Labor: Indirect Time — Training, Cleaning, Meetings and Other Non-Task Work

Not all paid time is task time. Record indirect time — training, cleaning, equipment maintenance, meetings, count support — by starting it in the WMS App and stopping it when done; a supervisor reviews each entry, and approved indirect time explains the day in Hours Reconciliation.

A warehouse day is not all picking and packing. People sit in training, clean aisles, wait for a forklift repair, join the morning meeting, or help with a stock count. Before, that time had nowhere to go: it either vanished or got squeezed into a task it did not belong to — and at the end of the day, the hours on the clock could not be explained. Indirect time gives that work its own record. It uses the same time entries as task work, just marked with an indirect type, so hours reconciliation and the reports can tell direct work and indirect work apart.

For employees: start and stop indirect time in the WMS App#

1. Open the Labor page in the WMS App. When you switch to work that is not a direct task — a training session starts, you are sent to clean, a meeting is called — choose the indirect type that fits (for example Training or Cleaning) and start it.
2. Work as usual. When the indirect work is done, stop it in the app. The entry now holds the real start, end and length, and goes to your supervisor for review.
3. One timer at a time: you cannot start indirect time while a task timer is running, or while another indirect timer is still open — the app will tell you to finish the current one first. That rule is what keeps the same hour from being counted twice.

For supervisors: review indirect entries#

1. Open WMS → Labor Review. Below the project time review, the Indirect Time Review section lists the indirect entries waiting for you, with the person, the type and the length of each entry.
2. Approve the entries that match what actually happened. Reject the ones that do not — a reason is required, so the employee can see what was wrong and record it correctly next time. You cannot review your own entries; another supervisor handles those.
3. Only approved indirect time counts: it enters Hours Reconciliation as the indirect part of the day, and the direct/indirect split in the reports. An entry that is still pending explains nothing yet — clear the queue before payroll day and the unexplained remainder shrinks to what is genuinely unexplained.

The indirect types your organization uses#

Every organization starts with the same five types: Training, Cleaning, Equipment maintenance, Meeting and Count support. Your organization keeps its own list from there: it can add types for work that happens often in your warehouse (for example Waiting or Safety checks), and switch off types nobody uses, so the list employees pick from stays short and accurate. The five starting types keep their names — they can be switched off, but not renamed — so reports stay comparable across warehouses. If a type you need is missing, ask a supervisor to add it rather than squeezing the time into the nearest wrong type: the type is what makes the reports and the reconciliation readable.

Docklify features used in this article#

• Start / stop indirect time with a type — WMS App → Labor (mobile labor page)
• Indirect Time Review (approve / reject with a reason) — WMS → Labor Review (/wms/labor-review)
• Approved indirect time inside the daily check — Labor → Hours Reconciliation (/labor/reconciliation)