Only About Today

There are two kinds of message an employee can get from the system they clock in on. One says: your shift started twenty minutes ago and you have not clocked in, here is the button. The other says: you have eleven days with a missing clock-out this month. The first one helps. The second one is a performance review delivered by a robot, and people learn to stop reading it.

Every reminder AWRA sends to an employee is the first kind. It is about something they can still fix, today, in one tap. Anything about the past is HR’s, and goes to HR in a weekly digest.

Not clocked in yet

When a shift starts and its grace period passes with no clock-in, the employee gets one reminder. It is read from the shift, not from a clock: someone with no shift has no start time to be late for, and is never reminded. Days off, public holidays the organization takes and approved leave are all skipped. A rostered shift on a Saturday counts, because the roster says they are expected.

Clock in now. Your Morning shift started at 08:00 and you have not clocked in.

Tapping it on a phone opens the clock-in screen in the AWRA mobile app. The email version links to the web, or to the self-service time page for staff without an account. If three hours pass and they still have not clocked in, the reminder stops trying: by then it is a conversation with HR, not a nudge.

Still clocked in

Thirty minutes after a shift ends, an employee who is still clocked in gets one reminder to clock out. Thirty minutes, because people finish the task in front of them; a reminder at the exact end time would mostly reach people already walking to the door. An overnight shift keeps the date it started, so the clock-out reminder for a 22:00 to 06:00 shift arrives that morning while it is still the current shift.

Clock out now. Your Morning shift ended at 17:00 and you are still clocked in.

This is the cheapest moment to fix a clock-out. Half an hour after the shift, the employee knows exactly when they left. The next morning, nobody does, and the day becomes a correction request with a guess in it. AWRA never fills in a clock-out on its own; The Punch That Was Never Closed explains why.

A claim still in draft

An expense claim saved as a draft cannot be approved or paid back, and nobody but the employee can see it. When a draft has sat untouched for three days, the employee gets one reminder: submit it, or delete it if it is not needed. A draft older than a month is not chased; it was probably abandoned on purpose.

Leave about to start

On the last working day before approved leave, the employee is told the dates and the day they are back, with a prompt to hand over open work. The Friday Before Monday’s Leave covers the timing and what their manager is told.

Why never the past

A reminder about last Tuesday cannot be acted on in one tap. It needs a correction, an approver and a reason, which is HR’s process, not the employee’s phone. Sending it to the employee every morning does not fix the day; it teaches them that messages from the system are complaints. Then the reminder that matters, the one that says clock out now, goes unread with the rest.

So the past goes to HR. Days left without a clock-out are listed for HR once a week (or daily, if your HR team prefers it) and fixed with an attendance correction. The employee only ever hears about the shift they are on.

• Each reminder goes once per shift, claim or leave, however often the system checks.
• Employees without a login get email with their self-service link: the time page, the claims page or the leave page.
• Every reminder is its own switch under HR in notification preferences, with email, in-app and push separately, so an organization can keep the clock-out reminder and drop the draft-claim one.

Frequently asked questions