Guaranteed Hours Policy

Some union agreements and employment contracts require you to pay employees for a guaranteed number of hours, even when they've worked slightly less. Guaranteed Hours Policy lets you configure this adjustment once and have MobiClocks apply it automatically, instead of tracking shortfalls and adjusting pay manually. It works alongside your existing pay policy and pay ID setup rather than replacing it.

How Guaranteed Hours works

Guaranteed Hours is a compensation rule, not a rounding policy. It never changes an employee's punches or their actual worked time. Instead, MobiClocks keeps actual worked hours and payable hours separate, and adds a distinct adjustment on top of payable hours when an employee qualifies.

An employee qualifies for an adjustment on a given workday if:

• Their payable hours (after any existing rounding policies) are at least (Guaranteed Hours minus Threshold), and
• Their payable hours are less than Guaranteed Hours.

Employees who already work at or above the Guaranteed Hours amount receive no adjustment, and employees whose shortfall is larger than the threshold also receive no adjustment. Only one Guaranteed Hours adjustment is generated per employee, per workday.

Calculation order

When a timelog is processed, MobiClocks:

1. Calculates actual worked hours.
2. Applies your existing rounding policies to get payable hours.
3. Evaluates Guaranteed Hours eligibility against the rounded payable hours.
4. If the employee qualifies, calculates the adjustment needed to bring payable hours up to the Guaranteed Hours amount.
5. Generates the Guaranteed Hours adjustment.
6. Reports the adjusted total throughout the system, while keeping actual worked hours available for audit and reporting purposes.

Set up a Guaranteed Hours policy

1. Go to Administration > Pay Policy > Guaranteed Hours Policy.
2. Use the toggle at the top to enable the feature for your environment.

3. Select Add a policy.
4. In the dialog that opens, fill in the following fields:
   • Name. A label for the policy, for example Daily 8 hours.
   • Guaranteed hours. The minimum number of hours an employee is guaranteed to be paid for.
   • Threshold. How many minutes an employee's payable hours can fall short of the guaranteed amount and still qualify for an adjustment. For example, with a 3-minute threshold on an 8-hour policy, an employee needs to have worked at least 7h 57m to qualify.
5. Select Add to save the policy.

The policy list shows each policy's name, guaranteed hours, threshold, and the number of employees currently assigned to it. Selecting the assigned employee count takes you to the Employee list, pre-filtered to that policy. Use the edit and delete icons in the Actions column to update or remove a policy.

Assign a policy to employees

By default, Guaranteed Hours is disabled for all employees, even after you create a policy.

From the Employee list

The Employee list includes a Guaranteed Hours column showing each employee's assigned policy, if any. Use the column filter to quickly locate employees on a specific policy, or employees with no policy assigned.

From the employee profile

You can assign or override an employee's Guaranteed Hours Policy from their employee profile, in the same section as Meal Break Policy and Rest Break Policy settings. This lets you assign a policy to an individual employee regardless of any bulk assignment, or exclude an employee from Guaranteed Hours entirely.

Guaranteed Hours pay ID

Guaranteed Hours adjustments are tracked under a dedicated GUAR pay ID, alongside your existing general pay IDs such as REG, OT, and DT. GUAR is enabled by default for Hourly and Salary Actual pay groups, but not for Salary. Like other general pay IDs, it isn't user-configurable.

To include Guaranteed Hours adjustments when exporting payroll to your accounting system, map the GUAR pay ID to the corresponding payroll item. See Map pay IDs for exporting.

Guaranteed Hours in Timelogs

When an adjustment is generated, it appears throughout the Timelogs module:

• On the Timelogs list, guaranteed hours are indicated above the punch times for that timelog, as shown in the following screenshot.
  

  

• On Timelog details, the summary section shows a Guaranteed hours field, and the adjustment appears as its own entry in the Timelog details tab, alongside punch, meal, and rest entries.

Actual worked hours remain visible throughout, so you can always see what an employee actually worked versus what they were paid for.

Example

An employee is assigned the Daily 8 hours policy (Guaranteed hours: 8h, Threshold: 3 minutes).

They punch in at 7:00 AM and out at 2:57 PM, for 7h 57m actual and payable hours. That's within 3 minutes of the 8-hour guarantee, so they qualify. MobiClocks adds a 3-minute Guaranteed Hours adjustment, bringing their total payable hours to 8h.

If the same employee had instead worked 10 hours that day, no adjustment would be generated, since their payable hours already exceed the guaranteed amount.

Cost coding

Guaranteed Hours adjustments participate in cost coding the same way as any other pay ID. No special handling is needed.