Workforce Modules

Workforce, Timekeeping, Approvals, and Employee Pay run directly inside Project Alpha. They share PA’s database, login, projects, UI, deployment, and backup. There is no second application, connection, synchronization service, or compatibility API.

Module ownership

• PA users and TOTP are the only login identities.
• Employees are PA users with the employee role and strict default ACLs.
• PA projects are authoritative; assignments control which projects employees select.
• Workforce owns timers, breaks, manual time, revisions, approval snapshots, and employee-pay accruals.
• PA billing consumes immutable approved snapshots internally. Corrections and voids append billing reversals instead of rewriting approved time.

Initial setup

1. Sign in as an administrator. PA recommends TOTP, but the reminder may be dismissed.
2. Open Settings > Work, Jobs & Pay > Workflow defaults. Set the Workforce currency, fallback pay/billing rates, and worker time requirements in the Time & Workforce section. The business name and timezone remain under Business & Branding.
3. Open Accounts, create or edit a PA user, and choose the Employee role. The Employee role loads the strict self-service ACL defaults automatically.
4. Complete the employee profile, pay visibility, and assigned projects on the same Account form. Optional assignment and service-component compensation rules take precedence over broader defaults.
5. Employees use Workforce > Time; approvers use Approvals; authorized users use Employee Pay. The Workforce Overview summarizes time and pay.

Timekeeping managers can enter time for any active PA account. Client, project, and mutable draft-invoice context is optional for managers. Employees never see direct client or invoice rates and select only the services and Work Activities available to them.

Client billing and worker compensation resolve separately. For hourly client billing, PA uses project override, client override, Service Activity rate, Work Activity default, then the business fallback billing rate. Compensation uses the most specific valid assignment or service-activity rule before Work Activity and worker/business fallbacks. Missing required rates block the affected payable or billable step.

See Service Library and Work Activities for catalog and activity setup, and Workforce, Time, Billing, and Pay for time corrections, billing decisions, statements, payment records, deadlines, and payroll exports.

Security boundaries

The employee role grants personal time, assigned projects, profile access, and permitted personal pay visibility. It does not grant billing, payments, financial administration, approvals, workforce administration, user management, settings, or API-key access.

Privileged users receive a dismissible TOTP recommendation. Sessions use hashed server-side identifiers, expire after 15 idle minutes, and have a seven-day absolute maximum.

Corrections and audit

Confirmation snapshots worker, Job, activity, duration, rates, amount, and currency. A worker can edit their own draft or returned entry. For a submitted entry, the worker uses Withdraw and edit; this marks the submitted revision withdrawn, retains its review history, and returns the live entry to draft for resubmission. Authorized workforce managers can perform the corresponding pre-approval action for workers in their scope.

Confirmed work is never overwritten in place. Workers use Request correction, while an authorized administrator uses Edit and supplies a reason. Approval retains the original revision and immutable snapshots, creates a corrected revision, and records worker-pay and client-billing effects separately. Draft statements and invoice lines can be rebuilt from the correction; closed statements and finalized invoices remain locked and receive explicit adjustments. Worker Payment Records preserve the independent fact of what an administrator actually paid. All module mutations write to PA’s system audit trail.

Verified-Owner self-confirmation is a worker-relationship rule. Marking a Worker Profile as a verified business Owner enables automatic confirmation as nonpayable owner time. Separately, built-in PA admin and owner account roles may self-confirm their own completed time while retaining the Worker Profile’s employee or contractor compensation policy. Ordinary time-management and review permission grants do not provide this bypass. Historical entries in closed periods remain unchanged and require the normal audited exception process.

Confirmed, billable time may be attached to a matching mutable draft invoice. When exactly one matching draft exists, PA can attach it automatically; otherwise an administrator chooses the destination. The invoice line and totals are created only after confirmation. Later corrections refresh a draft line, while finalized invoice changes use an explicit charge or credit workflow.

Operations

The Compose stack is db, migrate, web, worker, and cron. Backups cover the one PA database and shared configuration/upload volumes. No module-specific recovery step is required.