I submitted my report within 13 hours (rather than 12) of completing the shop. I did the shop a day before its due date, so I'm guessing that helps my situation a little bit. Has anyone ever done the same? Were there any penalties?
My husband is laughing at me for stressing out about this, but I can't help it .

Usually information about penalties will be somewhere on the website. Maybe check the FAQ page if they have one.

yeah.. dont do it. not a good idea. It will affect your shopper rating.

The rule of thumb is get in reports within time limit, if it's your first,
they are a great Co., don't make a habit of it. Being late isn't one of my
sins....just don't know how!

I would suggest not waiting, and contacting the scheduler immediately. Let her/him know the reason for being late and apologize. Some MSCs are more lenient about this than others, but don't ever assume it's "okay". I hope in this case, it turns out to be so. :-)

i have done late reports for some... usually if you tell them why they will give you a free pass first time.. or take a portion off... but since it costs them time to repost and possible less time to get done so they have to bonus it... it is usually less cost for them to just accept a late shop then send someone (or you) to redo it...

Obviously being late is not a good idea, but I would let it stress me only enough to not let it happen again. ACL is not a company that will ding you fees or reject your shop because it was a little late to "teach you a lesson". Rather repeated problems might limit the opportunities available to you. With them, as with any other company, your goal should be to work towards self assignment and preservation of what self assignment privileges you have already. A 'problem shopper' may have to request every shop and be awarded shops only when there is nobody who wants the job enough to self assign.

With hospitality shops especially, the deal is to get the report to the client as quickly as possible after the event. It is not a type of shop that the MSP just sends tallies to the client at the end of the month. Ideally a hospitality shop report is on line and available for the client to read or download 24 hours after the shopper walked out of the restaurant or hotel. If the shopper takes 13 hours, then the editor only has 11 hours to get it done. And if the editor needs to contact the shopper for more information, they may miss the deadline and the report becomes an "exception". I feel sure that there are quotas for the MSP with the client about how many reports can be more than 24 hours old and still accepted and quotas for the editors as well.

With ACL, I figure that any contact an editor makes with me more than 24 hours after I left the location is probably a question raised by the client. I may be wrong, but my reports get accepted so darn fast that I suspect they are on a 24 hour turn around. I figure my editors must love me because I can walk out of a restaurant at 8PM and they have already had ample time to edit my report and get it out to the client shortly after noon the following day. For a while I had an editor who would take the report I submitted at 11PM and have it shipped to the client before midnight. THAT is customer service!

So it really is not so much the window to do the job that is critical to report submission but rather the elapsed time since you left the location.

Since we are talking about ACL here - I am 99.9% sure that you will not be penalized for turning one report in one hour late. Flash said it perfectly - the goal here is to get the report in as quickly as possible. The editors also work under deadlines and the faster you submit, the faster they can get it to the client and meet the overall delivery goal.

That said, it certainly would not hurt to drop them a line (you could email info@a-closer-look.com) and just apologize for the tardiness and assure them that it was a one-off.

Thank you everyone for the replies.
I ended up emailing an apology to the scheduler and explained why I was late. (Thanks for the great advice, nicelytwicely!) She seemed sweet about it and said that the editor might make a comment, but it would just be a warning. The editor ended up accepting my report and not mentioning in her feedback that I was late.
Of course, I will not let this happen again. ACL is a very reasonable company in my book and I am more than happy to keep working with them.

Yes, they are nice reasonable folks to work with and it is always a delight to find a company with reasonable folks.

Glad it worked out!