> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.ontime.hosai.app/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Glossary

> The terms OnTime uses, and precisely what each one means.

## 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**, producing `Inside`, `Outside` or `Pending`.

## H

**Holiday** — A date on the organization's calendar, optionally scoped to specific locations. A no-punch holiday reconciles to `Holiday` 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 as `Absent`, 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.

## T

**Terminal** — A biometric hardware clock. Reaches OnTime only through the connector.

**Terminal user mapping** — The link between a terminal's own numeric user ID and an OnTime employee. Without it, that terminal's punches for that person park.

## U

**User** — The **person**: one login, one globally unique email, one password. Distinct from the Employee, which is their membership in a particular organization.

## W

**Webhook** — An HTTPS endpoint OnTime posts to when one of nine event types occurs. Deliveries are HMAC-signed and retried with backoff.

**Weekly off** — A rest day per the shift template. Overtime worked on one earns comp-off.

**Working day** — A date that is neither a weekly off nor a holiday. The unit leave requests are counted in, and the denominator of attendance percentages.