Clockings¶
Info
Only available if the organization uses the Clockings module. You need the permission to view attendance; to correct it, the one to manage it.
Clockings record actual attendance. Your job is to configure the places, check what comes in and correct the mistakes.
How recognition works¶
Before configuring, it is worth knowing what the app does with what you configure. A clocking arrives with three pieces of data — position, accuracy of the position, person — and AppToMe derives place, activity and in/out from them by itself.
In or out. It is not the volunteer's choice: if there is an open clocking of theirs opened less than 24 hours ago, the next stamp closes it; otherwise it is a new entrance. So a forgotten entrance is closed by the first useful stamp only within 24 hours, and the recorded duration is wrong; after that, the next stamp opens a new entrance and the forgotten one stays open. Either way it has to be corrected by hand.
The place. What counts are the clocking places and, on top of them, the place of a shift or lesson the person has right now — the calendar's place, the shift's destination, the place of the course or lesson: so the link to the shift works even if that address is not a clocking place. The app takes the nearest place and accepts it if the distance is less than the place's radius plus the GPS error, but the error counts for at most 50 metres: beyond that it widens nothing, and a very imprecise position (an iPhone with precise location off, a browser on a computer) can get the entrance rejected.
Outside every place, with the place constraint active the entrance is rejected with the message "You are not at a place where you can clock in"; if you removed the constraint, the detected address is recorded. The exit is never blocked: it is recorded with the place's name if the person is inside one, otherwise with the detected address.
The activity. Once the place is found, the app looks for what to attribute the hours to, in this order:
- an approved availability of the person on a shift in progress at that place (with the calendar's early tolerance); if several shifts are in progress, the one that started first wins;
- a lesson of a course the person is enrolled in, with the same rules; if the course provides for it, the clocking also counts as attendance at the lesson;
- an uncovered shift the person can cover — only on calendars that have automatic availability entry from clocking active.
The third step is the one that surprises: the app signs the person up for the shift without anyone having booked them. It does so only if the calendar allows it, if the person meets any group restriction, if they have one of the tasks the shift requires and if they are not already busy on a concurrent shift. It is designed for those who show up at the premises without having booked; if you do not want that to happen, it is a calendar setting.
Downstream. On closing the exit, the linked availability is marked as certified: that is how the hours become real hours for the statistics, the reports and any linked management system. A clocking without an exit produces no hours.
The automatic reminders¶
With the module active AppToMe sends two reminders, without you having to set anything:
- missing entrance — to the volunteer who has a shift under way and has not clocked;
- missing exit — to whoever has an entrance still open a few minutes after the end of the activity.
If you have reserved clockings to employees (see General settings), the reminders only go to them: whoever cannot clock is not asked to.
Two things to know when someone tells you "nothing reached me": the reminders come from a periodic check, so they are not instant, and each reminder is sent once only. There is no second round: you catch the forgotten exits yourself from the Clockings tab.
Clocking places¶
The configuration opens from the Clockings section with the gear at the top right: the tabs become Clockings general settings and Clockings places.
A place is an address with its coordinates. It comes about in two ways: you create it in the Clockings places tab, or it is created by itself whenever someone picks an address from the suggestions in a form — a calendar's place, a shift's destination, a course, an activity's extra fields. Only places with Valid for clocking are clocking places: the box is on by default for those created from the tab, off for addresses coming from the other forms.
| Field | Type | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Name | text, required | how the place appears in the clockings and in the calendars |
| Latitude | number, required | coordinate of the point |
| Longitude | number, required | coordinate of the point |
| Range | number, required | metres within which a clocking is recognised as made there |
| Valid for clocking | yes/no | whether people can clock from here. Off, the place stays as the address of calendars, courses and activities, but no longer counts for clocking |
The tab opens with the Valid for clocking column filter set to Yes, so it shows only the clocking places. From Filter set it to No to see the addresses created from calendars, courses and activities, or clear it to see them all; open a place and tick the box to make it valid, untick it to leave it out without deleting it. The Last clocking column tells you when somebody last clocked there, in or out: it is the figure to look at when deciding which places to switch off. Every column sorts by tapping its title: once ascending, twice descending, a third time back to alphabetical order; places never used stay at the bottom either way.
Delete works only on places not used anywhere — calendars, destinations, courses, lessons, clockings, extra fields. A place in use cannot be deleted: if it should no longer count for clocking, untick it.
Warning
When Valid for clocking arrived, only the places where at least one clocking had been made stayed valid: configured places where nobody had clocked yet were switched off. If a place you need no longer shows, set Valid for clocking to No from Filter, open it and tick the box.
The radius should be chosen sensibly: too tight and whoever clocks from the car park gets the entrance rejected, too wide and people clock from the bar across the road. A hundred metres or so is a reasonable starting point, to be corrected in the field.
General settings¶
The Clockings general settings tab holds the rules valid for the whole organization.
| Field | Type | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Default place proximity tolerance (meters) | number | the radius used when a place does not state one of its own |
| Allow clockings without place constraints | yes/no | lets people clock from any position, even far from the registered places |
| Clockings reserved to employees | yes/no | only employees clock: the others do not see the button and get no reminders |
Warning
With Allow clockings without place constraints active the position is no longer checked: the clockings arrive anyway, but the place becomes declared information, not verified.
Info
Clockings reserved to employees looks at the person's role in the registry. With the option on, a volunteer no longer sees the clocking button on the Dashboard and gets no entrance or exit reminders; the clockings you enter by hand stay possible for anybody.
The calendar can also require the clocking to happen at a verified place and allow an early tolerance before the start of the shift: those are calendar settings, see Calendars.
Checking the clockings¶
In the Clockings tab you find all the records in the chosen date range, with In, In place, Out, Out place, Manual, People and Activity. You can filter by person and by place, search and export.
The Open clockings only filter keeps the rows with an entry and no exit; on the phone, where the columns collapse, those rows carry the Missing exit label, so they are not mistaken for complete ones.
The things to look at:
- missing exits — those who clocked in and not out; the hours do not close and do not end up in the counts. The volunteer was warned once only, so the second safety net is you: look at them once a week, not at the end of the year;
- addresses instead of places — clockings outside the clocking places, recorded with the detected address: either the person was elsewhere, or the radius is too tight;
- manual clockings — those entered by you: fine as an exception, not as a habit.
Correcting a clocking¶
Open the row and fix it. A clocking corrected by hand stays marked as Manual: it is a deliberate trace, it serves to tell the recorded datum from the reconstructed one.
The correction also redoes the shift recognition, using the date and time you wrote — not the moment you are correcting. Fixing yesterday's clocking, then, AppToMe looks for yesterday's shift or lesson at that time, with the same rules as automatic recognition (place included, where required).
If despite the correction the clocking stays without a shift, the reason is almost always one of those in recognition: at that time the person had no useful availability, or the place does not match. In that case the hours are fixed by acting on the person's availability on that shift.
Adding a clocking by hand¶
When somebody forgot to clock at all, you write the clocking yourself: from the Clockings tab, the + button at the bottom right opens New clocking. The fields are the ones in the table below.
A clocking added this way is born already marked as Manual, and counts as a real one: it looks for the shift or the lesson at the time you wrote and, if it finds it, it certifies the hours.
It takes the permission to manage clockings: whoever can only view them does not see the button.
Deleting a clocking¶
Opening the row, the superuser also finds Delete, with a confirmation request. It is the only role that can do it.
Delete only what should not exist — a double clocking, a test. The hours disappear from the counts and from the reports, and they do not come back: if the clocking is wrong but real, correct it instead of deleting it, so the trace stays.
Info
On a clocking already passed to the connected management system the Delete command does not appear: out there those hours have already been recorded. See Odoo.
Fields of a clocking¶
| Field | Type | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Person | choice, required | who clocked |
| Start date / Start time | date and time, required | the entrance |
| End date / End time | date and time, required | the exit. This is where a clocking left open is closed |
| Place | choice | the registered place of the entrance |
| Place name | text | free description of the spot, when it is not one of the registered places |
| Closing place | choice | the registered place of the exit |
| Closing place name | text | free description of the exit spot |
| Activity | text | what was done in those hours |
Warning
The hours of the clockings end up in people's statistics and reports. Correct what is objectively wrong, not what is inconvenient, and leave a note when the case is not obvious.
Report¶
The Clockings report tab summarises the hours per person in the chosen period, as a ranking. It is the view to use for reports; from there you export.
The report's filters:
| Field | Type | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| People | multiple choice | limits the count to the people chosen. Empty = all |
| Places | multiple choice | counts only the clockings made at the places chosen |
| Range | dates | the period over which to add up the hours. It opens from the button with the calendar |