Your Attendance Policy, Applied the Same Way Every Time
Grace periods, half-day thresholds, late marks, week-off treatment and overtime eligibility configured as rules — so the answer does not depend on who is doing the counting.
Most attendance policies are written to be read by employees, which is a legitimate goal and a poor specification. "Habitual late arrival may attract disciplinary action" cannot be implemented by anything. "Arrival after 09:45 is marked late, and three late marks in a calendar month deduct half a day" can be. The gap between those two sentences is where nearly every attendance dispute lives: the rule exists as shared understanding rather than as a stated threshold, so two reasonable people apply it differently and both believe they are following policy. An attendance policy in AttendancePay is a set of configured values rather than a document — grace periods, half-day thresholds, late-mark accumulation, week-off and holiday treatment, sandwich rules and overtime eligibility — evaluated identically for every employee and every day. That has a second benefit beyond consistency: because the rules are explicit, you can change one and see what it would do before committing to it, rather than discovering the effect on payday.
Where unwritten rules cost you
The same situation gets two answers
An employee arrives at 09:47 twice in a month. One supervisor marks it late, another does not. Neither is wrong, because the policy never said. The employee learns that the rule depends on who is looking.
Half days are counted twice
A half day deducts half a day of pay and half a day of leave balance, charging the employee twice for one absence — usually not deliberately, but because attendance and leave are handled separately and each applies its own half of the rule.
Sandwich rules arrive as a surprise
A week-off between two absences is treated as unpaid, but nobody was told, so it reads on the payslip as an arbitrary deduction and costs more in goodwill than it recovers in pay.
Grace periods erode
An informal ten minutes becomes fifteen, then twenty, applied inconsistently across teams. Nobody decided this; it drifted, and pulling it back now looks like a new penalty.
Policy changes cannot be tested
Tightening a threshold is a leap of faith, because there is no way to see how many people it would affect until the month it takes effect.
How attendance policies works
- 1
Thresholds are set as values, not prose
Grace period, late-mark threshold, half-day and full-day hour thresholds, and early-departure rules are configured per policy as explicit numbers.
- 2
Day treatment is defined
How week-offs, holidays, approved leave and absence interact — including whether week-offs bracketed by absence are paid, and any minimum days required to earn a paid week-off.
- 3
Policies are assigned per company, branch or employee group
A single company can run different rules for office staff, site workers and field teams without maintaining separate systems.
- 4
Every day is evaluated against the assigned policy
The policy resolves each date into a status and a payable-days contribution, recorded with the rule that produced it.
- 5
The result flows straight into payroll
Because the policy produces the payable-days figure directly, there is no second interpretation step between attendance and pay.
What you get
Grace periods and late marks
Configurable arrival grace, late-mark thresholds and accumulation rules — for example a half-day deduction after a set number of late marks in a month.
Half-day and full-day thresholds
Define the worked hours that qualify a day as full, half or absent, so a half day is a measured outcome rather than a supervisor's judgement.
Week-off and holiday treatment
Control whether week-offs are paid unconditionally, subject to a minimum days worked, or affected by surrounding absence.
Sandwich policy
Optional treatment of week-offs and holidays bracketed by unauthorised absence, off by default because it materially changes pay and should be a stated decision.
Overtime eligibility rules
Which employees are eligible, from what threshold overtime accrues, and separate treatment for normal days, week-offs and holidays.
Per-group policies
Different rules for different populations, assigned by company, branch or employee group.
Regularization windows
How far back an employee may raise a correction and who approves it, so late corrections do not arrive after payroll has closed.
Visible derivation
Each day records the rule that produced its status, so a disputed day is answered by opening the record rather than by recounting.
Who this is for
See attendance policies on your own data
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Frequently asked questions
Can different teams have different attendance rules?⌄
Yes. Policies are assigned per company, branch or employee group, so office staff on a fixed shift, site workers on rotating shifts and field staff who never visit an office can each run under rules that suit them, within one system.
What is a sandwich policy and should we use it?⌄
A sandwich rule treats a week-off or holiday as unpaid when it is bracketed by unauthorised absence — so a Friday and Monday absence can also cost the weekend. It is supported and switched off by default. If you use it, it must be in the written policy and visible on the payslip, because employees whose intuition says "I do not work weekends anyway" will otherwise read it as an arbitrary deduction.
How do half days work?⌄
You define the worked-hours thresholds that qualify a day as full, half or absent, so the outcome is measured rather than judged. You also control whether a half day consumes leave balance, deducts pay, or both — the double-count where it does both without that being a deliberate decision is one of the most common attendance-to-payroll errors.
Can we see the effect of a rule change before applying it?⌄
Attendance reports and payroll previews let you see how a period resolves under the current configuration before a run is finalised, so a threshold change can be assessed against real data rather than assumed.
Does the policy apply to every attendance method?⌄
Yes. Biometric, kiosk, mobile, face and WhatsApp punches all produce attendance records that the same policy evaluates, so the rules do not change based on how someone marked attendance.
How do we handle an employee who was at work but has no punch?⌄
Through regularization: the employee raises the correction, a manager approves it, and the record updates carrying both the change and the reason. The regularization window and approver are part of the policy, so late corrections do not arrive after payroll has closed.