Clocking in without a scheduled shift
Last reviewed: 2026-07-14
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Staff aren't required to have a scheduled shift to clock in on POS — Team Shift fully supports ad hoc, unscheduled clock-ins.
What happens with no matching shift
When a staff member clocks in, Team Shift looks for a published shift for that staff member, at that location, on that date. If it finds one, the new timesheet is linked to it. If it doesn't, the timesheet is simply created without a shift link — nothing blocks the clock-in, and no warning is shown to the staff member.
An unlinked timesheet behaves like any other: it tracks clock-in, clock-out, and breaks normally. The only difference is that it has no shift to compare against, so it won't get early/late tags (see Early/late tags and POS sales attribution), since those tags are calculated relative to a shift's scheduled start and end time.
Why draft shifts don't match
Shift matching only considers published shifts. If you've created a shift for someone but haven't published the week yet, a clock-in that day will not link to it — it'll create an unlinked timesheet instead, exactly as if no shift existed at all. Publish the week before the shift's date to make sure clock-ins link up correctly. See Publishing schedules and notifying staff.
Reviewing unscheduled timesheets
Unlinked timesheets don't get any special flag on the Timesheets dashboard — they're not the same thing as "flagged" (auto-closed) timesheets. To spot them, open a timesheet's detail page: if there's no shift reference and no early/late tag badges, it wasn't matched to a schedule. This is useful context when reviewing timesheets for a period where staff may have covered shifts outside their normal schedule.