When you export payout data in CSV files, you may notice that there are different columns with different hours counts: Total Hours, Active Hours, and Effective Hours.
Total hours
Total hours are the entirety of hours spent "on the clock". If an employee clocked in at 5am, and clocked out at 2pm (without taking any breaks), they would have 9 total hours.
Active hours
Active Hours are total hours less any paid nonproductive time (e.g. rest breaks). If our example employee clocked in at 5am, and out at 2pm, but had 20 minutes of paid breaks during the day, they would have 9 total hours but only 8:40 active hours.
Effective hours
"Effective Hours" represents which value gets used internally by FieldClock based on the payout type. non-productive payouts always show 0 active hours, and the total value of nonproductive time is put in the total hours column. This can cause confusion when summing columns in the CSV.
Using our same example from above, the total hours column would have a row with 9:00 total hours (for the hourly work), and another row with 0:20 total hours (for the break payout).
A simple sum would seem to indicate 9:20 hours total, but this is not correct. However, a sum of the effective hours column would have the correct 9:00 hours value as it would include 8:40 active time for the hourly work + 0:20 total time for the break pay.