > Portal Settings.
  2. Click the Add Department button in The Time Clock Departments section, to add a new department.
  3. In the Add Department window, give the department a short abbreviation Dept. Code and enter a Dept. Name. You can  choose to assign specific staff members, who are responsible for approving time entries for specific departments, as Dept. Manager(s). The Dept. Managers drop-down displays all active staff. Hold the CTRL button to select multiple managers. (To see a listing of active staff members, point to Staff in the menu bar and click List Active Staff.)
  4. Continue using the Add Department button to add more departments up to a total of 50 which is the maximum number of allowed Time Clock Departments.

A manager is only able to approve time and run reports for the department(s) he/she manages. Make sure to have the Approve/Unapprove Time permission checked under the Gear (icon) > Settings > Users & Permissions > Select a User ID > User Permissions (left menu) > Staff Portal category for each department manager's User ID.