Time Off, Leave and Time Tracking
Set up time off policies and PTO accrual, approve or deny leave requests, and track hours with clock in, clock out and timesheet approval.
Time off and hours worked are two sides of the same question. Leave Management holds your time off policies, PTO balances and the requests waiting on a decision. Time Tracking holds the punches, the timesheets and the overtime.
When you would use this
- You are setting up vacation and sick leave for the first time and need accrual rules.
- Somebody has asked for time off and you need to approve or deny it.
- Payroll is due and you need this period’s hours approved.
- You want to know who is clocked in right now, or who is over on hours this week.
- A manager asks what PTO balance an employee has left.
Leave Management
To open it: Sidebar → HR → Time & Leave → Leave Management.
Leave Management has four tabs: Dashboard, Requests, Policies and Calendar. The description on the page says the scope: review leave requests, manage policies, and monitor PTO usage.
Dashboard
Four tiles: Pending Requests, Approved Today, On Leave Now and Upcoming Leave.
Set up a time off policy
A policy is a container; the leave types inside it carry the rules.
- Go to HR → Time & Leave → Leave Management → Policies.
- Create a policy. Give it a name and a description. Scope it to a department if it applies to one, or leave it organization-wide.
- Set the accrual frequency: per pay period, monthly, annually, or none for leave that does not accrue.
- Mark one policy Default. That is the policy a new employee falls under when nothing else applies.
- Add leave types inside the policy - vacation, sick, unpaid, bereavement, whatever you offer. Each leave type row shows Name, Accrual Rate, Max Balance, Carryover, Paid and Approval.
| Leave type field | What it controls |
|---|---|
| Accrual Rate | How much is earned per accrual period |
| Max Balance | The ceiling; accrual stops there |
| Carryover | How much may cross into the next year |
| Paid | Whether the time is paid or unpaid |
| Approval | Required means a manager must approve; Auto means it is granted on request |
| Advance notice | How many days ahead a request must be filed |
With no policies configured the tab says No leave policies configured yet rather than appearing empty.
Balances
A balance is held per employee, per leave type, per year, and carries four numbers: accrued, used, pending and carried over. Pending is held separately so a request awaiting approval cannot be spent twice.
Approve or deny a request
- Go to HR → Time & Leave → Leave Management → Requests.
- Open a request. It shows the employee, the leave type, the start and end dates and the hours.
- Press Approve. You are asked to confirm: Approve Leave Request.
- Or deny it, and give the denial reason. The reason is recorded on the request.
A request is pending, approved, denied or cancelled. An employee may cancel their own pending request; a denied one keeps its reason so nobody has to ask twice. Where your approval rules call for two approvers, the first approval is recorded separately from the final one, so a single person cannot satisfy both.
Managers can approve their own team’s requests from HR → My Portal → My Team without HR admin rights. It is the same queue.
Calendar
The Calendar tab shows approved and pending leave across the organization, filterable by department, so you can see coverage before you approve anything.
Time Tracking
To open it: Sidebar → HR → Time & Leave → Time Tracking.
Time Tracking has three tabs: Dashboard, Entries and Timesheets. The page description is the scope: monitor employee hours, approve timesheets, and manage overtime.
Dashboard
Four tiles: Clocked In Now, Hours Today, Pending Approvals and Overtime Alerts.
Clock in and clock out
Clock In and Clock Out record a punch pair. Employees can also clock from their own portal and from Muin Go on a phone. Muin records where each punch came from, which is a separate question from how it is classified:
| Entry type | Means |
|---|---|
| Clock | A real punch pair |
| Manual | Entered by hand, by the employee or an admin |
| Imported | Brought in from another system |
Entries
The Entries tab lists each entry with Date, Hours, Regular, Overtime, Type, Status and Reason. An entry is draft, submitted, approved or rejected. You can approve or reject one at a time, or select several and press Approve Selected.
An entry can carry a review exception that holds it for a human: tardy, outside the schedule, an unusually long punch, a missing punch photo, a geofence violation, a self-amendment, an auto-close or a no-badge fallback. Which of these block automatic approval is a setting, so you decide what a manager must look at by hand.
With no entries the tab says No time entries found.
Make punches trustworthy
Time tracking is honor-system by default. For grant-funded, field or hourly staff where you need evidence of where and who, turn on the trust controls in Settings → HR Settings → Time Tracking Trust Controls, then Save Changes. Every control is off until you turn it on, and all of them apply to punches made in the mobile app.
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| GPS punch stamp | Records the employee’s location at the moment they clock in or out, when they have allowed location access on their phone. There is no switch: if they deny permission the punch still records, just without coordinates. |
| Geofence enforcement | Compares each punch with the employee’s assigned work location. Set the Allowed radius (meters), from a job site’s 100 m up to 10 km for a wide campus. |
| Require punch photo (buddy-punch deterrent) | Asks for a selfie at clock-in and clock-out. Managers see it when reviewing the timesheet, and it is kept as long as the time entry. |
The geofence and the photo each have a mode. Warn records the punch and flags it for review (a geofence violation or missing punch photo on the Entries tab). Block rejects the punch and tells the employee why, so they can move inside the radius or take the photo and try again. Start on Warn while staff learn the boundary and every employee has a work location set, then switch to Block. If classes meet in places with no map coordinates, Block is not saved; the screen lists those places so you can add coordinates first.
Location and photos are captured only at the moment of a punch. Muin never tracks employees in the background.
Timesheets
A timesheet is a pay period’s worth of entries. The Timesheets tab lists each one with its Period, Total, Regular, Overtime and Status:
| Timesheet status | Means |
|---|---|
| Open | The period is still accepting entries |
| Submitted | Sent for approval |
| Approved | Signed off by a manager |
| Locked | Closed; no further edits |
Approve or reject a timesheet from its row. With none the tab says No timesheets found.
What it affects
- Approved hours are what payroll should be run from. Payroll operations reads the approved register, so an unapproved timesheet is hours nobody has been paid for.
- Approving leave reduces the employee’s balance and moves the hours from pending to used.
- Approved leave appears on the leave Calendar and on a manager’s OOO this week on My Team.
- Locking a timesheet stops any further correction to that period, which is why it is the last step rather than the first.
- Hours recorded against a class or a program also appear in that program’s own reporting.
When it goes wrong
“Failed to load leave data.” The read failed; nothing changed. Retry. An empty Requests tab after an error is not an empty queue.
An employee cannot request the leave they expect. Check three things: do they fall under a policy (the Default policy if no other applies), does the policy have a leave type for what they are asking, and does their balance cover it. A request inside the advance-notice window is also refused, and the refusal says so.
A balance looks wrong. Compare accrued, used, pending and carried over rather than one total. Hours sitting in pending are reserved against an undecided request, so they are correctly not available.
Carryover did not happen at year end. Carryover is capped by the leave type’s Carryover value. Anything over the cap is deliberately not carried.
An employee is still showing as clocked in. A punch with no clock-out is an open punch. It may be auto-closed, which records the auto-close as a review exception so a manager sees it rather than the hours silently landing in payroll. Correct the entry on the Entries tab.
A timesheet will not approve. A timesheet with an entry still in draft or holding a blocking exception is not ready. Settle the entries first, then approve the timesheet.
You cannot edit a period any more. It is Locked. A locked period is closed on purpose; make the correction in the current period instead.
Next step
- Payroll operations - turning approved hours into a payroll register, a GL entry and a pay stub.
- Benefits and enrollment - the other half of what comes out of a paycheck.
- Self-service profile - where employees request time off and see their own hours.