A
Accrual — Scheduled credit to a leave balance, monthly or annually per the leave type. OnTime checks for due accruals once a day automatically; an administrator can also run one for a specific month. Approved (punch status) — A punch that counts toward the day. The ordinary case. Audit entry — An immutable record of a mutating action: who, when, what resource, what changed. Written for every administrative mutation and every approval decision.B
Balance — One employee’s entitlement for one leave type in one financial year.C
Carry-forward — Unused leave moved into the next financial year at the year boundary, up to the leave type’s cap. Anything above the cap lapses. Comp-off — Compensatory leave credited when approved overtime falls on a holiday or the employee’s weekly off. Weekday overtime never earns it. Conflict (punch) — Two punches for the same person from different sources moments apart — usually a terminal and a mobile punch for the same arrival. Conflict (roster) — A roster cell set to Working on a date the employee has approved leave, or on their weekly off or a holiday. Flagged, not blocked. Connector — The small stateless service that sits on your network, terminates biometric terminals’ raw TCP sessions, and forwards their punches to OnTime over HTTPS. Cycle — One month’s payroll run, moving through five stages: freeze, inputs, calculate, approve, disburse.D
Day record — The reconciled answer for one employee on one date: status, hours worked, break, overtime, late minutes. Derived from that day’s punches judged against the shift template. The single source of truth everything downstream reads. Dead-letter queue — Where an outbound webhook delivery lands after exhausting all eight retry attempts. Replayable. Disburse — The final payroll stage. Materializes payslips and closes the cycle. Not reversible.E
Employee — A person’s membership in one organization: their code, role, manager, department, location, compensation. Distinct from the User.F
Freeze — Marking every day record in a payroll month as frozen. Punches, day overrides and attendance-affecting approvals for those dates are then refused. Frozen day — A day record that will not re-derive. Set by a payroll freeze, or by hand through a day override.G
Geofence — A latitude, longitude and radius on a location. A mobile punch is checked against it on the server, producingInside, Outside or Pending.
H
Holiday — A date on the organization’s calendar, optionally scoped to specific locations. A no-punch holiday reconciles toHoliday rather than Absent, so payroll does not debit it.
hr:approve — The permission that grants the organization-wide scope override. Not merely “the HR approval step” — its holder can act on every employee, not just direct reports.
L
LOP — Loss of Pay — Unpaid absence. Days reconciled asAbsent, and leave taken against an unpaid leave type.
M
Manual entry — The regularization type that claims a whole day with no underlying punches. The only regularization type requiring an HR second approval.O
Open shift — An unfilled roster shift posted for eligible employees to claim. Claiming is self-only. Organization — A tenant. One company’s data, isolated from every other organization at the database level. Override (day) — An administrator setting a day record’s status, hours or overtime directly, with a required reason. Audited. Override (payroll line) — A replacement amount for one component, one employee, one cycle. Applies even where the ordinary computation would have skipped the line.P
Parked punch — A biometric punch whose terminal user ID is not yet mapped to an employee. Held, never discarded, and replayed automatically once the mapping is created. Pending (punch status) — A punch recorded but awaiting a decision — typically because it fell outside the geofence. Punch — A single clock event: direction, time, source, and optionally location and photo.R
Regularization — A request to correct an attendance record. Five types: missing punch in, missing punch out, off zone, wrong location, manual entry. Roster — The assignment of employees to shifts, week by week. Draft until published.S
Same-actor rule — You cannot approve your own request, at any stage, whatever your permissions. Applies to approval only; rejection has no such restriction. Scope — Which employees a permission reaches. Exactly three levels:self, team-direct (your direct reports), and org (everyone).
Selfie — A photo captured at punch time and stored as evidence. Not verified by face matching or liveness detection.
Shift template — The time policy a day is judged against: hours, break, grace period, half-day cutoff, weekly offs, and the overtime thresholds and multipliers.
Statutory register — One of five monthly compliance documents: muster roll (Form 14), wage register (Form 17), overtime register (Form 10), leave register (Form 20), and the Shops & Establishments summary.
Swap — Two employees trading shifts. Approval atomically rewrites both roster cells.