One Attendance Record. Every Way Your People Actually Work.
Office staff on biometric, site staff on a kiosk, field staff on GPS, contract staff on WhatsApp — captured differently, recorded identically, and payroll-ready without a reconciliation step.
Most attendance software is built around a single assumption about where work happens. Buy the biometric machine, put it by the door, and everyone walks past it. That assumption holds for one kind of company and breaks for almost every other: the manufacturer with a plant gate and three site offices, the facility services firm whose staff never visit head office, the distributor whose sales team starts the day at the first customer, the hospital running four rotating shifts across two buildings. What those organisations end up with is not one attendance system but several — a device at head office, a register at the gate, a supervisor is WhatsApp group, and a spreadsheet at month end that someone assembles by hand and nobody entirely trusts. Attendance management in AttendancePay starts from the opposite assumption: the capture method should vary by team, and the record should not. A punch is a punch, whether it came from a fingerprint reader, a face scan on a tablet, a GPS check-in on a phone, or a WhatsApp message. It enters the same timeline, is evaluated against the same shift and policy rules, and produces the same payable days.
Why attendance stops being a solved problem the moment you have more than one kind of employee
Every method becomes its own island
The biometric device has its own software and its own export. The field team is on an app. Contract labour is on paper. Each produces a different file in a different shape, and someone spends the last three days of every month turning three formats into one.
The rules do not follow the employee
A late mark should mean the same thing for a site supervisor as for an office executive. When each capture method carries its own logic, grace periods, half-day thresholds and overtime rules quietly diverge, and two employees in the same grade get treated differently for the same behaviour.
Disputes are settled from memory
When the record is a spreadsheet assembled from other spreadsheets, an employee who says they were present at 9:05 cannot be answered from evidence. The argument is resolved by seniority rather than by data, which is corrosive in exactly the teams where trust matters most.
Shift complexity gets pushed onto humans
Rotating shifts, night shifts crossing midnight, split shifts, multiple shifts in one day — most systems handle one or two of these and leave the rest to a supervisor with a notebook. That supervisor becomes a single point of failure nobody planned for.
Payroll inherits every upstream error
Attendance is the input to salary. A transcription error in the attendance sheet is a salary dispute two weeks later, and by then the original evidence is gone.
How attendance management works
- 1
Choose a capture method per group, not per company
Assign biometric to the head-office team, a face-recognition kiosk to the plant gate, GPS to the field team and WhatsApp to contract staff. Employees can have more than one method available; nothing forces a single choice on the whole organisation.
- 2
The punch is evaluated against that employee is policy
Shift detection resolves which shift the punch belongs to — including multi-shift employees and night shifts that cross midnight. Grace periods, early-arrival buffers, late marks and half-day thresholds come from the attendance policy attached to that employee, not from the device.
- 3
Exceptions are surfaced, not buried
Out-of-geofence punches, mock-location attempts, missing punch-outs and unusually short shifts are flagged for review rather than silently accepted or silently dropped. Employees can raise a regularization request against a specific day with a reason and evidence.
- 4
Payable days are computed, then handed to payroll
Week-offs, holidays, approved leave, overtime and half-days resolve into payable days on a single calculation, which the payroll run consumes directly. PF, ESI, TDS and Professional Tax are applied on top without an export or a re-key.
What you get
Six capture methods, one timeline
Biometric devices, face recognition, GPS check-in, geofenced punches, tablet kiosk and WhatsApp all write to the same attendance record. Reporting never asks how the punch was captured.
Policy-driven rules, not device-driven ones
Attendance policies carry grace periods, late and half-day thresholds, early-arrival buffers, overtime rules, week-off handling and regularization limits, and are assigned per employee group rather than globally.
Real shift handling
Automatic shift detection for multi-shift employees, night shifts that cross midnight, rosters, and per-department week-offs — including the case where a punch after midnight belongs to yesterday is shift.
Evidence on every punch
Timestamp, capture method, coordinates where captured, geofence result and photo where required are retained on the punch, so a dispute is answered from the record.
Fraud signals surfaced at capture time
Mock-location and fake-GPS apps are detected and the punch is blocked at the point of attempt, with the blocked attempt recorded for HR rather than discarded.
Regularization with an approval trail
Employees raise corrections against a specific date; approvers see the original record, the requested change and the stated reason, and the approved correction flows through to payable days.
Who this is for
See attendance management on your own data
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Frequently asked questions
Can different departments use completely different attendance methods?⌄
Yes, and this is the normal setup rather than an edge case. A typical configuration has office staff on biometric or face attendance, plant staff on a gate kiosk, field staff on GPS check-in from the mobile app, and contract or housekeeping staff on WhatsApp. All four write to the same attendance timeline, so month-end reporting and payroll see one consistent record regardless of how each punch was captured.
How are night shifts that cross midnight handled?⌄
A punch-in at 22:00 and a punch-out at 06:00 the next morning are treated as one shift attached to the day the shift started, not split across two dates. Shift detection resolves which shift an out-of-hours punch belongs to, so an employee punching in at 00:30 for a shift that began at 22:00 is matched correctly rather than being recorded as a fresh day.
What happens when an employee forgets to punch out?⌄
The open punch is detected rather than left indefinitely. Depending on your policy the session is auto-closed against the shift end, and the day is flagged as an exception for HR review. The employee can raise a regularization request for the correct time, which goes through approval and then flows into payable days.
Do we need to replace our existing biometric devices?⌄
No. Existing ZKTeco and compatible devices integrate directly, so punches recorded on hardware you already own land in the same timeline as app and WhatsApp punches. Companies usually keep their devices for the locations where they work well and add app, kiosk or WhatsApp capture for the teams the devices never reached.
Can attendance rules differ between two employees in the same company?⌄
Yes. Attendance policies are assigned per employee, so a factory shift with a five-minute grace period and strict half-day rules can coexist with a flexible-timing policy for the office team. Departments, branches and shifts can each carry their own configuration rather than everything inheriting one company-wide rule.
How does attendance reach payroll?⌄
Directly. Week-offs, holidays, approved leave, overtime and half-days resolve into payable days, which the payroll run reads when it computes salary. There is no export, no intermediate spreadsheet and no separate reconciliation step, so an attendance correction made before the run is reflected in that month is salary automatically.