Retail scheduling and time clock glossary
The 15 key terms to know when managing retail teams: hour bank, annualized hours, time off in lieu, payroll export. Short definitions and real examples.
Schedule
Document that distributes each employee's working hours across a week or month.
Across several locations, the schedule says who works each day, at which location, in which time slots. No federal law sets how far ahead you have to post it. Eleven cities do, New York, Chicago, Seattle, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Berkeley, Emeryville and Evanston among them, plus Oregon statewide: 14 days notice for retail and food service, and premium pay when a posted shift changes inside that window. Most set a size threshold that leaves a single independent location out, Seattle and Oregon starting at 500 employees worldwide and Chicago at 100. Berkeley is the exception, covering employers with 10 employees in the city. Check whether one reaches you before assuming it does not.
Time clock
Recording of an employee's arrival and departure times.
Time clocking can be done via badge, mobile app or iPad kiosk. For legal admissibility, the timestamp must come from the server (not the device) and ideally be augmented with photo and GPS coordinates.
Hour bank
A running balance of hours worked against hours scheduled.
Someone scheduled for 40 hours who works 43 sits at +3, and someone sent home early sits negative. It is the fastest way to see who is consistently over or under before it becomes a payroll dispute. One caveat in the US: a positive balance on a non-exempt employee is not something you carry forward. Overtime past 40 hours in a workweek has to be paid in that pay period, and a private employer cannot hold it as future time off.
Comp time
Time off given instead of paying overtime.
Asked for often, rarely lawful. Under the FLSA a private employer has to pay overtime beyond 40 hours in a workweek at no less than one and a half times the regular rate. Giving the hours back as time off instead is allowed for public employers under specific conditions, not for private ones. If your team wants the time rather than the money, the workable version is to cut hours earlier in the same workweek, before the 40 hour line, so the overtime never accrues.
Overtime
Hours beyond 40 in a workweek, paid at a premium rate.
Under the FLSA a non-exempt employee has to be paid at least one and a half times their regular rate for every hour past 40 in a workweek. The workweek is a fixed, recurring period of 168 hours: it does not have to start on Monday, but once you set it you cannot move it to avoid the premium, and you cannot average two weeks together so that a 50 hour week cancels out a 30 hour one. Several states add a daily threshold on top, California paying 1.5x beyond 8 hours in a day and 2x beyond 12.
Clopening
Closing one night and opening the next morning, on the same person.
On paper it looks like two normal shifts. In practice it can leave eight hours between leaving and coming back, and it is the most common reason an opening runs late. Several cities with fair workweek ordinances, New York, San Francisco and Seattle among them, restrict the practice or require premium pay when the gap falls below a set number of hours. Even where nothing forbids it, rotating who closes and who opens is what keeps a team from turning over.
Exempt and non-exempt
Whether an employee is owed overtime pay.
Non-exempt employees must be paid overtime beyond 40 hours in a workweek. Exempt employees are not, but only when every test is met: paid on a salary basis, at or above the salary threshold in force, and performing executive, administrative or professional duties as the Department of Labor defines them. A job title decides nothing on its own, and calling a shift lead a manager does not make them exempt. The salary threshold has been revised several times, so check the current figure before classifying anyone.
Collective bargaining agreement
A contract negotiated between an employer and a union.
Where one is in force it sets pay, hours, scheduling notice and overtime terms above the legal floor, and it overrides the employee handbook. Union coverage in US retail and food service is low, so most small businesses never deal with one, but if your staff is represented the terms bind you completely. Not to be confused with the fair workweek ordinances adopted in New York, San Francisco, Seattle and elsewhere, which apply whether or not a union is involved.
Break
A pause during a shift. Federal law does not require you to give one.
There is no federal requirement to provide a meal or a rest break. What the FLSA does settle is how they are paid: short breaks, roughly 5 to 20 minutes, count as working time and are paid, while a genuine meal break of 30 minutes or more, where the person is fully relieved of duty, does not have to be. Around twenty states set their own rules, California requiring a 30 minute meal period before the end of the fifth hour. A break where someone keeps an eye on the counter is not a break, and stays payable.
Split shift
Two separate blocks of work in one day, with unpaid time in between.
Standard in restaurants: lunch service, a quiet afternoon, dinner service. The unpaid gap makes a long day for whoever works it, which is why the same people should not carry it every week. Some states add a cost: California requires an extra hour of pay at minimum wage when a split shift is scheduled, unless the employee already earns enough above minimum to absorb it. Check your state before you build the week around split shifts.
iPad kiosk mode
Tablet mode dedicated to employee time clocking in a store.
The iPad stays plugged in the store, displays a single token-protected clocking page. Employees identify via PIN and take a timestamped selfie. Anti-fraud: an employee cannot clock for another, timestamps come from the server, not the device.
Clocking anomaly
Significant discrepancy between planned shift and actual clock event.
Examples: arrival 15 min late, departure before end of shift, missing clock-out. Squadra detects automatically and requires written justification from the employee or manager.
Payroll export
A CSV file or an API call that sends worked hours to payroll.
Squadra exports hours as CSV for any payroll provider, and has native connectors for BambooHR, HiBob, Personio, Lucca, Factorial and Payfit. The export carries regular hours, overtime, paid and unpaid time off and the balance per person, so nobody retypes a number from one screen into another.
PTO, paid time off
Paid days off, set by the employer rather than by federal law.
There is no federal paid vacation or paid sick leave entitlement in the United States: what an employee gets is what the employer offers. A growing number of states and cities do require paid sick leave, and the rules differ on accrual and carryover. Whether unused PTO has to be paid out when someone leaves also depends on the state, California treating accrued vacation as earned wages while others do not. Write the policy down and apply it the same way for everyone.
Multi-location
Ability of the scheduling tool to run several locations with their own managers.
Each manager sees their assigned store(s), affiliated employees, local clock events. Reports are consolidated at headquarters. Squadra supports unlimited stores at no extra cost ($29 per month flat).