Keeping Both Columns

Arguing for symmetry on fairness grounds convinces the people who already agree. There are three other arguments.

The exposure is asymmetric

Unpaid working time produces claims with a statutory basis and a limitation period measured in years.

Break overruns produce an awkward conversation.

An organisation with an aggressive time-theft policy and a non-neutral rounding configuration has optimised the small risk and left the large one running.

And the records that prove the second are the ones the first created.

The arithmetic frequently favours it

Pre-shift minutes, rounding drift and deducted-but-taken breaks are measurable.

In most operations that measure both, the unpaid figure is larger.

Which means the project that began as a recovery exercise can find a net liability, and it is better to find it yourself.

The data degrades without it

A workforce that sees one column counted stops reporting the failures in the other.

Which means terminal faults go unreported, anomalies accumulate, and the record stops describing arrivals.

The controls then rest on data that has quietly become unreliable, and nothing in the system indicates this.

How to do it

Run both calculations on the same month, from the same records.

Present them together.

Fix the structural causes on both sides — the queue, the terminal location, the rounding setting, the rigid rule.

And say publicly that both were examined, which is what makes the first column's findings credible.

What it costs

An afternoon of analysis.

And whatever the unpaid minutes turn out to be worth, which is a cost you already had and had not counted.

The position it produces

A policy that specifies both directions is harder to argue with, internally and externally.

It survives a union question, a tribunal and an inspection better than one that counts one way.

And it is the version that keeps working, because it does not spend the cooperation the records depend on.

Present them on one page

The format that makes the point without an argument.

Both columns, same month, same records, same page.

No commentary needed.

The comparison speaks, and it speaks to people who would have discounted a fairness argument.

And it pre-empts the objection everyone was about to raise, which is the practical reason to do it first rather than in response.

Turn the boundary into a test

For a concrete product reference, this implementation example can help turn this boundary into a test. Verify the current behaviour with representative fields and record what reaches the destination.