Why a night shift can be 13 hours

A night shift from seven in the evening to seven in the morning is twelve hours, except on the two nights a year when the clocks change. In this video you'll see why MedAligna counts real elapsed time, what that looks like on the schedule on both nights, how the payroll export shows it, and which time zone decides. Here's Luis's week of nights at the end of October. On Saturday the thirty-first, the clocks go back an hour at two in the morning. His shift still says seven to seven, but the chip shows thirteen hours real, twelve on the clock. He was there for thirteen real hours, so that's what we count. That's daylight saving time. In the US, the clocks go forward an hour on the second Sunday of March and back an hour on the first Sunday of November, both at two a. m. Any shift that runs across two a. m. that night is an hour longer or shorter than its clock times suggest. A system that subtracts one clock face from the other gets twelve every time, and shorts that nurse an hour of pay every autumn. Every duration in the product is computed the same way, from the two real moments a shift started and ended: the hours on the time clock, rest gaps, overtime, the weekly total, the payroll export and the CMS PBJ file. Here, Luis's week is thirteen plus twelve plus twelve: thirty-seven hours, which is over his thirty-six-hour contract, and the overtime warning says so. Now the spring change. Saturday the seventh of March, seven p. m. , to Sunday morning at seven. At two a. m. the clock jumps to three, so the hour from two to three never happens. Luis worked eleven hours, and the chip says so. His week is eleven plus twelve plus twelve: thirty-five, not thirty-six. A seven-to-seven day shift on either Sunday is unaffected, because the change happens at two a. m. , hours before it starts. Here's Maya's day shift on Sunday the first of November: twelve hours. And an unpaid break is subtracted after the real time is measured, so a thirteen-hour night with a thirty-minute break exports as twelve point five. Open Exports, pick the dates around the change, and press Show hours. Because a thirteen-hour night looks like a typo to whoever approves the timesheet, the screen says so up front: the clocks changed during this shift, twelve hours on the clock, thirteen actually worked, and we export the real figure. In the summary, Luis has thirty-seven hours. The Source column says whether a figure came from the time clock, Clocked, or from the rostered times, Scheduled. These nights haven't been worked yet, so they're scheduled hours. Here's that night in the all-hours CSV. Date, the thirty-first. Start, seven p. m. End, seven a. m. Hours, thirteen. The start and end are what he saw on the clock; the hours are what he worked; and the two are not inconsistent. The local date is the day the shift started, so a night is filed under the evening it began. The note explains the clock change, and hours are summed unrounded and rounded to two decimals once, at export. Which time zone decides? The place the work happens: the site's time zone, or the hospital's, when the shift is call carried at a service you don't operate. Not the server's, and not yours. Each shift remembers the time zone it was worked in, and you can see the site's zone here, in Settings. Correcting a site's time zone once shifts exist means confirming the wall times were the truth: seven a. m. stays seven a. m. , and the shifts move with the clock. Once anyone has clocked in at that site, it's refused, because a clock-in is a real moment that can't honestly be moved; add a new location instead. And two edge cases are always decided the same way: a start time that doesn't exist on the spring night moves forward past the gap, and one that happens twice on the autumn night takes the first. Finally, what this is not. It's an hours figure, not a pay calculation. The export carries no rate, no differential and no dollar figure, and we never compute gross or net pay, withhold tax or move money. Your payroll provider prices the thirteen hours; our job is to make sure it's thirteen. To recap: every hour is measured between two real moments, so the autumn night is thirteen hours and the spring night is eleven. The export carries the real figure, with a note that explains it. And the clock that decides is the one at the site where the work happens.