Check In

Check In is MSPControl’s time-tracking module. Technicians record their working day against customers and tickets; managers approve the result and lock the week.

It is reached from the header, not the menu

Check In has no menu entry. It is the clock icon in the header bar, on every page.

When you are currently checked in the icon carries a small play badge, which is the only at-a-glance indication that your timer is running. If you are unsure whether you remembered to check out yesterday, that badge is the first thing to look at.

Turning it on

Settings > Policies > MSPControl > Check In Settings controls the module. Enable Check In switches it on; nothing below matters until it is.

Setting	Purpose
Maximum number of hours per day	The ceiling for a single day
Check-in Authorizers / Select Authorizers	Who approves timesheets
PTO Authorizers	Who approves paid time off — a separate list
Enable Check Out Reminder	Chase people who are still checked in
Check-In Reminder Response Wait Time (Minutes)	How long to wait for a reply before escalating
Escalation Delay	15 minutes, 30 minutes, 45 minutes or 1 hour
Enable VirtuBot Notification for Missed Check-In	Let Virtubot chase a missed check-in
Allow Emoji Reaction As Response	Accept an emoji reaction as the reply to a reminder
VirtuBot Escalation Authorizers (Fallback if no Manager)	Who gets chased when the user has no manager

Check-in and PTO authorizers are separate lists

Approving someone’s hours and approving their holiday are different decisions, and the policy treats them as such. Filling in only one list is the usual reason approvals sit unanswered — the requests are going to people who were never nominated for that kind of decision.

The daily flow

1. Click the clock icon. The Check In tab shows your Check In Status and, once running, Started and Current Status.

2. Check In. Optionally reserve lunch — Lunch Reservation — so the time is accounted for rather than appearing as working hours.

3. Work. Check In Details records the day against a Customer, a Ticket, a Start time, Lunch Time, a Site, an IP Address and a Comment. Geolocation is captured where enabled.

4. Check Out at the end of the day. The screen confirms with You Checked Out.

Forgetting to check out is the normal failure

Nothing closes your day automatically. A missed check-out leaves the timer running, which is why the policy has a Check Out Reminder, an escalation delay and a Virtubot notification — and why there are Check-Out Reminder - Over N Hours and No Check-Out Summary - Over N Hours mail templates.

If those are switched off, the first anyone knows is a timesheet showing an eighteen-hour day.

Your week, and everyone’s

The Check In tab shows Your Week; managers also get Employees Week. Both use the same columns:

Column	Meaning
Portal	Time recorded in MSPControl
CW	Time from ConnectWise
PTO	Paid time off
UR	Utilisation rate
OT	Overtime
Total	The week’s total

Target Achieved shows whether the week has met its goal. Export to Excel takes the grid away for payroll or review.

Locking the week

A technician locks their own week when it is complete — the confirmation names the week’s start and end dates and warns you are about to lock it. After that it is read-only.

An authorizer can reverse it with Unlock Timesheet / Click to unlock timesheet, which asks “This will make the employee’s timesheet editable again.”

Lock reminders exist because locking is manual

Nothing locks a week on its own. The Timesheet Lock Reminder - Employee and Timesheet Lock Summary - Weekly mail templates are the mechanism that makes it happen, so a payroll run that keeps finding open weeks is usually a disabled template rather than a forgetful team.

PTO requests

The PTO tab holds Your PTO Requests and, for approvers, Employees PTO Requests.

Create PTO Request takes Date From, Date To and a Reason. Requests carry a status of Pending, Approved, Declined or Auto Approved, and record Approved By / Declined By with the date.

Approvers select requests and Approve or Decline in bulk. The screen refuses anything that is not pending — “Please select only Pending requests” — and rejects overlaps at creation: “You already have a PTO request for this time period.”

Cancelling a PTO request cannot be undone

The confirmation says so outright: “Are you sure you want to cancel this PTO request? This action cannot be undone.”

There is no restore. A cancelled request has to be created again from scratch, and if it had already been approved, that approval is gone with it.

Auto Approved is a real status — some requests never reach a person. Know which rules produce it before assuming every entry in the list was reviewed.

History

Two further tabs record what happened:

• Approval History — decisions taken on timesheets and requests
• Tracking History — the check-in record itself over time

These are the tabs to use when someone disputes a timesheet, because they show the decision and who made it rather than only the current state.

Mail templates

The whole module is driven by the Check In / Out mail templates — 18 of them, covering daily approval requests, PTO decisions, overtime, lock reminders and missed check-outs. The Send Daily Check-In Approval Requests scheduled task is what issues the daily round.

Disabling those templates does not disable the approvals. It removes the notifications, leaving requests sitting in a queue nobody has been told about.

Related

• Scheduled tasks
• Mail templates
• Peer roles