In Roubler, unassociated shifts play a key role in managing timesheets for worked shifts. Understanding how unassociated shifts work is essential to ensuring accurate time tracking and payroll processing. This article will guide you through what unassociated shifts are, how they function, and why it's important to manage them effectively.

What are Unassociated Shifts?

In Roubler, the term unassociated shifts refers to published shifts that are not yet linked to a timesheet. These published shifts remain "unassociated" until specific actions are taken to convert them into timesheets. There are two types of timesheets in Roubler: Shift Timesheets and Leave Timesheets.

• Shift Timesheet: A timesheet created for actual time worked by an employee either scheduled or non-scheduled work time.
• Leave Timesheet: Automatically created with an approved status once a leave request is submitted and approved.

How Unassociated Shifts Work

When a shift is published in the roster, they will be pushed to Time section under Unassociated shifts and Clock entries. Those will remain unassociated until:

• The manager manually completes the shift or 

• The employee has clocked in and out and the system auto completes the unassociated shift with the clock logs.

Once the employee clocks in and out, the shift becomes a completed timesheet and is no longer considered unassociated.

Shift converted to leave

When a shift is converted to leave, an approved leave timesheet is created and the published shift remains unassociated until it is manually completed or shifts gets unpublished. 

Scenarios why Shifts remains Unassociated in Time section

1. When the shift is published after the employee's schedule

2. When the shift that was initially linked/associated to a timesheet got Unpublished and never got re-associated to the timesheet

3. Missing clock in or out

Why It’s Important to Manage Unassociated Shifts

• Timesheets can be manually created without associated shifts. This often happens when an employee works without being scheduled and forgets to clock in and out, so the manager creates the timesheet.
• It's important to associate these unassociated shifts with a timesheet because this determines whether the employee will be paid for overtime or deducted for tardiness as the basis for the company's set Rounding Rules and Grace Period.

By understanding how unassociated shifts work and managing them effectively, you can ensure that all timesheet are correctly associated and reflected in payroll and employee records. It’s important not to manually complete an unassociated shift before the end of the employee's shift, for the system to effectively apply rounding rules and grace periods based on the associated shift’s clock logs.

In addition to the above, shifts must be published before the end of the employee’s shift to ensure they are properly associated with the timesheet and linked to the clock in and out times.

How can I Associate an unassociated shifts to a timesheet?

• In the timesheet page, if there is no rostered shift linked to the timesheet, it will be displayed without an associated shift. 
  
  
  
  
  

How do I link a Timesheet to an associated shift? 

• For a timesheet to be linked to an associated shift, a shift must first be published. All published shifts that aren't associated to any timesheets will appear in the drop when editing or manually adding a timesheet. By selecting the associated roster shift, the timesheet and shift are connected, ensuring accurate tracking of hours worked vs the scheduled shift of the employee (shift time vs timesheet time and total shift hours vs total timesheet's worked hours). This also ensures that the hours from the roster are reflected in payroll, timesheets, and leave management, streamlining the entire process.
  
  
  
  

• For the Leave Timesheet, manual timesheet creation is not possible. An indication that an approved leave does not have a timesheet is a note in the leave section. The leave will show without any recorded hours.