Track your shifts and bookings

A shift is a single period of clinical work at one workplace. Sessional stores the workplace name, the date, start and end times, your agreed rate and rate type, site notes, and the payment and cancellation terms. These details follow the shift all the way through to your invoice, your earnings, and your tax records, so you enter them once. Because Sessional serves ten AHPRA professions, the labels adapt to you: a GP sees their work described the way GPs talk about it, a pharmacist the way pharmacists do.

Every shift moves through the same six states, and you control each step:

1. Offered: a workplace has proposed the shift, or you have logged one you are arranging
2. Confirmed: both sides have agreed and the shift is locked in
3. Delivered: you have completed the work
4. Invoice ready: the shift is queued to be invoiced
5. Invoiced: you have generated and sent the tax invoice
6. Paid: the money has landed

A shift can also be Cancelled before delivery. As an AHPRA-registered independent contractor, you may invoice a workplace yourself, be paid by an agency, or be paid through PAYG payroll. Self-invoiced shifts become ready for an invoice after delivery. Agency and PAYG shifts use the pay-check instead, so you can record whether the payslip was correct without creating a Sessional invoice. See agency and PAYG trackingfor the three billing modes.

Shifts reach your ledger in two ways:

• From a booking request: when you accept a workplace's request, a confirmed shift is created for you automatically
• Manually: add a shift yourself with the workplace, date, times, and agreed rate, using the Create button

Record the rate basis that matches the agreement: daily, hourly, per session, or percentage of billings. Daily uses one amount for the shift. Hourly multiplies the rate by booked or recorded actual hours. Per session multiplies the rate by the session count. Percentage of billings needs the agreed percentage and, once known, the billing revenue.

The basis controls the total shown across your shift, invoice and finance views. Readhow each rate basis is calculated before logging an unfamiliar arrangement.

Open a shift to edit its times, rate basis and related pay fields. For hourly work, you can record actual hours after delivery without changing the booked times. A shift is locked while it has any invoice line, including a draft line, so the source record and invoice cannot disagree.

Delete is narrower than edit. It is only for an offered or confirmed shift that should never have existed and has no invoice line. Cancel a real booking that will not go ahead. See the fullshift editing, locking and deletion rules.

The filters at the top of the shifts page let you cut the list down fast:

• Status filters: All, Upcoming (offered or confirmed), Delivered, Invoiced, Paid, or Cancelled, each with a live count
• Search: type a workplace name (or text from your site notes) to find specific shifts
• Date range: set a from and to date to focus on a particular period, such as a single BAS quarter

Search and the date range work together, so you can pull up, say, every shift at one Sydney clinic between April and June. There is also a calendar view of your shifts at the top of the page for an at-a-glance month.

Four cards at the top of the page give you the headline numbers:

• Total shifts: every shift you have logged
• Upcoming: shifts that are offered or confirmed
• Ready to invoice: delivered shifts waiting to be billed
• Total earned: the value of all your shifts excluding cancelled ones, with hourly rates worked out from the hours on each shift

Worked several shifts at the same workplace in a billing period? Tick the delivered shifts you want and generate a single invoice covering all of them, rather than one invoice per shift. Sessional even prompts you when you have more than one shift ready to invoice for the same workplace.

Generating invoices is included from the Free plan up, with the number of invoices a month capped on Free and lifted on the paid plans. See billing and plans if you are hitting the monthly cap.

Export your shifts to a CSV file for your spreadsheet, your accountant, or your own records. The export respects your current date range, so you can pull a whole financial year or just one quarter. Each row contains the date, workplace, start time, end time, rate, status, and notes. The on-screen list shows your most recent shifts; if you have a very long history, the CSV is the way to get the complete record. The export is open on every plan, because your shift records are yours to take with you.

Each shift carries the payment terms and cancellation policy you agreed. Your profile defaults pre-populate every new shift, and you can override them per shift. The cancellation default suits your profession out of the box: a sliding scale for GPs, a working-day notice for pharmacists, and so on. These terms carry through to your invoices, and the payment due date is calculated from them. If a shift is cancelled and your terms apply, you can raise a cancellation-fee invoice, or waive it. See cancellation terms and fees for the detail.