This article will cover the steps and components that you will need to successfully roster a Sleepover or Night shift, and refer to some tips and tricks to correctly set up: pay group times; sleepover allowance; and shift types, for a sleepover or 24 hour shift.

First we will explain the components then use them to roster a shift.

When selecting your shift type it is useful to understand what effect they have in scheduler. We will use standard and sleepover shifts in this article.

A standard shift will have the start and end time on the same day.

The shift type of Sleepover or Night shift forces the end time to be on the following day.

To select the shift type use the drop down menu when creating a shift in scheduler.

Sleepover shifts have a crescent moon icon to identify them in the shift details, and the carer timesheet report.

This shift type has the same rule as a Sleepover, it forces the shift to cross the 12am threshold, but it won't show up as a sleepover shift in scheduler or reporting. Useful for standard night shifts that cross midnight.

To be able to override the normal hourly rate for the carer an allowance must be set up to override the hours. This way you can set up a sleepover shift, and instead of the normal hourly rate, the worker will receive the allowance.

Find allowances in the account menu under the pay items menu.

When creating a sleepover allowance be sure to use the Sleepover Type option otherwise the hourly rate for the carer's standard award will be used.

Now when you create a shift this allowance will be able to be selected through advanced edit mode.

It will then appear on the staff members' timesheet under the allowances column.

For active or awake hours please see the article: Awake hours on a sleepover shift

A common requirement with a 24hour or 12hour shift is that there are hourly components generally before and after the sleepover. This can be easily handled within ShiftCare by setting up another allowance with type as Override hours.

In our example, we will assume that there is 8 hours of Sleepover and 16 hours of awake day hours. Therefore, staff should have both components within their timesheet.

On the Allowances page create a new allowance in our example we will call it 24h day (you can give it any name that you can easily identify). Choose Allowance type to be Override hours and value should be 16 for our example. This way 16 hours will be sent to the payroll system (in addition to the 8-hour sleepover this will be 24 hours).

When creating a 24hour shift within Scheduler, choose the newly created allowance along with Sleepover allowance. This will then give appropriate timesheet entries.

👉 more on this topic is covered in the article: Using allowances to control pay rates

A common error that occurs with sleepover shift set ups is attempting to use a pay group period that crosses over midnight.

For example, the carer may receive a standard award for normal hours, an evening loading award for the night times hours, and finally an allowance for the sleepover hours. The shift times may cross over between these. For accurate export of staff timesheet then we need to make sure that pay groups are set up correctly.

If an award crosses over into morning hours, then you must use two separate entries. eg. Weekdays 8pm-12am, and weekdays 12am - 2am. Covering the total period of the evening loading award 8pm - 2am

This will mainly prevent any errors when exporting the timesheet reports for accounting purposes.

Creating a standard shift in scheduler that attempts to cross midnight you will receive the following error - Start time cannot be later than end time.

To use a Shift Type that is not Sleepover or Night Shift, tick the "Shift finishes the next day" option.

Using the elements discussed above we can now roster a shift. Lets use an example of a client needing a 24 hour shift, showing the various elements required.

For example, a client needs the following roster.

To do this accurately, remember to follow all the steps for each component described in this article above:

This would appear as the following in scheduler daily view.

On the start day, notice the standard daytime shift, then the standard evening shift. A sleepover shift starting at 10pm and continuing on to the next day...

... finishing at 6am. Then finally a 6am - 8am standard shift to complete a 24 roster.

Demonstration of 24 hours of shifts based on splitting the shifts to align with the pay groups.

In this example the pay groups run: