Everything you need to know about TimeTally — leave management, rota scheduling, time tracking, and more. Can't find your answer? Contact us or book a demo.
TimeTally comes with Annual Leave, Sick Leave, TOIL (Time Off in Lieu), Unpaid Leave, Maternity Leave, and Paternity Leave built in. These cover the most common UK leave requirements out of the box and can be used immediately without any configuration.
Yes. You can create unlimited custom leave types with any name you choose (e.g. Study Leave, Compassionate Leave, Volunteering). For each custom type you can set: whether it is paid or unpaid; whether it deducts from the employee's annual leave balance; or whether it has its own separate balance (e.g. Study Leave — 5 days per year). You can also choose a colour and icon so they're easy to identify in the calendar.
Yes. As an admin you can set exactly how many days (or hours) employees are allowed to carry over into the next leave year. You can also set an expiry date for carryover — for example, any carried-over leave must be used by 31 March. If the expiry date passes, unspent carryover is automatically forfeited. You can also set carryover to zero if you do not allow it at all.
When you mark an employee as part-time, you select which days of the week they work. TimeTally automatically calculates their pro-rata annual leave entitlement based on those working days as a proportion of a full-time week. It also accounts for bank holidays — if a bank holiday falls on a day the employee doesn't work, they aren't disadvantaged. For example, an employee working 4 days a week receives 80% of the full-time entitlement.
Yes. Managers and admins can submit leave requests on behalf of any employee — useful if an employee calls in sick and can't log in themselves. Managers are also responsible for approving or rejecting leave requests submitted by their team.
Yes, if your organisation has half-day leave enabled. Employees can book AM or PM half-days. If leave is tracked in hours rather than days, employees can book leave for specific hours of the same day, allowing even more granular bookings.
TimeTally detects clashes to prevent double-booking — if a bank holiday is already booked on a date, a standard leave request for the same date will be flagged. Employees can delete the bank holiday entry and replace it with a different leave type if needed. Bank holidays can be set to auto-book for all employees, or employees can manually book them using the Bank Holiday leave type.
Yes. You can set any start date for your leave year — 1 January, 1 April, 1 September, or any other date that suits your business. The leave year drives accrual calculations, carryover, and annual leave resets for all employees.
You can choose to have bank holidays auto-booked for all employees at the start of the leave year, or leave it for employees to book themselves using the Bank Holiday leave type and selecting whichever days apply to them. Bank holiday entries can be deleted at any time by a manager. Each employee has their own bank holiday country, so a team spread across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland each gets the right dates — or none at all, for anyone who doesn't take them. Ireland, the United States, Canada, Australia, Germany, France, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands are also available.
Yes, but this is a setting you control. Admins can enable a team calendar view that shows employees who else in their department has approved leave — useful for planning without revealing personal details. This is off by default and can be toggled on in organisation settings.
If your organisation uses TOIL, overtime hours worked by an employee are converted into TOIL at a rate set by the admin (e.g. 1:1 or 1.5:1). The TOIL balance is updated when the timesheet is submitted (not when it's approved), and is restored if the timesheet is rejected. Employees can then request time off using their TOIL balance in the same way they request annual leave.
Yes. Admins can manually adjust any employee's leave balance from the employee profile — for example to correct a historical error, add a one-off bonus day, or set a specific balance. You can set an exact current balance or change the yearly entitlement while keeping the current balance unchanged.
The reports section includes: Leave Trends (monthly leave days taken by type across the year), Leave Balance Status (remaining balances for all employees), and per-employee leave history. You can filter all reports by department.
Yes. You can configure your organisation to track leave in hours rather than days. This is useful for employees with irregular working patterns or variable daily hours. Half-day and specific-hour bookings are all supported in hours mode.
The rota is a weekly shift planner that lets managers schedule which employees are working on which days and at what times. Each shift has a name, a start time, and an end time. You can see the full week at a glance and publish it for employees to view. The rota also shows who is on approved leave each day, so you never accidentally schedule someone who is off.
Yes, but only once a manager has published the rota for that week. Once published, employees can log in and see their shifts for the week. Shifts are not visible to employees until they are published.
Yes. You can create shifts with a start time later than the end time (e.g. 22:00–06:00) and TimeTally correctly calculates the shift duration as 8 hours. Night shifts are fully supported.
Yes. You can copy an entire week's rota to the following week with one click, saving you from building the same schedule from scratch each time. You can then make any adjustments for the new week.
Shift templates are pre-saved shift configurations (name, start time, end time) that you can drag and drop into the rota for any employee on any day. If your business runs recurring patterns — like a Morning shift (07:00–15:00) or a Late shift (14:00–22:00) — you create them once as templates and reuse them every week.
On the rota, each person has one shift per day — that limit applies across every schedule, so someone already rostered elsewhere shows as busy rather than being double-booked. Split days are recorded on the timesheet instead: a timesheet day can hold several start and end times, each with its own break, and the hours are added together for that day.
Yes. When building the rota, you can see which employees have approved leave on each day, so you avoid scheduling someone who is already off. This gives managers full visibility before publishing.
Yes! When you publish shifts, you'll be asked if you want to notify employees. Those with email notifications enabled will receive an email with their shift details. Employees can manage their notification preferences in their account settings.
Yes. The rota is split into Schedules — each one is its own rota with a name, a colour and its own list of people, and you switch between them from the dropdown at the top of the rota page. Someone can belong to more than one schedule, though they can still only hold one shift per day across all of them. You can also filter the rota by department, and department managers only see the employees assigned to their department.
Yes. If you use the clock-in/clock-out feature alongside the rota, employees can clock in when their shift starts and clock out when it ends. This records their actual hours worked, which feeds into their timesheet for manager review and approval.
Yes. The rota has a week view for building and publishing shifts, and a month view for seeing the shape of the whole month at once. You can also filter what's shown — by department, schedule, job role and location — so a large rota stays readable.
A job role is what someone is doing on a shift — Chef, Waiter, Driver, Supervisor. Each role has a name, a colour so it's recognisable on the rota, and a default break length in minutes that is applied to shifts using it. Roles are set up in Settings → Rota, and they're separate from activities (what the work was) and departments (who someone reports to).
Yes. As well as copying last week forward, you can save a week under a name — "Standard week", "Summer cover" — and apply it to any other week later. Templates belong to the schedule they were saved from. Before anything is written you see exactly what will be added, and any day where that person already has a shift is skipped rather than overwritten.
If shift swaps are turned on (Settings → Rota), an employee can ask a colleague to take one of their shifts. The colleague accepts or declines first, and only then does the request reach a manager. Nothing on the rota changes until the manager approves it — that's the moment the shifts actually change hands. If a manager edits or moves either shift while a request is still outstanding, the swap is cancelled automatically so it can't go through against a shift that no longer exists as it was.
There are two ways: (1) Manual entry — employees log in to their weekly timesheet and enter their start time, end time, and any breaks for each day, or simply enter a total number of hours. (2) Clock in/out — employees tap Clock In when they start work and Clock Out when they finish. TimeTally builds their weekly timesheet from those entries automatically. Once complete, they submit the timesheet to their manager for review.
Yes. Employees can clock in when they arrive and clock out when they leave, directly from their phone, tablet, or computer. TimeTally records the exact times and builds their weekly timesheet automatically. At the end of the week (or whenever they're done), they review and submit it to their manager.
Yes. When entering hours, employees can record their break times. Breaks are deducted from the total worked hours so that the approved hours accurately reflect productive time rather than time on site.
Yes. Employees are not restricted to the current week — they can go back and submit timesheets for previous weeks at any time. This is helpful for catching up after holidays or illness.
Once an employee submits a timesheet it moves to Pending status. Managers can review all pending timesheets in their dashboard. They approve or reject the full week's timesheet with one click — there is no need to approve day by day. Managers can add a rejection note so the employee knows what to correct before resubmitting. Employees receive an email notification when their timesheet is approved or rejected.
Yes. Employees can add one or more projects to any timesheet entry and specify how much time they spent on each project that day. This gives you a breakdown of hours across different clients or workstreams.
If your organisation has TOIL enabled, any overtime hours in an approved timesheet are automatically converted to TOIL at the rate set by the admin (e.g. 1:1 means one hour overtime = one hour TOIL). The TOIL balance is credited when the timesheet is submitted and restored if the timesheet is later rejected. Employees can then use their TOIL balance to book time off.
Yes. You can export timesheet data as a CSV or Excel file at any time. You can also connect directly to Xero or QuickBooks — TimeTally generates a payroll journal entry that posts directly to your accounting software. You'll need to sign in to your Xero or QuickBooks account the first time you connect.
Employee-level pay details (hourly rates, pay totals) are never shown to employees — only to admins. Managers can also have pay details hidden from them at the admin's discretion, so sensitive payroll data stays with the right people.
Strict clocking means hours are recorded rather than typed. Start and end times come from the moment someone actually clocks in and out, and they can't edit them afterwards. If someone forgets to clock out, their only options are to clock out now or discard the shift — they can't pick a time they say they left. Admins and managers can still correct a genuine mistake. It's turned on in Settings → Time Tracking → Strict clocking, and it needs everyone to be recording time by clocking in and out.
No. Strict clocking and GPS clock-in are separate settings that answer different questions: strict clocking is about who set the number, GPS is about where the person was. Strict clocking needs no geofences and asks nobody for location permission, so it works for desk-based teams. You can use either on its own, or both together.
Yes. Each person can be exempted individually, and an exempt employee can enter and edit their own hours as normal while everyone else stays locked to their clock in and out times. Only an administrator can change exemptions — a manager can't quietly release themselves or someone else.
GPS clock-in lets you define work locations — a point on a map with a radius around it — and require the people assigned to them to be nearby before they can clock in or out. You place each location by searching for an address or postcode, dropping a pin on the map, or using your current position, then choose the radius and who it applies to. Before someone presses the button they can see which site they're being checked against and how far away they are, so a refusal is never a surprise.
No. A single position is taken at the moment someone clocks in and at the moment they clock out, and nowhere else. Nothing is recorded in between, breaks are not location-checked, and there is no background or continuous tracking of any kind — the app is not following anyone around. Organisations that never turn GPS clock-in on are never asked for a location at all.
That's up to you, and it's set per work location. "Block them" means they can't clock in or out until they're on site. "Allow, but flag it" means the clock-in goes through but is recorded as off site, with the distance, for you to review. Someone assigned to several locations only needs to be at one of them, and anyone assigned to no location at all can clock in from anywhere.
Without a usable position the clock-in is refused, and the attempt is logged so you can see it happened. The employee is told why — a location that's too vague to prove anything gets a different message from being genuinely too far away, because the fix is different (try again outdoors versus travel to site). If someone's phone simply won't produce a decent fix, you can exempt them in one click and they clock in from anywhere from then on.
Anywhere from 25m to 2km, set with a slider. Phone GPS is typically accurate to 10–50m, so a radius under 50m can block people who really are standing on site. Around 100–200m suits most single buildings; a depot, farm or large site is usually happier at 500m or more. TimeTally also ignores a fix that is too imprecise to mean anything (roughly worse than 100m of stated accuracy) rather than treating a vague reading as proof of attendance.
The decision isn't made on the phone. The app shows a preview — "you're 340m from Head Office" — so nobody taps a button that was always going to refuse them, but the real check runs on our server against its own clock, so a tampered app or a changed device clock can't award anyone hours. Every clock event is written to a log that nobody can edit or delete from the app, including the refused ones, so repeated blocked or off-site attempts are visible to you. No location system can rule out a device-level spoofing tool, which is why the exceptions list exists — and why pairing GPS with strict clocking matters, since the hours then have to match the time actually clocked.
In Settings → Time Tracking → GPS Clock in there's a log of clock events for the last 30 days. It shows exceptions only by default — blocked attempts and off-site clock-ins, with the person, the time, the site and the distance — because a list of people turning up exactly where they said they would isn't information. One toggle shows the full log. Individual timesheet days also carry a small badge: "GPS" when the hours were clocked at the work location, "Off site" when they weren't, with a map on the expanded row.
No, and TimeTally won't pretend otherwise. Checking where someone is while also letting them type their hours into a form is theatre — whatever the geofence refuses, the form quietly grants. So location checks (and strict clocking) only apply when the whole organisation records time by clocking in and out. If you later switch back to allowing the form, we tell you plainly that both features stop enforcing, rather than leaving a switch on that does nothing.
A Location records where a day was worked — Manchester, Head Office, Mason House. It attaches to the whole day on a timesheet and to each shift on the rota, so a day has one location however the hours are split between projects. Locations never affect pay. They can optionally be linked to a GPS work location, which is what lets a rostered site decide where someone has to clock in, but they work perfectly well on their own for organisations that never touch GPS. Turn them on in Settings → Work Categories.
An activity is what the work was — Installation, Travel, Commissioning — sitting alongside the project on a timesheet line. A 5-hour day can read 2.5h Mason House / Installation plus 2.5h Mason House / Travel and still total 5 hours. Each activity can carry an optional hourly uplift for work that prices differently; the uplift is on top of the project rate, never a replacement for it, and it's saved onto the line at the time, so changing an uplift later never reprices an old timesheet. Turn them on in Settings → Work Categories.
Yes. If a shift is at a Location that has a GPS work location behind it, that's the geofence the person is checked against for that shift — even if they're normally assigned somewhere else. Each shift also has a switch to place someone at a location without demanding they be inside it, for a site visit or a day where the signal is known to be poor; then their usual work locations apply instead. Reassigning a shift while someone is already clocked in doesn't strand them: their clock-out is still judged against where they clocked in.
You can choose weekly, 2-weekly or 4-weekly in Settings → Time Tracking → Timesheet Period, along with the date periods are counted from (it has to fall on your week start day). That date can be in the past, so your periods line up with a payroll cycle that started earlier — it only decides where the boundaries fall, and timesheets already recorded stay exactly as they are. If existing timesheets don't line up with the new periods, TimeTally warns you first, because a new timesheet covering the same days would double-count those hours in payroll.
Two ways, in Settings → Overtime. By hours threshold — anything past X hours a day or a week counts as overtime, with tiers if you pay different rates at different points, and per-day overrides where a particular day works differently. Or by time of day — hours worked before or after a set time count as overtime, which suits night and unsocial-hours premiums. You then choose separately how overtime is paid: at a multiplier, or converted to TOIL.
TimeTally costs £3.00 per active employee per month (prices in GBP). There are no setup fees and no long-term contracts. Managers who only approve other people's work are free — you pay for employees, plus any manager or admin who submits their own timesheets. A team of 20 employees costs £60/month. The only optional extra is GPS clock-in at £1 per person per month.
Yes — a 14-day free trial with full access to every feature, no credit card required. Most UK businesses are fully set up and tracking hours within 10 minutes of signing up.
Yes. Managers who only oversee other people are free; a manager who also submits their own timesheets counts as a seat like any other employee. When adding a manager you can configure: which department(s) they oversee (so they only see relevant employees), whether they can view employee pay details, and whether they can submit their own timesheets, request leave, and be rostered on the rota.
We accept all major UK credit and debit cards (Visa, Mastercard, American Express) via Stripe. All payments are in GBP and card details are handled securely by Stripe — we never store them on our servers. Invoices are provided for every payment and meet HMRC record-keeping requirements.
Yes. There are no lock-in contracts and no cancellation fees. When you cancel you keep access until the end of your billing period. Before it ends you can export all your data as CSV/Excel. We retain your data for 90 days after cancellation in case you return, after which it is permanently deleted in line with UK GDPR.
TimeTally integrates directly with Xero and QuickBooks for payroll journal exports. You connect once by signing in to your accounting software, and then generate payroll entries from within TimeTally. You can also export timesheet data as a CSV or Excel file for use with any other payroll or HR system.
Yes. TimeTally has a web app that works on any browser on any device, plus a dedicated iOS app on the App Store and an Android app on Google Play. Employees can clock in/out, submit timesheets, request leave, and check their balances from their phone.
Yes. You can assign each employee to a department and assign a manager to that department. Department managers only see employees in their own department. Reports, rotas, and the team calendar can all be filtered by department.
You can archive an employee — they immediately lose access but all their historical timesheet, leave, and payroll data is retained and still visible to admins. If they ever return, you can unarchive them and their full history is restored. If you want to permanently remove someone, you can delete them — this removes all their personal data in compliance with UK GDPR.
GPS clock-in is an add-on at £1 per person per month on top of your subscription. It's included free for the whole of your 14-day trial, so you can set up work locations and try the checks before deciding. You add it yourself in Settings → Time Tracking → GPS Clock in, which shows your new monthly total and exactly what is charged today — pro-rated for the rest of your billing period — before you confirm anything. You can remove it again from the same screen at any time. Strict clocking, Locations and Activities are all included at no extra cost.
Every active employee, plus any manager or admin who is set up to submit their own timesheets. A manager who only approves other people's work costs nothing. Archived employees and the demo employee used for previewing the app are never counted, so your seat count follows your actual team.
Yes. TimeTally is fully compliant with UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018. We are registered with the ICO (Information Commissioner's Office). All data is stored in EU data centres and is never transferred outside the UK/EU.
All data is transmitted using TLS 1.2+ encryption (the same standard used by banks). Data is stored in encrypted databases with automatic daily backups. We use Row-Level Security policies to ensure complete data isolation between organisations — no organisation can ever see another's data. Passwords are hashed using bcrypt and are never stored in plain text.
Yes. TimeTally runs automatic daily backups of all data. In the event of any issue, data can be restored from the most recent backup with minimal data loss.
You own your data at all times. Before cancelling you can export everything as CSV/Excel. After cancellation we retain your data securely for 90 days in case you return. After 90 days all personal data is permanently deleted. Billing records are kept for 7 years to comply with HMRC requirements.
Only what a clock event needs, and only when GPS clock-in is switched on: the latitude, longitude and accuracy your device reported at that moment, the distance to the nearest work location, and the decision that was made. Nothing is recorded between clock-ins and breaks are not location-checked. Admins can see their own organisation's clock events; employees can see their own and nobody else's. The log is append-only — it can't be edited or deleted from the app, which is what makes it useful as evidence.
Yes. Location is personal data under UK GDPR, so your team should be told what is collected and why before you switch it on, and it should be proportionate to the reason you're doing it. TimeTally is built to make that an easy conversation: one position at clock in and one at clock out, nothing in between, the employee can see the check and their distance from site before they press the button, and anyone can be exempted individually. We can't advise on your own policy — the ICO's employment practices guidance is the right place to start.
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