Shift Allowances and Night Shifts Costed Automatically
No more checking finish times against a rate card. No more allowances missed because nobody spotted the hours. No more engineers chasing money they're owed.
Who it's for
Anyone paying shift, night or unsocial hours allowances, where somebody currently works out who qualifies.
What it saves you
The month-end reconciliation of shift claims, and the allowances that quietly never got applied.
Set up time
Live within days, once the rules are agreed.
How do you calculate it automatically?
Build Concierge reads the attendance, applies your rules to decide whether it qualifies, works out the allowance and posts it to the job as a costed line, coded the way your accounts need it.
Your rules, applied the same way every time, on the day the work happened.
Why allowances get missed
Because qualifying is a judgement made after the fact, by somebody reading times off a job.
Nobody sets out to miss one. It happens because the decision sits at the end of a process, when a person's working through a batch of completed jobs, checking finish times against a rate card that lives in a different document. Some obviously qualify. Some are borderline. Some straddle midnight and need thinking about, and it's four o'clock on a Friday.
So allowances get applied inconsistently depending on who processed the job and how busy they were. Some get missed entirely. And because the engineer's the one who notices, you find out when they chase it, which is the worst possible way to find out.
What getting it wrong costs
Two costs, pulling in opposite directions.
Missed allowances cost you trust. An engineer who has to chase money they're owed, more than once, draws a conclusion about how the business is run. That's expensive in a market where good engineers have options.
Inconsistent allowances cost you accuracy. If the uplift lands on some qualifying jobs and not others, your job costs are wrong, so your margins are wrong, so the next quote gets priced off a number that was never real.
What the automation does
- Reads the attendance from the completed job or the submitted timesheet.
- Decides whether it qualifies under your rules, including the awkward cases you've defined. Shifts crossing midnight, part-night attendances, call-outs that ran late.
- Works out the allowance, whether that's a fixed amount, an hourly uplift or a percentage.
- Posts it to the job as a costed line with the right nominal code, department and VAT treatment.
The decision is rule-based.
You define what qualifies and the workflow applies it. It isn't forming a view about whether somebody deserves an allowance.
What you need first
The rules, written down.
That's genuinely the whole prerequisite, and it's usually where the work is.
- When a night shift starts and ends, and whether it's judged on start time, finish time, or hours worked in a window.
- What the allowance is worth.
- Whether it varies by client, contract or engineer grade.
- Which nominal code, department and VAT treatment it posts to.
- What happens at the edges. A shift straddling midnight. A call-out that started at 8pm and ran to 2am.
How it gets set up
- We write the rules down with you. Expect to find your own rules are ambiguous somewhere, usually around midnight. Sorting that out is worth more than the automation.
- We build it in stages you can check. Extraction, the qualifying decision, the calculation and the description are separate steps, so when something looks wrong you can see exactly which part produced it.
- We run it alongside the manual process for a period. Every line compared. This is money going to engineers, so a quiet error costs more than the time it saves.
Common questions
No. You define the rules and the workflow applies them. It reads the times and follows the rule you wrote.
That's exactly the case to define up front. Once the rule's written it gets applied the same way every time, which is more than most manual processes manage.
Yes. Different rules, rates and codes per contract are normal, including separate treatment for call-out rates and overnight allowances when working away.
The sums are handled by a calculation step rather than left to AI, so they're deterministic.
Change it on the job exactly as you would now. The automation sets the starting position.
It posts the allowance to the job. What flows to payroll from there follows your existing route, with the advantage that the line's already there and already right.
Let the allowance take care of itself
Get in touch with the Build Concierge team and we’ll set it up around the way you work.
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