When you are building a schedule for an employee, it is often common that an employee will do multiple things during that period of time while they are working. For example (using hospital schedules), a nurse may spend the morning precepting another employee and the afternoon floating to another unit. Both of those are schedule transfers.
Or a nurse may work a 12-hour shift and then spend the next 12 hours on call. All of these are important to put on the schedule for coverage and tracking purposes.
But when you have a schedule-centric approach, where all the schedule data should also feed Timekeeper to drive payroll, you want to make sure those shifts and segments go in correctly to pay correctly as well as show coverage, etc. correctly.
Kronos Schedules module has shifts and shift segments (which are, intuitively, partial segments of a single shift). What's the best way to put in schedules? Always use separate shifts? Always use a single shift with multiple segments? A mix - and if so, how do you know which to use?
A good rule of thumb is to use a single shift with multiple shift segments when the employee could punch in once at the beginning of the shift and once out at the end.
Use a separate shift if there is some worked time that the employee does not record punches for.
So, in the examples above:
When an employee is precepting (i.e. work rule) for one period of time and then floating for the rest of the shift (i.e. job transfer), then PUT IT ALL IN A SINGLE SHIFT. Employee clocks in at the beginning of the day and out at the end of day and all the transfers are applied for both the schedule and the time card.
When an employee is working a shift and then goes on call (which implies going home - not punched in), then PUT IT IN TWO SEPARATE SHIFTS. Employee clocks out and goes home and the schedule still shows coverage without trying to link the on call shift back to the first worked shift.
Of course you always want to test every scenario in your test environment to make sure it pays the way you expect, but thinking of it in terms of the simple rule of thumb will help your schedulers know when to use a single shift with multiple segments and when to use multiple shifts.