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. The same record carries the data the whole way — there is no hand-off, no separate “payroll system” to sync with. This article walks each transition: what triggers it, what flips, 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 shift workers. 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. Validate against your team in the coverage grid and the assignment dropdown. Iterate until you’re happy.

Anyone you assign to a draft shift sees nothing yet — an assignment’s visibility follows the 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:

  • Workers 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.

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

Published the wrong batch? Unpublish retracts a shift to draft — as long as nobody has clocked in and it hasn’t started. Once a shift has run or its hours are approved, cancel it instead; the worker 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, workers (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.

Who confirms depends on your company’s time approval mode. In manager-approval-only mode a manager confirms; in employee-confirmation mode the worker confirms their own hours first (most often just by clocking out at the kiosk). Either way, a confirmed entry is still editable — Undo confirmation clears the clock data and reverses the accruals.

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. In employee-confirmation mode, 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 Published, Confirmed, and Approved entries — filter to Approved-only 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 workers

Confirmed

Times, breaks, assignment; confirmation can be undone (editing the times clears it)

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. Can confirm their own hours (most often by clocking out at the kiosk) or have a manager confirm on their behalf.

  • Manager — publishes, approves, exports.

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