When somebody forgets to clock out.
A shift with no end on it is the most common problem in any time clock, and the one people handle worst. Here is what you owe, how to work out the number so it survives being questioned, and how to stop it happening every week.
Written for US employers. It is not legal advice — see the note at the end.
The hours are owed either way.
The work happened whether or not the button was pressed. A missing clock-out is a records problem, not an hours problem, and the distinction matters because the two have different answers.
Under the Fair Labor Standards Act the duty to keep accurate records of hours worked sits with the employer, not the employee. "They forgot to clock out" does not move that duty, and it is not a defence that survives a wage claim. Neither is a default — quietly closing every open shift at eight hours produces a number that is wrong in one direction on purpose, which is exactly what an investigator looks for.
So the task is not deciding whether to pay. It is establishing when the shift actually ended, and being able to show how you know.
Reconstruct it from something, and write down what.
In rough order of how well each holds up if somebody challenges it later.
A location trail
When the phone left the site is when the shift ended, near enough. It is contemporaneous, it was not written by either party after the fact, and it does not rely on anybody's memory.
Somebody else's clock-out
Two people on one site leave together more often than not. A colleague's recorded end time is a reasonable basis, and it is checkable.
A fixed event
A delivery signed for, a gate locked, a site log, a photo with a timestamp. Anything that happened at a known time and needed them there.
What they remember
Still worth having, and still better than a default — but get it in writing and get it agreed the same week, not in six months when the figure is in dispute.
Whichever you use, record which one it was against the shift. A corrected entry with its reasoning attached is a record. The same correction without it is somebody's word.
Have the crew member confirm the number.
An estimate both sides agreed to in the moment is far stronger than an exact-looking figure nobody can source. It is also the cheaper outcome: most wage disputes over a forgotten clock-out are not really about the ninety minutes, they are about a number appearing on a payslip that the person did not recognise and was never asked about.
A message saying "I've put you down as finishing at 3:40 based on when you left the site — tell me if that's wrong" takes ten seconds and closes the whole question.
It is a design problem, not a discipline problem.
If it happens most weeks, telling people to remember harder will not fix it. Somebody finishing a physical day, hands full, walking to a truck, is not going to reliably open an app.
What actually reduces it:
- A reminder that fires when they leave the site, not at a fixed time of day — the fixed time is always wrong for somebody.
- An automatic close with a flag, so a shift that ran past any plausible length stops accruing but is marked as needing a decision rather than silently paid or silently dropped.
- A record that can be re-read. If the day's trail is still there, the end time is recoverable later; if all you kept was two button presses, it is gone.
The ones that come up.
Can an employer legally edit a timesheet?
Do I have to pay for a shift with no clock-out?
What if the crew member cannot remember either?
It re-reads the day and shows its working.
A shift with no clock-out keeps its location trail, so the end is recoverable rather than guessed. Fix shift re-reads that trail, proposes the time the phone left the site, and says which stops it used — and where it genuinely cannot tell, it asks instead of filling the gap with something confident.
Free while it is in beta. A GPS time clock for construction and field-service crews, built by somebody who runs one.
This is general information about a common payroll problem, not legal advice. Wage and hour rules vary by state and some are stricter than the federal floor described here. For a specific dispute, ask an employment lawyer in your state.