Set Up Your Workspace: Hours, Work Zones
Configure working hours, closed days, operational day start, and GPS work zone in Loopapa. Five settings, done once, free to start.
Every team app starts with assumptions. It assumes your day begins at midnight. It assumes Saturday is a normal working day. It assumes everyone on your team reads the same language. For most businesses, at least one of those assumptions is wrong — and every task, shift, and report built on a wrong assumption lands on the wrong day, pings the wrong people, or arrives in a language half the team cannot read.
Loopapa fixes this with one short setup, done once by the admin. You tell the app five things about how your business actually runs: your working hours for each day of the week, which days you are closed, the hour your operational day starts, the work zone where staff clock in, and the languages each person works in. From that moment, every scheduled task, every shift record, and every AI answer follows your rules instead of the app's defaults.
This guide walks through each setting: what it controls, what the safe defaults are, and the exact numbers behind them — from the 10 to 500 meter geofence radius to the rule that protects today's data when you change a setting mid-week. The whole setup takes about five minutes, and most of it is available on the Free plan.
What can you set up in your Loopapa workspace?
Five settings, all in one place under your business profile: weekly working hours, closed days, the operational day start hour, a GPS work zone with an adjustable radius, and the languages your team works in. Four of the five are included on the Free plan; only the GPS work zone starts on the Starter plan. Each setting is set once by the admin and applies to the whole team automatically.
Working hours
Opening and closing times for each day of the week, Monday to Sunday — each day set independently.
Free planClosed days
Mark any weekday as closed. Scheduled tasks skip closed days automatically, so nothing fires while the doors are shut.
Free planOperational day start
The hour your business day begins — anywhere from midnight to 4 AM — so late shifts count toward the right day.
Free planWork zone
A GPS pin on your location plus a radius from 10 to 500 meters. Staff outside the zone cannot clock in; remote staff are exempt.
Starter planLanguages
Four separate language choices per person — app interface, handbook AI output, chat translation, and PDF reports.
Free planSet once, applies everywhere
These settings feed every part of Loopapa — scheduled tasks, the attendance clock, the calendar, reports, and AI answers. Nobody on the team has to configure anything themselves.
How do you set working hours and closed days in Loopapa?
Inside your business settings, you get one row per day of the week — Monday through Sunday. Each row has two controls: an open/closed toggle, and (when open) a time range showing when that day starts and ends. Toggle a day closed and it is marked as a non-working day across the whole system. Leave it open, set your hours, and every scheduled task will know when your day actually runs.
The default schedule out of the box is Monday to Friday, 09:00–17:00, with Saturday and Sunday set to closed. Most businesses will adjust at least one day on their first setup — that is expected, and the change takes effect from the next working day so nothing running today gets disrupted.
Weekly Schedule
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Mo Monday09:00 – 17:00 Open
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Tu Tuesday09:00 – 17:00 Open
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We Wednesday09:00 – 17:00 Open
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Th Thursday09:00 – 22:00 Open
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Fr Friday09:00 – 22:00 Open
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Sa Saturday— — Closed
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Su Sunday— — Closed
What does marking a day as closed actually do?
A closed day is a system-wide signal. When a day is marked closed, recurring scheduled tasks skip that day automatically — the calendar highlights only your open days, so there is no risk of creating a task pattern that fires while nobody is working. The 14-day task calendar your staff sees on their dashboard also respects closed days, showing only the days ahead that are actually open.
One-time tasks — tasks scheduled for a specific single date — are an exception. They always run on their chosen date, even if that date falls on a closed day, because they represent a deliberate manager decision. The app shows a short warning when you pick a closed date, but it does not block the task.
The Starter plan adds an option to override this — a per-template toggle labeled "Even on holidays" lets you force a recurring task to run on closed days when genuinely needed. This is the only way to have a recurring task fire on a day your schedule marks as closed.
Most countries require employers to record daily and weekly working hours. Under the EU Working Time Directive (2003/88/EC), workers are entitled to at least one day of rest per week and a maximum 48-hour working week on average. Configuring your schedule accurately means the shift records Loopapa generates are already aligned with those requirements — no manual adjustment when you run a work-hours export.
What is the operational day start hour — and why does it matter?
Most software treats midnight as the boundary between two days. For teams that work late shifts — finishing at 1 AM, 2 AM, or 3 AM — that means the last hours of a night shift get stamped to the wrong date. A shift that started at 8 PM Tuesday and ended at 2 AM Wednesday gets split: some records go to Tuesday, some to Wednesday. Reports are wrong. The calendar shows tasks on the wrong day. Managers spend time correcting data instead of reading it.
Loopapa solves this with one setting: the operational day start hour. You pick the hour — anywhere from midnight (00:00) to 4 AM — that marks the real beginning of your business day. Everything before that hour still belongs to the previous day. A shift ending at 2 AM is part of Tuesday if your day starts at 4 AM. The clock on the dashboard, the task calendar, and the shift report all follow the same rule.
Shift starts Tuesday 8:00 PM, ends Wednesday 2:00 AM
Because 2:00 AM is before the 04:00 day boundary, the whole shift belongs to Tuesday
Reports, the task calendar, and the shift log all show one clean Tuesday entry — no split
Allowed values: 00:00 · 01:00 · 02:00 · 03:00 · 04:00 · Default: 04:00
With day start set to 04:00, a shift ending at 2 AM belongs entirely to the previous calendar day.
Which value should you choose?
The default is 4 AM, which covers the vast majority of operations that run late-night shifts. If your team always finishes by midnight, setting 00:00 (midnight) is perfectly accurate. If you have occasional shifts ending past midnight but rarely past 2 AM, 02:00 gives you the right boundary without overcounting. The key rule: choose the earliest hour at which a genuinely new working day can start — not the latest time a shift might end.
This setting affects five things simultaneously: the attendance clock boundary (when an open shift is auto-closed), the task calendar date display, the generation of recurring task instances, the dashboard task counts, and the work-hours export date attribution. Getting it right once means all five stay consistent without any manual correction.
Why it matters
One wrong boundary =
wrong data every night
If your team finishes at 2 AM and your day starts at midnight, every late-night shift creates a split record: part on Tuesday, part on Wednesday. Multiply that by 5 shifts a week and 52 weeks — that is 260 incorrectly split records per year that need manual correction at payroll time. The operational day start hour eliminates the problem at the source.
What happens to today's data when you change a setting mid-week?
Nothing. That is the short answer — and it is by design. When you change your working hours, your operational day start hour, or your timezone, Loopapa does not apply the new values immediately. It stores your change, keeps the current settings active for the rest of today, and switches to the new values at the start of your next working day.
This is called a forward-only settings change. The system records both versions — the settings active right now and the settings you have just saved — and automatically uses the right one depending on the date. Every task instance, every shift record, and every report entry is evaluated against whichever set of settings was active on that specific day. Past data is never retroactively changed.
Settings change saved on Wednesday
Day start changed: 00:00 → 04:00
Monday – Tuesday
Shifts, tasks, reports use old settings
Wednesday Change saved
Today still runs on old settings — no disruption
Thursday onwards
New settings take effect from the next open working day
If Thursday is a closed day, the new settings activate on the next open working day after that — automatically.
Why it matters
No retroactive changes.
Ever.
Changing a setting mid-week on most tools rewrites how past data is interpreted — shift records shift dates, task histories move, reports change numbers. Loopapa's forward-only policy means historical records are immutable. What was recorded on Monday is still recorded on Monday, regardless of what you change on Wednesday. Your data is a reliable audit trail, not a moving target.
Which settings follow the forward-only rule?
Three settings trigger the deferred activation mechanism when changed: timezone, operational day start hour, and weekly working hours (including closed days). These are the settings that define what day a record belongs to — so changing them mid-day without a buffer would cause inconsistency in data that has already been written.
Other settings — your business name, logo, GPS pin, geofence radius, language preferences — take effect immediately, since they do not affect how historical records are dated or attributed. You can update those at any time without any deferred activation.
How does the work zone keep clock-ins honest?
The work zone is a GPS pin on your physical location combined with a radius you control — anywhere from 10 to 500 meters. Once set, any on-site staff member who tries to clock in from outside that radius is blocked. The system checks their device position at the moment of clock-in, calculates the distance to your pin, and either allows or blocks the attempt immediately. No manual review needed: the rule runs automatically on every clock-in.
Setting up the work zone takes one tap in your business profile: open the GPS settings, press "Set here" to drop the pin at your current location, then drag the radius slider to your preferred distance. The pin stores your exact coordinates; the radius slider moves in steps from 10 m to 500 m, with a default of 100 m.
✓ Inside zone
Clock-in allowed
✗ Outside zone
Clock-in blocked
Remote staff
Always exempt
Why it matters
Buddy punching costs employers
up to 5% of gross payroll
The American Payroll Association estimates that time theft — where one person clocks in for an absent colleague — costs employers up to 5% of gross payroll. For a team spending €200,000 a year on labour, that is up to €10,000 paid out for hours nobody worked. A GPS work zone eliminates the problem entirely: you cannot clock in from the car park, from home, or from the café down the street.
What radius should you set?
Modern smartphones achieve a typical GPS accuracy of 4.9 metres under open sky according to GPS.gov. In practice, buildings and urban canyons can degrade that to 10–20 metres. The default 100 m radius is deliberately generous: it covers GPS drift, a quick walk from the car park, and multi-floor buildings, while still ruling out clock-ins from home or nearby streets.
For a compact site — a single office floor or a kitchen — 50 m is usually sufficient. For a spread-out site with a large car park or multiple buildings, 200–300 m may be more appropriate. If you set the radius too tight and staff report clock-in failures near the entrance, increase it by 50 m increments until the issue resolves. The slider moves in 10 m steps, so fine-tuning is straightforward.
What about staff who work off-site?
Any staff member marked as Remote in their profile is completely exempt from geofence checks. They clock in and out from wherever they work, with no GPS prompt and no radius validation. You set the work type — on-site or remote — individually per employee in the employee profile. A team can mix both types freely: your front-desk staff are on-site with geofencing enforced; your delivery drivers or field technicians are remote with no location check at all.
If you have not set a GPS pin yet, geofencing is simply inactive — no clock-in will be blocked, regardless of staff type. The feature only activates once you drop the pin. This means you can safely start on Loopapa, get the team comfortable with clocking in and out, and add the work zone later without any disruption to the attendance workflow you already have running.
On the Free plan
GPS records your location at clock-in, but no geofence radius is enforced. Staff can clock in from anywhere.
Unlocks on Starter
Set a GPS pin and a 10–500 m radius. On-site staff outside the zone are blocked at clock-in. Remote staff remain exempt.
What happens to scheduled tasks when a day is marked closed?
When you mark a weekday as closed in your workspace settings, every recurring task template that was set to fire on that day stops generating instances for it — automatically, with no manual editing of the templates themselves. The template is not paused, not deleted, and not changed in any way. It simply skips the days your schedule says are closed, and resumes on the next open day that matches its pattern.
This connection is live: the moment you save a change to your working hours, the task calendar recalculates. Days that were previously open and are now closed stop showing scheduled tasks. Days you reopen immediately appear as active run days again. There is no separate step to update your templates — the schedule drives everything.
No tasks
No tasks
Exception — "Even on holidays": On the Starter plan, individual recurring templates can be set to run even on closed days. Only templates with this toggle explicitly enabled will fire on a closed day — all others continue to skip it.
Saturday and Sunday are marked closed — no task instances are generated for those days across any periodic template.
How does the calendar update when you change your schedule?
Every time you save a working-hours change, Loopapa recalculates which days are valid run days for your recurring and scheduled task templates. The calendar strip your staff sees on their dashboard reflects the updated schedule from the next open working day onwards — no template editing required, no notification to staff needed. Close a day that was previously open, and its task slots disappear from the forward view immediately. Reopen it and they return.
This automatic recalculation means your task schedule is always an accurate reflection of your current working week — not a snapshot of the week you set things up. A business that moves from a five-day to a four-day week changes one toggle in settings, and every template adjusts without a single edit to any individual task.
Why it matters
One setting change.
Every template stays correct.
Without a closed-day connection, every schedule change means opening each recurring template, checking its run days, and manually removing the day you just closed. On a team with 10 active templates, that is 10 edits every time the schedule shifts — and 10 chances to miss one. Loopapa eliminates that work entirely: mark the day closed and every template that does not have "Even on holidays" enabled simply skips it. No edits, no misses, no phantom tasks landing on a closed day.
How a mid-size hotel configured its workspace in under ten minutes
The Grand Elm is a 74-room hotel with three operational departments: front desk, housekeeping, and food & beverage. The general manager set up the Loopapa workspace on the first morning, before any staff had logged in. Here is exactly what she configured, and what each setting unlocked for the team.
The Grand Elm Hotel
74 rooms · 3 departments · 1 location
Working hours
Mon–Fri 07:00–23:00, Saturday 08:00–22:00, Sunday closed.
Operational day start: 03:00
Night-shift front desk staff finish at 02:30. Setting 03:00 keeps their full shift attributed to the correct day — no split records, no manual corrections at payroll.
Work zone: 150 m radius
The hotel occupies a full city block. A 150 m radius covers the main building, staff entrance, and the adjacent annex — while excluding the café across the street. Delivery drivers are set to remote and are exempt.
Sunday closed → 8 templates skip automatically
The hotel has 8 daily recurring task templates — opening checks, linen counts, F&B prep. All 8 skip Sunday without any template edits. One weekly deep-clean template has "Even on holidays" enabled and runs on Sunday as intended.
Setup complete in 8 minutes. From that point, every shift record, task calendar entry, and clock-in check followed the hotel's actual schedule — on day one, with no staff training required on the settings themselves.
Two months later: the schedule changed, the setup held
In week nine, The Grand Elm added Saturday evening service and extended Friday hours to midnight. The general manager opened workspace settings, updated Friday to 07:00–00:00 and kept Saturday open as-is. Because the operational day start was already set to 03:00, Friday's late shift automatically belonged to Friday — not Saturday. All 8 recurring templates adjusted to the new Friday end time without a single template edit. The change took under two minutes.
This is the compounding value of setting up the workspace correctly from the start. Each subsequent schedule change costs almost nothing, because the templates, the calendar, and the shift records are all downstream of the same five settings — not independently maintained lists that each need their own update.
How workspace settings connect to the rest of Loopapa
The five settings you configure in your workspace are not isolated — they feed into almost every other part of the app. Understanding those connections helps you set things up with confidence, and helps you know exactly which settings to revisit when something downstream behaves unexpectedly.
Staff Attendance Tracking
The operational day start hour sets the shift boundary. The GPS work zone enforces clock-in location for on-site staff. Working hours determine when auto-close fires on open shifts.
Recurring & Scheduled Tasks
Closed days skip task generation automatically. The operational day start hour controls which date a task instance belongs to. Change your schedule and all templates recalculate immediately.
The 14-Day Calendar
The staff dashboard calendar strip shows only your open working days. Closed days appear blank — no tasks, no phantom entries. The day start hour determines where "today" begins on the strip.
Exports for Payroll & Compliance
Work-hours PDF and CSV reports group shift records by operational day — not calendar midnight. If your day start is 03:00, a shift ending at 02:30 appears on the correct date in every export.
Roles, Managers & Permissions
Only admins can edit workspace settings. On Pro, manager roles see the operational calendar and attendance data filtered through the same working-hours and day-start rules you set here.
Manage Your People
Each staff member's work type — on-site or remote — determines whether your GPS work zone applies to them. Set it per person in their profile; the workspace zone does the rest.
Create Tasks From Text or Voice
When the AI suggests a deadline for a new task, it uses your operational day start to determine what "today" and "tomorrow" mean — ensuring suggested dates align with your actual working day, not the calendar clock.
Voice to SOP
Voice-to-SOP uses the handbook language setting to produce written procedures. Once workspace setup is done, any manager can record a voice note and get a written procedure in the language they set — immediately.
Notifications
Shift reminder notifications align with your working hours — staff only receive clock-in reminders on days your schedule marks as open. No reminders fire on closed days.
Which plan do you need for workspace setup?
Four of the five workspace settings are available on every plan, including Free. The only setting that requires an upgrade is the GPS work zone — the pin and geofence radius that enforces clock-in location. Everything else — working hours, closed days, the operational day start hour, and language preferences — is yours from day one, with no card required.
Setting
Free
€0 forever
Starter
€29 / month
Working hours & closed days
Per-day open/close toggle + time range
Operational day start hour
00:00 to 04:00, default 04:00
Language preferences
App, Handbook, Report — per person
Work location GPS pin
Drop a pin at your site address
Geofence radius (10–500 m)
Block clock-in outside the zone
"Even on holidays" toggle
Force a recurring template to run on closed days
On the Free plan
Working hours, closed days, operational day start, and language preferences — all four configured and running for free. The task calendar and shift records follow your rules immediately.
Start free, no cardUpgrade to Starter
Add the GPS work zone with a 10–500 m geofence, the "Even on holidays" override per template, and trust routing for shift reports — from €29 per month.
Try Starter free for 14 daysFrequently asked questions
- Can I change my working hours after the team has already started using Loopapa?
- Yes — and you can do it at any time without disrupting the current day. Loopapa uses a forward-only policy: when you save a change to working hours, the new schedule takes effect from the next open working day. Everything recorded today stays exactly as it was. If the day after your change is a closed day in your new schedule, the system automatically moves the effective date to the first open day after that.
- What is the operational day start hour, and what value should I set it to?
- The operational day start hour is the time at which your business day officially begins — and therefore the point at which the previous day ends. Any shift or task that falls before this hour is counted as part of the previous day, not the current calendar date. The allowed values are midnight (00:00), 01:00, 02:00, 03:00, and 04:00; the default is 04:00. Choose the earliest hour a genuinely new shift could start at your location. If your team never works past midnight, 00:00 is accurate. If night shifts end around 2–3 AM, 04:00 keeps those shifts cleanly on the correct day.
- If I mark Sunday as closed, will a recurring task that runs every day still fire on Sunday?
- No — by default, recurring templates skip any day marked as closed in your working hours. The task simply will not be created for that day; no instance appears on anyone's dashboard and no notification is sent. The template itself is unchanged and resumes normally on the next open day. The only exception is if the template has the "Even on holidays" toggle enabled — a Starter-plan option that overrides the closed-day filter for that specific template only.
- Does the GPS work zone apply to all staff, or can some people be exempt?
- You control this per person. Each staff member in Loopapa has a work type — on-site or remote. On-site staff are subject to geofence enforcement when a GPS pin is set: if they try to clock in from outside the radius, the clock-in is blocked. Remote staff are always exempt — no GPS check runs for them at all, regardless of the work zone settings. You can mix both types freely on the same team. If no GPS pin has been set yet, geofencing is simply inactive for everyone until you add one.
- What geofence radius should I use, and what happens if I set it too tight?
- The default is 100 metres, which covers most single-building locations while accounting for the typical GPS drift of 10–20 metres indoors. If staff report clock-in failures near the entrance or car park, increase the radius in 50-metre steps until the issue clears. The slider runs from 10 to 500 metres in 10-metre increments. For a compact indoor site, 50 metres is usually sufficient. For a large campus or multi-building complex, 200–300 metres is more appropriate. An admin can always clock in a staff member manually if a legitimate clock-in is blocked.
- Do workspace settings affect all staff immediately, or only from the next shift?
- It depends on the setting. Language preferences, GPS pin, and geofence radius take effect immediately — the next clock-in attempt will use the updated radius, for example. Operational settings that affect how days are counted — working hours, closed days, and the operational day start hour — are deferred to the next open working day to protect records already created today. This means you can safely update your workspace settings at any time, even mid-shift, without corrupting data that is currently in progress.
Your workspace is the foundation everything else builds on
Get the working hours, day boundary, work zone, and closed days right once — and every task, shift record, calendar entry, and export that follows will be accurate from day one. The Free plan covers four of the five settings with no card required.
No credit card for the Free plan · Starter trial needs no card either