Edit a technician's clock in or clock out
Technicians forget to clock out, clock into the wrong job, or work a visit with a dead phone. When that happens the job's hours — and its labor cost — are wrong until someone fixes them. If your role has the Edit Clock In/Out permission, you can fix them straight from the job.
Open the job from Scheduling > Jobs and select the Clock In / Clock Out tab. Each row gains actions, and a button above the table adds an entry from scratch.
What you can do
Correct the times. Select the pencil on a row, set the date, clock in, and clock out, and give a reason. The reason is kept with the correction, so anyone reviewing the job later can see why the hours changed.
Close a session that was never clocked out. Rows marked No clock out are edited the same way — set the clock out time and save.
Remove a session from the job. Select the trash icon and say why. The row stays on the tab, struck through and labelled Removed, and its hours come off the job's labor cost. Nothing is destroyed: the technician's original clock records stay on the visit, and the circular-arrows icon on that row restores it (after a confirmation). The same icon on an edited row reverts it to what the phone recorded, also after confirming.
Undo a correction. A corrected row gains a circular-arrows icon that drops your change and returns the row to what the technician's device actually recorded.
Add time that was never clocked. Select Add clock entry, pick the technician and the visit, then enter the times and a reason. The technician list covers anyone assigned to one of this job's visits, plus anyone who clocked on one — so a technician who helped out and later came off the schedule can still have their time logged. A manual entry is labelled Manual, and deleting it removes it outright — there are no clock records behind it to fall back to.
Every change lands on the job's Timeline
Each correction writes a line to the job's Timeline: what was done, whose time it was, what it changed from and to, who did it, and the reason typed at the time — Clock In/Out corrected by Dana Whitfield: Edna Tech · Mar 10, 2026 at 9:00 AM – no clock out → Mar 10, 2026 at 9:00 AM – 1:30 PM — "Forgot to clock out". Removing a session (… 9:00 AM – 1:30 PM → removed), restoring one, and adding or deleting a manual entry each get their own line.
The lines sit under Record activity in the Timeline's Activity filter, so you can pull up every clock change on a job without reading past the rest of its history.
What happens to the original records
Corrections never overwrite what a technician's phone recorded. Essential stores your change as an adjustment layered on top, which is why a row can always be reverted and why the tab can show you both the corrected hours and what was actually clocked.
The same adjustment drives everything downstream: the job's labor cost and margin on the Job Costing card, and — if your business has Time cards turned on — the technician's own timecard. The job page and the timecard can't disagree.
Where a correction reaches
A correction is authoritative everywhere the hours are counted or acted on: the job's labor cost and margin, the technician's timecard and pay, the Clock In / Clock Out tab, the technician's day list and visit screen, the Jobs list's Open Visits count, the customer portal's visit status, the Technician utilization and Technician time reports, the Other crews line on a visit, GPS tracking (it stops once the correction says the shift ended), clock-out reminders, and missed-arrival alerts. Inspection reports and work acknowledgments created after the correction stamp the corrected start time. Essential's hourly housekeeping job reads the corrections too: hours you logged by hand count as attendance, so no "no clock in" task is filed for that visit, and a session you removed is not treated as worked, so no "missing summary" task is filed for it. (A visit whose only session was removed reads as never clocked into, so it can still receive a "no clock in" task — that is what the removal says happened.)
One display-only surface still reads what the technician's phone recorded and can lag up to a day behind a correction, until Essential closes the forgotten session automatically: the Scheduling board's In Progress badge. The visit history inside the mobile app (the past visits a technician opens from a visit's Job or Property view) is a second display-only surface, but it reads raw clock events directly and never catches up to a correction at all — it only reflects the technician's original clock-in and clock-out times. The hours themselves are already correct everywhere they are counted.
When an edit is refused
A few saves are turned away on purpose, with a message explaining why:
The timecard has already been submitted or approved. Changing time after sign-off would quietly change what someone was paid. Ask a manager to send the timecard back first, then make the correction.
The new times overlap other time the technician already has. Hours can only be counted once.
The session starts or ends in the future, or runs longer than 24 hours.
The selected clock time does not exist on that date. When daylight saving time skips an hour, choose a time before or after the skipped period; Essential will not silently move the entry to a different time.
Overnight shifts
The editor takes one date plus a clock in and a clock out time. If the clock out is at or before the clock in, Essential reads it as an overnight shift and rolls the end to the next day — it tells you which day underneath the field.
Where to find it: Open a job from Scheduling > Jobs; select the Clock In / Clock Out tab in the tabbed panel
Permission needed: Edit Clock In/Out (Settings > Roles & Permissions, under Time & Job Costing). It is granted to the default Back Office and Back Office Admin roles.
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