Time tracking glossary
Short, plain definitions of the words that come up when hours turn into pay: from timesheet and overtime to ORT, rest time, client approval and period lock.
ABU and NBBU cao
The two Dutch collective agreements for temporary agency workers, from the employer associations ABU and NBBU.
Audit trail
A chronological, unchangeable record of who created, changed or approved data, and when.
BAG ruling on time recording
The 2022 decision of Germany's Federal Labour Court that employers must record the start and end of employees' daily working time.
Break rules
Legal minimum breaks during a shift, based on how long the employee works that day.
Client approval
The client confirming the hours a worker spent at their site, before the hours are paid and invoiced.
Decimal hours
Hours written as a decimal number instead of hours and minutes, for example 7.75 instead of 7:45.
Geofence
A virtual boundary around a real location that lets an app react when a phone enters or leaves the area.
Kiosk time clock
A shared tablet or terminal at a workplace where employees clock in and out, usually with a personal PIN.
Magic link
A secure, unique link sent by email that opens one specific task or account without a password.
MCP (Model Context Protocol)
An open standard that lets AI assistants such as Claude connect to tools and data sources in a structured way.
Overtime
Hours worked beyond the agreed or normal working time, often paid at a higher rate or compensated with time off.
Payroll export
A file of approved hours, allowances and expenses per employee, in the layout the payroll system can import.
Period lock
Closing a pay period so its hours can no longer be changed after they have been exported to payroll.
Placement
The assignment of a worker to a client for a period, with its own position, rates, approvers and rules.
Predictive time tracking
Time tracking that pre-fills expected hours from the roster, calendar or past weeks, so people confirm or correct instead of typing.
Rest time
The legal minimum of uninterrupted time off between two working days and within each week.
Shift allowance (ORT)
Extra pay for hours worked at inconvenient times such as evenings, nights, weekends or public holidays; in the Netherlands called ORT.
Staffing agency
A company that employs or contracts workers and places them at client companies, paying the workers and invoicing the clients.
Timesheet
A record of the hours a person worked in a period, with start, end, breaks and what the time was spent on.
Webhook
An automatic HTTP message one system sends to another when an event happens, such as hours being approved.
How to use this glossary
Time tracking sits between three worlds that each have their own vocabulary. Operations talks about shifts, rosters and breaks. Payroll talks about wage codes, allowances and exports. Staffing agencies add placements, clients, hirer's pay and collective agreements on top. When a planner, a payroll administrator and a client use the same word for different things, hours get paid wrong or approved late.
Every entry starts with a one or two sentence definition you can quote. Below it you will find what the term means in practice, an example with real numbers where that helps, and how it connects to the rest of the process: capture, approval, export and lock. Where a term has a legal side, such as rest time, break rules or the German duty to record working time, we only state figures that come from the law itself and link to the full labour-law page with official sources.
From capture to payroll: the terms in order
If you are new to the topic, read the entries in the order hours move through a business. A worker records time on a timesheet, on a phone or at a kiosk time clock. The hours belong to a placement or project and are checked against break rules and rest time. A manager or the client approves them, often through a magic link instead of a login. Payroll then receives a payroll export, the period is locked so nothing changes afterwards, and an audit trail shows who did what.
The technical entries at the end, webhook and MCP, explain how other systems and AI assistants can read and write hours automatically. Each entry links to related terms and to the product pages where TimeTracking implements the idea, so you can see what is live today and what is still coming soon. Nothing in this glossary is legal advice; collective agreements and sector rules often differ from the general rules described here.
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