What happens if I forget to check out?
A missing check-out leaves the day open. The record holds a start with no end, so it produces no working hours until somebody supplies the closing time. The self-serve card stops offering a check-out two hundred and forty minutes after the shift ends, and after that the correction goes through a request.
An unclosed record is the most common attendance defect anywhere, and it is almost never about leaving early.
Somebody shuts the laptop, walks to a train and remembers on the platform. The day has no end because a browser tab closed, not because the work stopped at an unusual time.
The wide closing edge exists for exactly that. Four hours past the shift end covers the ordinary late finish without dragging every long day into a review queue.
Beyond it the request path takes over, which is the right trade. A time supplied eight hours after the fact is a recollection, and a recollection deserves a reviewer.
The mirror case is rarer and stranger. A day holding an end with no start, usually because the morning scan failed and nobody looked. It breaks in the same way and gets fixed in the same way.
Order breaks things too. Two starts in a row with nothing between them is not a longer day. It is a broken sequence. Treating the second as an update throws the first away quietly, and nobody notices until a month-end total looks wrong.
None of these is unusual. Any team of any size produces them weekly. Planning for them beats being surprised by them.
Where the record was captured by the fingerprint terminal rather than the browser, the gap looks identical but the cause is usually physical. Somebody walked out past the device rather than up to it.
Close the day before you leave rather than after. Where that has already failed, raise the request the same evening while the finishing time is still exact.
Related questions
Will the system close my day automatically?
No. Nothing invents an end time. An automatic close would put a fabricated figure into a record that other people rely on being real.
Does an open record count against me?
It contributes no hours, so a weekly total reads low until it is fixed. That is a gap in the data rather than a mark against the person.
Can somebody else close it for me?
Somebody with approval rights applies the corrected time once a request exists. The change keeps its before and after values in the audit trail.