Every member of staff already has a decided out time — the end of their shift, set per person and per weekday. Out Time makes that time mean something: clock out too early and the day is recorded as Short Leave instead of Present.
Where it is
Attendance → QR Attendance Settings, in the Staff card, under Out Time. There are two controls:
- Mark Short Leave on Early Out — the switch. It starts off, and while it is off nothing about your attendance changes.
- Allow Leaving Up To … minutes before decided time — your allowance. Leaving within it is a normal out; leaving earlier than it is a Short Leave.
A worked example appears under the fields as soon as you switch it on, so you can see the exact time the rule starts to bite before you save.
One setting, every way staff clock out
You set it once and it applies to all four: the QR app, a biometric reader, a face device, and the teacher app's location attendance. The Geo Fence Settings screen shows the rule so you can see it is active there too, but it is only editable here — one rule, one place.
Exactly what it does
- Only a Present or a Late day converts. A day you marked as Leave, Off Day, Death Leave, Paper Leave, Sandwich Leave or Absent is never touched. Somebody at a reader can never overturn a decision a person made.
- Landing exactly on the allowance is fine. With a 2:00 PM out time and a 15-minute allowance, 1:45 PM is Present and 1:44 PM is Short Leave.
- The status is decided at the moment of the punch, and stored. Change the allowance next month and last month's attendance stays exactly as it was recorded. Nothing is recalculated behind you.
- It does not undo itself. A staff member who leaves early has earned the Short Leave for that day; clocking out again later the same day does not take it back.
- The person is told. The reader — and the teacher app — says the day was marked Short Leave and by how many minutes, rather than letting them find out on a payslip.
It is not the same as Employee Auto Short Leave
The Employee Auto Short Leave checkbox just above it is the opposite rule: it marks a Short Leave overnight for somebody who never clocked out at all. Out Time is about somebody who did clock out, too early. They cannot collide — one needs a missing out time and the other needs a real one — so you can safely run both, one, or neither.
If Short Leave is switched off for your school
Short Leave is one of the attendance acronyms a school can switch off in HRM → Attendance Acronyms. If yours is off, this rule cannot be used and the screen says so: an early out would otherwise be filed under a status none of your reports have a column for. Switch Short Leave on first, then come back.
🔴 What this does to salary — read before you switch it on
- A Short Leave day is counted against the employee's Short Leave allowance on their salary plan (HRM → Salary Plan). If you have set no Short Leave deduction, the deduction is zero.
- But it always cancels the all-present allowance. Any day that is not Present or Off Day means the month is no longer all-present, so an employee who would have earned that allowance loses it. This happens whatever your Short Leave deduction is set to.
- Salaries you have already generated do not change. A generated salary is a snapshot. To reflect a changed attendance day you would have to delete that month's generated salary and generate it again.
- Short Leave also counts as time not at work in the Teacher Performance Report, so a converted day lowers that teacher's presence percentage.
A sensible way to start: switch it on with a generous allowance, watch a week of attendance, then tighten it.