Night shift
A night shift is a working window falling mainly in the overnight hours. It typically starts in the evening and ends the following morning. A 22:00 to 06:00 shift is a night shift. Its defining technical feature is that it crosses midnight, so it belongs to two calendar dates.
That midnight crossing causes more attendance bugs than anything else.
A naive calculation of 06:00 minus 22:00 returns minus sixteen hours. A naive daily report files the clock-out under the wrong day. A naive absence check sees no punch on Tuesday for a person who worked all Tuesday night.
All three are fixable. All three have shipped in real systems. The fix is to treat the shift, not the calendar day, as the unit.
Handover is the other thing nights need and day shifts do not. Somebody arriving at six inherits eight hours they did not see. Whatever was not written down is lost. Build handover into the shift rather than leaving it to goodwill at the end of a long night.
Where this shows up in PeopleMuster
PeopleMuster stores each punch with its own date and time. The attendance table shows check-in and check-out against the record, rather than forcing both into one calendar day.
Questions people ask
Which date does a night shift belong to?
Most teams attribute the whole shift to its start date. What matters is that everybody uses the same rule. Mixing the two makes daily totals impossible to reconcile.
Does a night shift attract extra recognition?
That depends on the employer's own policy, and this page states no rule about it. The related concept is a shift differential.
How do you calculate hours for a shift that crosses midnight?
Treat an end time earlier than the start as the following morning. A 22:00 start and a 06:00 end is eight hours on the clock, before any break comes off.