Time clock and attendance

Recording attendance

Employees clock in and out from the time clock on their own phone. For a business that would rather have one place to clock, there is a shared station where each person identifies themselves with a personal code, so a single device at the entrance serves the whole shift.

A punch is tied to the shift it belongs to and the site it was made at, and break time can be recorded with it. Hours are not a disconnected list of timestamps but a figure you can trace.

Location, where it matters

A punch records the location and the distance from the site. Whether a location check is required at all is decided per site: a business where everyone comes to the same address and one that sends people out into the field do not need the same rule.

Anything odd is flagged

A missing punch, a clock-out that never happened, or a report that does not line up with the shift is flagged for review, and a manager approves or corrects it. A correction can carry a note, so the change keeps its explanation instead of becoming a number somebody altered for reasons nobody can recover.

Closing a month

Once a month has been checked it can be locked. From then on the figures do not move, and who locked it and when is kept — so a report already handed to bookkeeping cannot shift underneath the people who relied on it.

Hours reports

Reports gather what was actually recorded, by employee, department and month. They are a basis for payroll, not a payslip: check the data and the calculation settings before passing them on.

For what the law asks you to record, see attendance records and Amendment 24. For a quick figure for one shift there is an overtime calculator, and before choosing a system it is worth reading how to choose a time clock.

What counts as an exception

• Late: clocking in more than ten minutes after the shift starts.
• Left early: more than a quarter of an hour before the shift ends.
• Over plan: more than half an hour beyond the planned hours.
• No-show: a shift on the rota with no clock-in that day.
• Unplanned work: a clock-in on a day the employee has no shift.
• Not approved: a clock-in still waiting for a manager.

A file for the payroll system

The recorded hours can be turned into an import file for the payroll system: a line per employee per pay component, with the employee's number in the payroll system, the component code and the quantity. The codes are copied once from the payroll bureau, because every bureau defines its own table, and a file built on guessed codes loads without an error and pays people wrongly.

Before the file is made, every employee with hours is checked for an employee number and every component with a quantity for a code, so a gap is found now rather than after the file has loaded.

What is included and what is an add-on

Clocking in from the phone is included with every user. Some of what this page describes are add-on packages bought once: the time clock with geofence (location check, exception flags and manager approval), the shared clock-in station, payroll export, compliance and payroll lock, and advanced reports. What each includes and what it costs is on the pricing page.