Every assignment (one person, at one branch, in one position) carries an attendance basis: Rostered or Fixed hours. This one field decides something specific — how attendance’s “expected” count is worked out, and where lateness starts counting from — not which branch someone belongs to, and not whether they can take leave.
Rostered
For a rostered person, expected comes from the published roster only: a shift on the roster that day means expected; a shift on a draft roster never counts; a branch with no roster covering that day at all means not expected either. Whichever shift they actually land on that day sets the expected start time and that shift’s own flex window.
Covering a shift still counts, whatever the person’s usual basis: someone normally marked fixed-hours who covers a Saturday shift at some branch is treated exactly like the shift says for that one day — the roster decides, regardless of their everyday basis. The other direction also holds: a rostered person who punches in on a day their branch’s roster has nothing scheduled for them gets an Off-roster flag (the punch needs a reason, and a manager sees it in Timesheets) — telling the manager that this arrival was not planned for.
Fixed hours
For a fixed-hours person, expected does not look at any roster — it looks at their own work pattern: which weekdays count as working days, a start time, an end time, and a flex window. These four fields live on the assignment form, alongside editing that person’s position and branch; an org can also set a default work pattern on Company ▸ Settings ▸ Timekeeping (under Policy in the settings list), which any new fixed-hours assignment starts from unless it sets its own — changing the default only affects assignments created AFTER the change, never the people who already have one.
What the flex window means: a 08:00 start with a 120-minute flex means arriving any time from 08:00 to 10:00 counts as on time — though that alone is not the whole lateness picture; see how lateness is decided for the org’s grace period stacked on top. Days outside the pattern’s working weekdays, and holidays on the org calendar, are never expected — even on a weekday the pattern would otherwise count.
Which one to pick
Before an org buys the scheduling module, every assignment can only be fixed hours, and the assignment form does not even show this field as a choice — there is no roster to be on, so “rostered” would not be a real option, just one that looks selectable and is always empty. Once scheduling is bought, a new assignment defaults to Rostered, and whoever creates it decides the person’s real basis at that moment. A branch with no roster of its own yet is better left fixed-hours until its first roster exists, then switched — the switch is one field, either direction. Existing assignments never change basis just because the org later buys scheduling; they stay fixed-hours, which is the true fact about how those people have always worked.
There is no rule the system can apply automatically for who fits which basis: a branch head nurse who works at the very branch that has a roster, but whose OWN position is never actually assigned a shift on it, would get an Off-roster flag every single day if marked rostered — fixed hours with her own pattern is the honest read. The positions that genuinely receive shifts — doctors, nurses, pharmacists, assistants — are exactly where rostered makes expected reflect what the roster actually scheduled.