Automating the Flow of Scheduling Data into your Time and Attendance System

SchedulePro offers a comprehensive time and attendance solution that allows users to easily apply actual worked hours into their planned schedule. With accurate scheduling data, SchedulePro can apply compliance, overtime equalization, and qualifications to ensure that the best employee is assigned to open requirements.

SchedulePro also provides the freedom for users to utilize their own time and attendance solution that is well established within their organization. With the use of the SchedulePro API, planned scheduling data can be passed into a third party system that handles an employee’s actual worked hours. This data can then be easily synced back into SchedulePro to ensure that the schedule has been updated with accurate worked hours.

Passing planned scheduling data into your third party T&A system

The SchedulePro API has two options for fetching planned scheduling data:

Using the Schedule Endpoint

The GetSchedule endpoint allows an caller to retrieve a snapshot of the schedule data within an organization for a given date range. The endpoint provides a list of filters that can be used to reduce the amount of data being returned. The endpoint will return 7 days of scheduling data by default, and is restricted from returning more than 28 days.

This endpoint could be used to fetch and populate time and attendance data in real time when the employee is opening the Timesheet.

If the request is successful, the GetSchedule endpoint will return the employee info and a collection of their schedule records within the given date range. If the request was unsuccessful, please check out the common error responses in the GetSchedule endpoint.

Using the Schedule Changes Endpoint

The GetScheduleChanges endpoint allows an caller to retrieve changes made to the schedule data within an organization from a provided point in time.

This endpoint could be called periodically to continually synchronize SchedulePro schedule data into the time and attendance system. The benefit over using the GetScheduleChanges endpoint is that only delta data is returned which reduces payload size.

If the request is successful, the GetScheduleChanges endpoint will return the delta of employee info and a collection of their schedule records from a given point in time. If the request was unsuccessful, please check out the common error responses in the GetScheduleChanges endpoint.

NOTE: The modifiedAfter point in time parameter is the int64 value epoch time in milliseconds (see an example here.)

What is a Timesheet within SchedulePro?

In SchedulePro, a Timesheet represents the actual scheduled hours that an employee has worked within a given date range. A Timesheet includes the unplanned changes and amendments to their planned schedule. It is the final record of worked hours.

An employee’s Timesheet can undergo an approval process. An employee can submit a proposed Timesheet for approval, and a schedule manager can then decline, modify, or sign-off on the Timesheet. Signed-off Timesheets are synced back to the schedule, applying all the amendments to the planned schedule.

The properties of a Timesheet includes:

  • Employee: EmployeeIdor EmployeeNumberto identify the employee

  • Shift Date: Date of the worked shift

  • Start Time and End Time: Start time and end time of the worked shift

  • Shift Code: SchedulePro shift or leave code associated to the shift

  • Hours Paid: Straight time hours paid of the worked shift

  • Regular Overtime: Pre-multiplier overtime hours paid of the worked shift

  • Overtime Multiplier: Overtime multiplier to apply to the regular overtime hours

Syncing actual worked hours from your T&A system into SchedulePro

Actual hours worked, recorded in the 3rd party T&A system, will flow back into SchedulePro via the TimesheetBatchUpdate API endpoint.

This has the following benefits:

  • Actual hours worked will be reapplied to the SchedulePro schedule data and lock the schedule records from manual edits. Additional amendments to the schedule data will need to be made in the T&A system to ensure this is the source of truth.

  • Amendments to time and attendance data will flow back into SchedulePro via the same API endpoints then applied to the SchedulePro schedule data.

  • Future dated time and attendance data can be sent into SchedulePro. This data is queued up and will be applied to the schedule as the shift dates elapse. This is necessary to ensure schedulers are not blocked from managing the schedule data up until the shift date has passed.

The TimesheetBatchUpdate API endpoint was built for bulk data processing. Include a unique referenceIdfor each record in the batch job for future cross referencing line items. The batch can include multiple employees and cover a range of shift dates to reduce the number of API calls. The API endpoint will perform some light validation then queue the work up to be processed asynchronously, returning a batchIdback to the caller.

The TaskProgress API can then be polled to track the status of the batched job. Detailed results will be included in the results once the job is complete. Each record will be processed and applied independently and returned in the results.

⚠ Your organization must have the Timesheets module enabled in order to sync third party worked hours into SchedulePro. Please contact  support for more information.