Your crew can now punch in from a wall tablet, the front-counter PC, their own computer or their phone, and it takes a few seconds. At the end of the pay period you get hours you can actually review, with a record of every change, ready to hand to whoever does your payroll. 1sixty8 Manifold has a time clock now.
It wasn’t on the plan for launch. I aimed launch at running the shop itself: sales, inventory, service and work orders, scheduling, talking to customers. Then shops started running their days on 1sixty8 Manifold, and the same question kept coming up: can my team clock in here too? They were keeping a separate punch clock, a paper sheet or a second app just for hours, and then retyping those hours for payroll. Enough of them asked that I moved it up and built it. When the shops using 1sixty8 Manifold keep asking for the same thing, it moves to the front of the line.
A business can be a hard place to keep time. Technicians, salespeople and counter staff come in at different hours, and the techs are out in the bays, not standing at a computer. So punching in has to be quick from wherever someone is:
- A shared PIN station on a wall tablet or the front-counter PC. The counter PC still works for sales: the PIN pad opens over the page, the next person punches, and the salesperson stays signed in.
- A button at the top of every screen for anyone signed in on their own computer.
- The 1sixty8 Manifold app on their phone, with the location saved with the punch.
You decide which of those your shop allows and exactly who is on the time clock. Breaks are optional, and if you turn them on they’re unpaid and come off the hours automatically. Store managers can run the day-to-day while the setup stays with you.
The version of this most owners have lived is the timesheet on payday: somebody never clocked out Friday, somebody else forgot to clock in that morning, and a few hours got patched by hand with no way to tell who changed what. The failsafes are there for exactly that. Anyone still on the clock after closing gets a reminder on their phone. A shift left open too long is marked as a missed clock-out and counts zero hours until a manager fixes it, so a forgotten punch never quietly turns into a 20-hour shift on the report. The next time that person punches, they’re asked what time they actually left. And if the shop’s internet drops, the station keeps taking punches and sends them when it’s back.
Managers get one review list: who’s on the clock right now, missed clock-outs, correction requests and flagged punches, like a phone punch from away from the shop. Those are flagged, never blocked, and the punch still counts. Employees can’t change their own time. They send a correction request and a manager approves or denies it. Every manager edit needs a reason, and the original punch is never lost. The timesheet shows what was punched, what it was changed to, who changed it and why, and once a pay period is locked its hours stay put.
At the end of the period, the Hours Worked report gives each person’s days worked, regular hours, estimated overtime, total hours and unpaid break time, with anything unusual flagged. Export it to CSV for your payroll provider or print it.
Then there’s the piece a separate punch clock can’t give you. 1sixty8 Manifold already tracked time on each work order, and the time clock now works with it. Clocking out or going on break stops or pauses a running job timer, and starting a job while off the clock offers to clock you in. The Technician Efficiency report now shows each tech’s shift hours next to their job hours, and what share of their paid time went to jobs. Most standalone time clocks can’t show you that, because they don’t know about the work. To keep the words straight, the work order buttons now say Start Job and Stop Job, so clocking in always means the shift.
If your hours still live on a paper sheet and you’d like to see them sitting next to your work orders, send me a note.