Clock States and Punches Explained

If your organization tracks your hours, you clock in and out from a small stopwatch icon that sits in the top navigation bar next to Legal & Compliance. Two concepts sit underneath that one icon:

Punch

A punch is a single timestamped event — the moment you started your shift, went on a meal, came back from a break, and so on. There are six punch types: Shift in, Shift out, Meal out/Meal in, and Break out/Break in. Each punch records the exact moment you confirmed it, not the moment you opened the confirmation dialog — the dialog shows a live, ticking clock specifically so this is never ambiguous.

Clock state

Your clock state is what those punches add up to right now: Off the clock, On the clock (working), On your meal, or On a break. The clock icon shows a small colored dot for your current state — green for working, amber for a meal, violet for a break — and no dot when you're off the clock. Which punches you're offered next depends on your current state: if you're on the clock you can end your shift, go on a meal, or take a break; if you're on a meal or a break, you can come back or end your shift directly (you don't have to "return" first just to immediately clock out).

A punch within a minute of the last one cancels it out

If you press a punch by mistake and correct it within about a minute, the server treats the correction as reversing the original — your timecard shows no interruption at all, and the confirmation card stays open with a one-line notice explaining what happened, rather than closing as if nothing occurred.

Meal and rest breaks are handled differently

Meals are punched (they're unpaid time, so there's a clock record). Rest breaks are paid, so they are deliberately not punched — instead you self-report them once a day. See the break attestation how-to for why, and what happens if a break was missed or cut short.