Reports and the Audit Log in helloswap: What You Can Look Up Afterwards

When something looks wrong on payday, or a manager swears they never approved a swap, you need to be able to look backward and get a straight answer. In helloswap, that backward look happens in two places: Reports, which tells you what a week cost and who worked how much, and the audit log, which tells you who did what, when, and from where. Both are on the Growth plan and above, and both are built for company admins to check things after the fact rather than to manage the schedule in the moment.

What Reports Actually Shows

Reports works one week at a time. For that week, it lists each person's hours on published shifts, their hourly rate, and what that costs — cost is scheduled hours times rate, plus any pay supplements once your company has set some up. You enter the rate either directly in the Rate column or on the person's profile in People, so it's worth checking that rates are current before you trust a report.

A few things to watch for:

• Anyone working more than their contract hours gets flagged, which is the fastest way to catch a scheduling mistake before it becomes a payroll dispute.
• If time tracking is switched on, an Actual column shows tracked hours next to scheduled hours. This is for comparison only — it does not change the cost figure, which is still based on the published schedule.
• Pay supplements (evenings, weekends, holidays) get their own column once they're configured, and they're included in the labor cost total.

The practical use case here is simple: run Reports before you finalize payroll, not after someone complains. The over-contract-hours flag in particular is the kind of thing that's cheap to check weekly and expensive to discover quarterly.

A Note on Supplements and History

Pay supplements are always calculated from the shift times on the published schedule, and the unpaid break isn't subtracted from them. That matters when you're reconciling a report against what you remember scheduling — the numbers are driven by what was actually published, not by a rough plan in someone's head.

It's also worth knowing that changing a shift pattern's hours doesn't rewrite history: new hours apply from today forward, and shifts worked before today keep the hours they were actually worked at. Working-time rules aren't re-checked for upcoming shifts on that pattern, so it's worth reviewing those. That's exactly why Reports and the payroll export stay accurate even after you've reorganized a pattern — the past doesn't get silently rewritten.

What the Audit Log Is For

The audit log is a different kind of record. It's a tab under Security and audit log in the profile menu, and it logs who did what, when, and from where — covering sign-ins, changes to people, shifts, swaps, time off, security settings, developer changes, and impersonation. Entries can't be changed or deleted, which is the point: it's meant to be a trustworthy record you can hand to an owner or an auditor without worrying it's been edited after the fact.

Use the audit log when:

• You need to confirm who approved a swap or a time-off request, and when.
• There's a dispute about who edited a shift or changed a person's details.
• You're reviewing account security — unexpected sign-ins or impersonation events.

One gap to keep in mind: changes to the company name, time zone, departments, shift patterns, and notification settings aren't recorded in the audit log. If you need a record of those specific changes, you'll have to track them some other way — the audit log won't help you there.

Together, Reports and the audit log answer two different after-the-fact questions: what did it cost, and who touched what. Checking both regularly, rather than only when something goes wrong, is the cheaper habit.