Farm timesheets: a calendar of hours for paying staff
Phase keeps each worker's start, finish, break and what they did in a month calendar, entered from their own phone, and exports the month for pay.
Seasonal work makes timesheets hard. Hours change every day, people come and go, and the record is usually a notebook on a dashboard or a text message sent on Sunday night.
A grower asked us for something better: a timetable where workers put in their start and finish times, a calendar to look back on, and a note of what they did that day. That is now Hours in Phase.
What a day's entry holds
- Start time
- Finish time
- Unpaid break, in minutes
- What they did that day
A split day is simply two entries. A finish time earlier than the start means the next morning, for a night job at seeding or harvest. Two entries for one person cannot overlap, and hours cannot be recorded for a day that has not come yet.
Two ways hours get in
A worker types them in on their own phone. Or, if the farm also uses signing on and off, signing off writes that day's hours for them, and they add the break and what they did afterwards.
The calendar
The page is a month calendar. Each day shows its hours as a figure, such as 8.5. Tap a day to see its entries and add, change or remove one. Under the calendar are the week totals and the month's total.
Who sees whose hours
A worker sees only their own hours.
Owners and managers see everyone's. The page opens with one line per person, showing their days and total hours for the month. Pick a person to see their calendar and to add or correct hours for them.
Getting the month out for pay
Export saves the month as a spreadsheet: person, date, start, finish, break, hours as a figure, what they did, and whether the hours were typed in or came from a sign-off.
Phase keeps the record of hours. It does not work out pay rates, overtime or award conditions, so the spreadsheet goes to whoever does your pay.
When nobody signed off
If a sign-on was closed without a real finish time, the hours stop at the finish time the worker gave when they signed on, and the day is marked "to check" until someone opens it and saves it. Hours whose times were changed by hand afterwards say so.
Switching it on
Hours is off for every farm until a manager switches it on. Go to More → Farm Operations → Hours and turn on Record hours for this farm.
Tell the team before you do. Hours are kept until someone removes them, and they are included in the farm's data export.
One login for the whole team
Hours is part of Phase, the same all-in-one app the farm uses for crop plans, spray records, inventory, machinery and livestock. Staff do not need a second app or another password, and it costs nothing extra per person: managers, employees and advisors are all included in the farm's subscription.