How do I close the month?

The four steps

Closing is not a button but a sequence. It is worth keeping to, because the last step makes the three before it irreversible.

1. 1Work through the open cases: decide change requests, resolve clarification cases from the terminal, confirm or discard suggested bookings from the planning. The warning bar on the dashboard and in the time tracking shows what is open.
2. 2Go through the time account per person. Target, actual and balance sit side by side, and the detail view shows the course of the month and the underlying bookings.
3. 3Close the period. The closing lock is set to a fixed date for this, after which everything up to and including that day is unchangeable.
4. 4Export the report, as Excel or as PDF, and pass it on.

The two locks

Two periods stand independently of one another. Both act on the date of the entry and not on when it was recorded: an entry added today for the month before last is locked immediately. The calculation is to the day; the time of day plays no part.

Each period offers eleven levels, from „none“ through „today“ and „yesterday“ to „90 days“. The closing lock additionally knows a fixed date, and that is exactly the route for the month end: everything before or on that cut-off date is then locked.

Both periods can be set independently, and the code does not check the combination. If the closing lock is shorter than the editing lock, a change request runs into nothing. There is no case-by-case release, and no role gets around the closing lock.

The time account: target against actual

Four quantities feed into the calculation: the target hours from the working-time model valid on each day, the actual time recorded, the public holidays of the relevant federal state and the approved absences. Employment periods limit all of it; outside them neither target hours nor absences arise.

The current day is treated separately. Its target hours not yet met are not an absence but a provision. Anyone looking at their account at lunchtime therefore does not appear to be in the red.

The time account does not post, it calculates. It carries no balance forward, and there is no manual correction. The only value that is set is the opening balance from the employment contract. If somebody changes working-time model, a retrospective report uses the model that applied at the time.

Overtime: three figures that are not the same thing

The distinction is not a nicety; it decides requests. The available figure is displayed, and the check runs against the usable one.

Pay out or take as time off

Both draw on the same balance and both require the business to have permitted it. With a wage contract neither route is possible.

Before a payout request the application checks five preconditions and names the reason for any refusal: whether the business permits payout, whether it is a wage contract, whether the contract's overtime arrangement provides for payout, whether a premium rate is stored and whether the usable balance is greater than zero.

Time off in lieu runs as an absence of the type overtime reduction. The conversion from hours to days follows the person's working-time model and not a fixed eight-hour day, and it is taken in whole and half days.

The application does not pay anything out. It keeps the request, the decision and the marker that the payout has happened. The payment is made in payroll.

The traffic-light account

So that a balance does not first come to light at the month end, four thresholds can be agreed, two in credit and two in debit, all as positive amounts. A daily job at 06:30 compares each person's displayed balance against them and determines the level green, amber or red.

What is reported is a change of level, not its persistence. A second run on the same day recalculates and stays silent. Managers and HR get one figure per level rather than one notification per account.

Without an agreed threshold an account stands at green. That means no warning has been agreed, not „everything is fine“. The traffic light is also not the occupational safety warning under the Working Time Act. That is about the individual day and the law; this is about the accumulated balance and the arrangement within the business.

What is logged

On the Professional plan the application keeps a complete history of all operations on time entries: creating, changing, deleting, locking, unlocking. Per operation it holds the previous and the new state in full, plus the list of fields changed, the reason, the acting person and the time. Only the system writes the log; a manual entry is not possible.

The operations stay 90 days in the live data. After that a scheduled job writes them on as a CSV archive and removes them from the live table. The archives can be viewed in the audit view and deleted there, after which the operations are gone for good.

The log covers time entries. Changes to master data, contracts, permissions or settings are not in it; those run in logs of their own.

What closing does not do

It does not calculate pay. MetronHR keeps times, absences and balances; the payroll run itself happens in payroll.

And it does not catch anything up. Whatever was not recorded during the month cannot be added after closing, neither directly nor through a request. That is why working through the open cases comes before setting the lock and not after it.