Audit Your PCE Hours: A Shift Ledger Beats a Job-Title Guess
If your résumé says 1,400 clinical hours but your payroll export says 1,260 paid hours, do not pick the larger number and hope the descriptions explain it. Reconcile the dates, duties and counting method first. A small shift ledger is more useful than a confident estimate you cannot reproduce.
This is an audit of your record, not a promise that a program will accept every hour. You need both a defensible total and a school-specific answer about which duties qualify.
Separate three questions that often get mixed together
First, how many hours did you actually perform the activity? Second, which CASPA category fits the duties? Third, how does the target program apply its experience requirement? Those answers can differ without making the underlying record inconsistent.
The CASPA Experiences instructions direct applicants to classify experiences by responsibilities, explain that programs may evaluate them differently, and prohibit repeating the same hours across experience types. They also ask for average weekly hours completed during the stated date range and a contact who can verify the experience. Check the current instructions when entering your application.
Start with records, then explain the gaps
Collect timecards, schedules, volunteer logs or another contemporaneous record you are entitled to use. Payroll totals are a useful cross-check, but may include paid leave, orientation or other time whose treatment needs review. Conversely, a payroll report will not capture a separate unpaid activity.
Choose an “hours through” date. Keep future shifts in a planning column, never silently mixed into completed experience. A job you expect to start is different from an ongoing role. CASPA’s instructions distinguish current and in-progress experiences from planned ones.
Date range · role/site · recorded hours · duty categories · non-overlapping allocation · evidence · verification contact · unresolved program rule · hours-through date
You do not need patient names, medical-record numbers or clinical notes to prove how long you worked. Keep the ledger about your employment and responsibilities. If a program requests formal documentation, use its instructions and your employer’s approved process.
A fictional reconciliation
Suppose your records show twenty eight-hour shifts: 160 hours total. You identify 120 hours of direct-care duties, 24 hours of administrative work and 16 hours of training. These categories are illustrative; the program decides what it accepts.
| Time block | Recorded hours | What still needs checking |
|---|---|---|
| Direct-care duties | 120 | Does this program accept these responsibilities as PCE? |
| Administrative duties | 24 | Which experience category fits, and does the school count it? |
| Training | 16 | Is this type of training accepted toward the requirement? |
| Total accounted for | 160 | No hour appears in more than one block. |
Listing 160 hours as PCE and another 24 as HCE would create 184 hours from 160 hours of activity. The problem is duplication, even if both descriptions are accurate. Your allocation should reconcile to the actual total before you apply any school’s exclusions.
Program rules still matter. Utah Valley University, for example, directs applicants to break out combined direct and related healthcare experience and excludes unpaid student training from its PCE requirement. That example is not a rule for every school.
Handle changing schedules without false precision
If you worked twelve-hour shifts for one period and switched to weekends later, a single “hours per week” guess may hide the change. Reconstruct the periods first, account for weeks away, and then calculate the average using the date range you will report. Do not use a standard forty-hour week just because the position was called full time.
If old records are incomplete, write down the estimation method and what supports it. A supervisor may be able to confirm the schedule or a range. Do not invent exact shift-level data to make the spreadsheet look tidy. Resolve uncertainty before submission where possible, and follow a program’s documentation rules if it requires a specific format.
Make the supervisor’s check easy
Give the person a concise summary of dates, role, duties and the total you calculated. Ask whether it agrees with their records, rather than asking them to sign a number without context. Confirm their current professional contact details and retain any corrections.
Run one last check across the whole application: does the résumé use the same cutoff date as the experience entry? Does an essay describe the role accurately? Are projected hours clearly labeled wherever a school specifically asks for them? Differences should have a reason you can explain.
The Dashboard’s experience records and preparation export can help organize your work. It does not replace an employer’s verification or decide a program’s acceptance policy. Keep the source records, your calculation and the relevant school rule together.
Research checked October 27, 2026. Follow the linked official policy for your entering class; program rules and reporting dates can change.