Getting Your Baylor Time And Attendance System Actually Working Right
I spent about three years dealing with Baylor's workforce management setup before I stopped fighting it and actually made it work. The system itself isn't bad, but the configuration details are scattered across multiple departments and nobody writes down the little things that matter. Most people I see struggle with the same two problems: timesheet approvals getting stuck in limbo and automated clock-in corrections creating duplicate records that never resolve themselves. The core platform most Baylor affiliates end up using is a combination of UKG (formerly Kronos) for hourly tracking and an HRIS layer for salaried reporting. If you're setting this up for a department, start with the employee master data. That means getting each person's job code, location code, and pay schedule right before you touch anything else. I learned this the hard way when I onboarded a department of forty-two people and spent three weeks untangling incorrect location mappings that caused overtime calculations to fire for off-site clinics instead of the main campus. Here's how I actually get the system configured properly now:
First, pull the org chart from PeopleSoft and cross-reference it against your UKG worker profile export. Do this before any scheduling begins. Look for employees showing as "ghost workers" — people who still exist in the attendance system but have separated from employment. These ghost records will silently consume allocated hours and throw off your budget reporting. In my experience, Baylor tends to retain these accounts for about nine months after separation due to the way the sync processes are scheduled. You can manually purge them in UKG by navigating to Worker Profiles, filtering by termination date, and running the termination validation report. It takes about twenty minutes for a department of fifty. The second step is setting up your time policy group correctly. This is where most people make mistakes. The default policy templates assume standard Monday-through-Friday operations with an eight-hour shift. If your workforce includes night shift, rotating shifts, or on-call rotations, you need to build custom policies. I recommend creating a separate policy group for each shift type rather than trying to force one template to handle everything. I set up a night shift policy at 10 PM to 6:30 AM with a thirty-minute unpaid meal allowance and a ten-hour threshold for overtime calculation. This alone reduced our overtime discrepancies by roughly sixty percent in the first quarter after implementation. Common pain point and my workaround:
The biggest headache I ran into was with the automated correction process. Baylor's system is designed to automatically adjust clock-in times when there's a gap between punch and scheduled start. This sounds fine until you have employees who work flexible start times or leave early without punching out. The system would create what it calls a "correction ticket" and route it to their supervisor for approval. Supervisors would either ignore the tickets or approve them in batches, and sometimes they'd approve corrections for employees who had already clocked out correctly on a different device. I ended up with double-clock-ins on about eight percent of records during peak periods. My fix was to disable the auto-correction feature for manual time entry and instead configure the system to flag gaps larger than thirty minutes. This gives supervisors visibility into actual problems without creating noise from legitimate flexible scheduling. The tradeoff is that supervisors now have to actively review their team's timesheets instead of letting the system handle it passively. For a well-managed department, this is a fair exchange. For a team with poor oversight habits, it can actually make things worse because people stop checking altogether. I've seen both outcomes. Download and access links:
Get the Full Details
If you're looking for the official Baylor workforce management resources, you'll find them through the university's internal IT portal. The main portal is accessible at baylor.edu/it/services. From there, you can download the UKG mobile app configuration guide and the self-service onboarding documentation. There's also a template spreadsheet for bulk employee uploads that your department administrator can request from the central HR operations team. Don't skip this — uploading employees one by one through the UI is how you introduce formatting errors into dates and ID numbers. What the documentation doesn't tell you: Most guides stop at the basic setup. They don't cover the synchronization lag between PeopleSoft and UKG, which can run anywhere from four to forty-eight hours depending on the batch schedule. If someone changes their department or position in PeopleSoft on a Monday, it might not show up in the attendance system until Wednesday. This causes legitimate complaints from managers who see their new hire still listed under a different supervisor two days into the job. The workaround is to run a manual sync request through the IT service desk and flag it as urgent. This usually completes within six hours instead of waiting for the nightly batch.
Another thing nobody mentions is the overtime rule conflict. Baylor has union regulations for certain staff categories that override the standard overtime calculation. If your workforce includes any classified staff covered by collective bargaining agreements, the default UKG overtime rules will calculate incorrectly for those employees. You need to tag them with the appropriate union code in the worker profile and create a custom overtime rule that references the correct CBA section. I missed this for one of my departments and spent an entire pay cycle reconciling inaccurate overtime payments before someone in payroll flagged it. When this system won't work for you: If your department has fewer than ten people or operates on a project basis with frequent reassignments, the full Baylor workforce management system is overkill. The configuration overhead alone — getting policies right, managing sync issues, training supervisors on the approval workflow — takes about forty hours for a first-time setup. For smaller teams, I'd recommend evaluating whether a simpler scheduling tool integrated with your existing HR system makes more sense. The error-reduction benefits of the full system only materialize once you have enough volume to justify the complexity, which is typically a headcount above twenty-five with regular hourly scheduling needs.
One last practical note: Train your supervisors on the exception report, not the timesheet. The exception report is the actual utility in this system. It shows missed punches, unapproved absences, and potential overtime before the pay period closes. If you rely on supervisors to catch problems during the manual timesheet review, you'll miss things. The exception report catches them first. Run it every Friday afternoon and require supervisors to clear all flagged items before the week ends. This single habit reduced our end-of-cycle correction tickets by about seventy-five percent across the departments I supported. The system works if you put in the configuration time upfront. It will fight you if you try to use it as a black box and expect it to figure itself out. The difference between a functional deployment and a frustrating one usually comes down to whether someone actually read the synchronization documentation and set up the exception workflows before the first pay period started.
