Timesheets and pay periods
A timesheet is a legal record before it is an input to payroll. The employer carries the duty to keep it, and in a wage dispute the absence of a reliable record tends to count against the employer rather than the worker. That reframes what "good enough" means.
Last checked
Record hours actually worked, not hours planned
The record has to reflect what happened, which is not always what was scheduled. Pre-filling a timesheet from the published roster is a sensible starting point and a poor finishing point: the value is in what the worker corrects. Unpaid breaks are deducted from worked time; paid ones are not.
A pay period does not have to be a calendar month
Many workplaces run a cutoff mid-month — the 21st to the 20th is common — so a single payslip spans two calendar months. Everything downstream has to agree on that boundary: overtime is still calculated per day, but monthly totals, holiday counts and the reporting window all follow the pay period, not the calendar.
Corrections need a trail, not just permission
Records get corrected — a forgotten clock-out, a shift covered at short notice. What matters is that a correction is visible as a correction: who changed what, when, and from what value. A record that can be silently overwritten is worth much less than one that cannot, precisely at the moment it is being questioned.
Wage records are kept for years, not months
Timesheets, decided leave and published rosters are wage records and are retained for a long period — on the order of seven years — and they stay identified, because an anonymous wage record cannot serve its purpose. This has a consequence people miss: deleting a worker’s account cannot delete their wage history, only the parts that are not statutory.
How Noviq applies this
Noviq pre-fills each month from the published schedule, approved leave and public holidays, then keeps auto-filled rows distinguishable from hand-entered and clocked ones — so a manager can see at a glance whether a month reflects a person’s own input or just the system’s. Pay periods are configurable per workspace, and every mutation is audit-logged.