From shift draft to payroll

From shift draft to payroll#

For: Manager | Admin You’ll need: Nothing.

A shift travels through five stages between pencilled in and paid, and the same record carries the data the whole way — there’s no hand-off, no separate payroll system to sync with. This article walks each transition: what triggers it, what changes, and what locks behind you.

The flow at a glance#

Draft
  │  publish
  ▼
Published
  │  clock-in / clock-out  →  confirm
  ▼
Confirmed
  │  manager approve  (locks the row)
  ▼
Approved
  │
  ▼
Payroll export

Each arrow is a deliberate action by a specific role. Each transition narrows what’s still editable.

1. Draft — the planner’s sandbox#

A new shift is Draft. Visible to planners and managers; invisible to the team. Free to move, resize, reassign, or delete.

This is where most of your work happens. Bring shifts in from a schedule template, a recurring pattern, or Alt+drag. Check the plan against your team in the coverage grid and the assignment dropdown. Iterate until you’re happy — nobody on the team sees a thing yet, because an assignment’s visibility follows its shift.

2. Published — released to the team#

You promote drafts in bulk from the publish horizon: pick a cutoff date and Shiftavo flips every draft shift starting on or before that date to Published. The people on each shift see it the moment it publishes — there’s no separate assignment to publish.

What changes:

  • People see the shifts on their calendar.

  • If shift acceptance is on, each assignee is asked to accept or decline.

  • The shifts feed availability and coverage as committed work.

  • You can still edit, but edits are now visible to assignees.

Published the wrong batch? Unpublish retracts a shift to draft — as long as no hours on it have been approved and it hasn’t started. Once a shift has started, cancel it instead — as long as nobody has recorded hours on it; the person sees the cancellation but the shift stays on the calendar as a record. See the full state diagram in Shift lifecycle — from draft to approved.

3. Confirmed — the clock data is in and signed off#

Once a published shift starts, people (or a manager on their behalf) clock in and out. When the hours are confirmed — recorded and signed off as correct — the assignment is Confirmed.

Confirmation is what makes the time real. Specifically, it:

  • Locks in the worked hours that drive overtime tiers and premiums.

  • Triggers leave accrual for accrual-style policies.

  • Triggers time-comp accrual for time-comp policies.

Most often the person confirms just by clocking out, on their phone or at the kiosk — in every time approval mode. A manager confirms the rows nobody clocked, or confirms on someone’s behalf; in ‘Automatic’ mode Shiftavo records and confirms those rows itself. The mode decides whether approval has to wait for the confirmation. A confirmed entry is still editable — Undo confirmation withdraws the confirmation: punched times stay, while typed or schedule-filled hours are removed and their accruals reversed (in ‘Automatic’ mode you correct the times instead).

See How confirmation and approval work.

4. Approved — the manager signs off, the row locks#

A manager reviews confirmed entries on the Timesheet and approves them. Approved is the sign-off state — and it’s the only lock in the flow. When people confirm their own hours, a manager can’t approve a row until it’s confirmed.

Approval locks the underlying shift — you can’t change times, position, or assignment after approval without first unapproving. There’s no separate “close the books” step: you approve each row, and an approved row is frozen until someone unapproves it. Unapprove clears the audit stamp and re-opens the entry.

Approving every row for a pay cycle is your contract with payroll: the numbers won’t move under you.

5. Payroll export#

The payroll summary is the final view. It groups time entries by person inside a pay cycle (the cycle length comes from your payroll frequency in company settings) and totals regular hours, overtime tiers, premiums, paid and unpaid absence, time-comp, and gross pay. By default the report includes Scheduled, Confirmed, and Approved entries — filter ‘Status’ to ‘Approved’ for a clean, signed-off export.

Export the report to CSV, XLSX, or PDF and hand it to your payroll vendor. Payment itself doesn’t have a status — once you’ve exported, the payroll vendor takes over.

What locks behind you, in order#

State

What you can still change

Draft

Everything

Published

Everything; edits notify the assigned people

Confirmed

Times, breaks, assignment; confirmation can be undone (saving new times replaces it with yours)

Approved

Nothing, until unapproved

When a save is refused, unapprove the entry. See Why a shift can’t be edited or deleted.

The other people in the flow#

  • Shift worker — sees the shift only after publish. Confirms their own hours (most often by clocking out at the kiosk) or has a manager confirm on their behalf.

  • Manager — publishes, approves, exports.

  • Admin / Owner — configures the payroll frequency, leave year, and work policies the export totals run on.

Verify it worked#

Follow one shift the whole way: it leaves ‘Draft’ for ‘Published’ on the planning list, appears on the timesheet as soon as it’s published, moves from ‘Scheduled’ to ‘Confirmed’ to ‘Approved’ once it has finished, and its hours land in Reports → Payroll summary for that period.