Attendance & Payroll — punches, shifts, overtime and salary

How it works

Six steps, in the order the month actually runs

Nothing is configured in the abstract. Each step produces the data the next one needs — the shift you define is what the pairing measures against, and the day it produces is what the salary sheet counts.

Set up the rules

Roles carry the shifts, buffers and OT terms. Employees carry the wage.

Punches arrive

From the reader, from an ID-card scan, or typed in by a supervisor.

Pair and classify

IN meets OUT, the active shift is picked, the day gets a status.

Review the month

Fix a missed punch on the calendar. Every edit is signed and logged.

Add the money

Allowances, incentives, deductions, token books and loan EMIs.

Pay and report

Salary sheet, slips, bank list — and the audit trail behind them.

Attendance capture

Three ways in, one log

A gate reader, a supervisor with a phone, and an admin fixing yesterday all write into the same place, in the same shape. Nothing downstream has to know which one it came from — and everything downstream can tell you if it needs to.

Biometric readers

ESSL devices push each punch as it happens, with its direction and an optional overtime marker. Employees are matched on their device code or RFID number, so the reader never needs to know your employee master.

QR on the ID card

A supervisor signs in on a phone, scans the code printed on an employee's card, and saves an IN or an OUT. Useful where there is no reader — a second gate, a night shift, a site away from the plant.

Manual correction

Somebody forgets to punch out. An admin opens the day on the calendar and types the time in — permission-gated, attributed, and written to the audit trail alongside what it replaced.

The attendance log for July 2026, 2,471 punches listed newest first: employee code
and name, date, time, an IN or OUT direction chip, and a source chip reading
either device or manual. One row shows a manual entry attributed to ADM-admin;
the rest came off a reader. — One log, three sources — the *source* column says which reader sent a punch, or who typed it in.

One pairing rule, applied to all three sources — first IN of the day, then the last OUT that matches it inside 24 hours.
Cross-midnight shifts are ordinary, not a special case. A 22:00 start belongs to the day it started on.
Device sync you can confirm — push an employee to a reader and watch the command go pending → done, or fail with a reason.
Pending means the device is offline, which is a fact worth knowing before payroll day, not after.
Bulk add and bulk remove — enrol a shift's worth of employees onto a reader, or clear leavers off it, in one action.
Nothing is silently overwritten — a manual edit records who made it, when, and the value it replaced.

Shifts & overtime

The rules live on the role, not in a spreadsheet

An attendance role carries its shifts, its grace buffers and its overtime terms. Assign the role and the employee inherits all of it — and when the terms change, they change in one place for everyone on that role.

Which shift was this?

A role can hold several shifts, each with a start, an end, and separate early and late buffers. The system picks the one the punches actually fall inside, rather than asking a supervisor to declare it — so a man who came in for the second shift is paid for the second shift even if nobody told the system he would.

Grace buffers before and after, so arriving three minutes early is not a different day.
Shifts that cross midnight are marked as such and stay attached to the day they began.
Two shifts in one day are two blocks on the cell, each with its own hours and pay.
Lateness comes from the role's own buffer — never from a raw comparison against the clock time.

The shift table of the Three Shift role: three rows, each ticked active, with a
start time, an end time and an 8h duration — 06:00 to 14:00, 14:00 to 22:00,
and 22:00 to 06:00, the last of which crosses midnight. — A role's timetable — three shifts, the last one running through the night into the next morning.

Overtime, counted the way you already count it

Overtime starts after the expected duration plus whatever slack the role allows, and it is counted in units — typically half an hour — at the role's rate. Cross a threshold and the rate steps up. Work a weekend or a holiday and the whole day can be overtime.

Two role shapes — the shift defines the day's length, or the role defines a fixed duration whatever the clock says.
Escalating rates — past a set number of minutes the unit rate doubles, or whatever you set it to.
Whole-day overtime when a punch pair is marked as such, for weekend and holiday working.
Punishment minutes come off overtime first, and only then off the working day.
Hide overtime entirely for the roles or the viewers who should not see it — a per-permission switch, not a report filter.

The overtime block of the same role. Overtime counts from 15 minutes after the
shift ends and nothing before it starts; the in/out buffer allows 10 minutes
either side. Every 30 minutes of overtime is worth one times an hour of salary
— and an After row raises that: beyond 3 hours 20 minutes, every 30 minutes
becomes worth two. — The overtime terms — the unit, the rate, and the *After* row that doubles it once a shift runs past 3h 20m.

Seeing the month

Three ways to look at the same month

One person in full, everybody at a glance, or the raw pairing underneath both. They read the same records, so a correction made on the calendar shows up in the other two without anything being re-run.

A month of the calendar for an employee on the night shift. Every day
card reads SHIFT II, 12h 00m, with an in time the previous evening and
an out time the next morning — the 6th at 08:02 PM pairing with the 7th
at 08:15 AM. Cards also carry overtime badges, incentives of 100 and 200
rupees, and token and custom deductions. The 21st is a Half Day at 6h
19m paying 332.50, two days are marked Absent, and a worked holiday on
the 17th shows a FULL 5 hrs overtime badge and pays 1,163.75.

The Monthly Attendance Report for July 2026: 58 employees down the side,
all 31 days across the top. Each cell holds the hours worked — 8.5, 9,
8.42 — with a smaller +0.5 or +3 beneath where there was overtime, or a
letter where there were no hours: W for weekend, A for absent, H for
holiday, ? where a punch is missing. Cells are tinted by state. Summary
columns on the right total presence, holidays, weekends, leave, absence,
salary days and OT hours. A toggle switches the grid between Show Hours
and Show Denotion.

The Employee Attendance Report, 1,256 records for July 2026. One row per
shift worked, carrying the employee code and name, their role and
department, the contractor supplying them where there is one, the date,
which shift it was, the in and out times, the duration, the overtime and
a status chip reading Complete.

One person

The calendar

The screen the payroll argument gets settled on. Every day of the month, what the man did, what it was worth, and — where it is wrong — the place to fix it. The summary beside it recalculates as you go.

Everybody

The month sheet

The whole plant as one grid: a row per employee, a column per day. Show the hours, or switch to the status letters and read the shape of the month instead. The totals on the right are the same ones the salary sheet starts from.

The record

Every shift, listed

What the pairing actually produced — one row per shift, with the punches either side of it, the duration, the overtime and whether the pair was complete. This is what you open when a figure above needs explaining.

Colour is the status — present, half day, absent, holiday and weekend read at a glance without opening anything.
Hours or letters — the month sheet toggles between the figures and the status codes, because the two answer different questions.
The cell carries the detail — in and out, hours worked against hours payable, OT units and what each block earned.
Edit in place — correct a punch, add a missing one, or clear a day, with each action gated by permission and recorded.
Bulk edit the month when a whole week needs the same correction, instead of thirty-one dialogs.
Weekly wage shows week footers — each week rolls up its own salary days, OT and total, and exports on its own.
Contractor labour is labelled in the record list, so supplied staff can be read apart from your own payroll.
Every view exports to Excel, matching exactly what is on screen.

PPresent — the full shift

PWWeekend worked — whole day overtime

HFHalf day — between four and seven hours

PAPart day — under four hours

?Partial — a punch is missing

AAbsent

HHoliday

PHPaid holiday

WWeekend

LHoliday without pay

The calendar on a phone

Not a shrunk table — a different screen

A month grid of thirty-one cells does not survive a 375-pixel screen, so on a phone the calendar is rebuilt rather than reflowed: the answer pinned at the top, the month as a map you can fold away, and the days as an agenda you scroll. Fully editable — the same corrections, the same permissions, the same audit trail.

The calendar on a phone: the employee chip and month stepper at the top, a To Pay figure of 16,975.24 rupees with 22.5 salary days beside it, and the Month at a Glance grid open below, every day of July a dot coloured by its status.

The month as a map Employee, month, total — then the grid, foldable to a one-line recap.

The day agenda: each worked day is a card carrying the shift, the in and out times either side of midnight, the duration and the pay, some with incentive and deduction chips or an overtime badge. Sunday the 5th collapses to a single line, and an absent Wednesday to a tinted one.

Every day, sized by what happened A worked day gets a card. A Sunday gets one line.

The day sheet for Tuesday 7 July risen over the screen: Present, Shift II running 20:00 to 08:00, in at 07:54 PM and out at 08:07 the next morning, 12h 00m worked against 12h 13m actually punched and capped at the shift, 665 rupees day pay, and a deduction breakdown of one canteen meal and one tea, totalling 35 rupees.

One day, opened Everything the desktop shows on hover — plus the day’s actions, as a bottom sheet.

The pay bar unfolded into the full breakdown: days first — 21.5 present, one full-overtime day, 3.5 absent, holidays and weekends, totalling 22.5 salary days of 31 — then money, from 14,962.50 basic through overtime, allowance and incentive to a 17,476.24 total, less 501 rupees deduction, leaving 16,975.24 to pay.

The number, unfolded Tap the pay bar and the whole month’s arithmetic opens beneath it.

Zone 1

Who and when

The employee chip is the picker — tap it to search by name or code, or step to the next man on the list. Month arrows sit beside it.

Zone 2

The number, pinned

One figure earns permanent space on a phone, and it is the month total. Tap the bar and the whole breakdown unfolds beneath it.

Zone 3

The mini-month

The grid stays, shrunk to dots, as a way to jump. Fold it away and it leaves a one-line recap of the month behind.

Zone 4

The agenda

All thirty-one days in order. Quiet ones are a single line so the scroll stays short; the ones that matter get a card.

Fully editable on the phone — fix a punch, add a missing log, record a deduction or an incentive, all from the day sheet.
Dialogs become bottom sheets across the whole app, full width and thumb-reachable, not desktop boxes squeezed into a phone.
Straight to the fix — a day with no log carries its own add button, because a missed punch is the most common thing a supervisor is there to do.
Weekly wages group by week, each header carrying that week's salary days, OT and total, expandable to the full roll-up.
Spillover days are labelled — a weekly month can start in the previous one, and the 27th of July says July on it.
The thirty-one-row month editor stays on the desktop, and says so, rather than pretending to work on a phone.

Leave & holidays

The company year, declared once

Weekends and holidays are not a footnote to attendance — they decide whether a day is paid, whether working it earns overtime, and whether an incentive still qualifies. So they are declared for the year, in one calendar, and everything else reads from it.

The leave calendar for August 2026. A month grid with a Weekend chip on every
Sunday, a Company Holiday on the 27th of July reading Plant shutdown — annual
maintenance, and a Public Paid Holiday on the 15th of August reading Independence
Day. Above it, a picker for the month and year and a row of buttons choosing
which weekdays count as the weekend; a legend names the six day types. A rail on
the right lists the whole of 2026 — paid holidays and leaves grouped by month,
and a weekend-working section with no records. — The leave calendar — the month you are editing on the left, the whole declared year on the right.

Six kinds of day — weekend, weekend working, company, public, public paid and paid — because "holiday" alone does not tell payroll what to do.
Paid or unpaid is a property of the type, not a decision made per employee at the end of the month.
You choose which days are the weekend — one button per weekday, and the whole year's weekend entries regenerate from it.
A weekend worked becomes a paid day at full overtime, automatically, wherever the punches say so.
Declared per year, so last year's calendar stays exactly as it was when last year was paid.
Feeds the day status directly — the calendar, the salary sheet and the incentive rules all agree because they read the same source.

Payroll

Three wage types, one salary sheet

Daily, weekly and monthly men sit in the same plant and often on the same line. Each is paid by its own arithmetic, and the salary sheet puts them in one table anyway.

Daily wage pay = rate × salary days Straight count. The day statuses on the calendar are what "salary days" means.

Monthly wage

pay = (rate ÷ working days) × salary days
working days = days in month − weekends − unpaid holidays

The divisor comes from the leave calendar, so a month with an extra holiday pays correctly without anyone adjusting a figure.

Weekly wage pay = week start → week end, per the company week calendar Weeks are computed on their own boundaries, which is why a weekly month can start in the previous one.

The salary report for July 2026, 58 employees. One row each, carrying the rate
and whether it is monthly or daily, salary days and extra hours, then an Earned
group — basic, HRA, attendance incentive, allowance, overtime incentive and their
total — a Deductions group of EPF, ESI and other, and a net amount in the last
column. Daily and monthly wage types sit in the same table. — The salary sheet — daily and monthly people in one table, every component of the number beside it.

Basic and HRA split by rule, resolved role → employee → company, so an exception on one man does not need a new rule for everyone.
Effective-dated salary — a raise applies from its date forward and leaves the months already paid untouched.
EPF and ESI computed alongside, from the same figures the sheet is built on.
Attendance incentive folded in, on the thresholds your incentive rules define.
Salary slips as PDF and the whole sheet as Excel, generated on the server.
Bank list, consolidated and contractor sheets from the same run, so the figures cannot disagree between them.

Additions & deductions

Everything that moves the number

Between hours worked and money paid sits a queue of small adjustments — a canteen book, an advance, a Sunday bonus, a fine. Each has a home, a date and a reason, and each shows up on the day or the month it belongs to.

Token books

Canteen and facility scrip. Quantity taken on a day, priced at the rate in force on that date — so last quarter's meals stay at last quarter's price.

Loans & advances

An amount, a tenure and an EMI schedule. Instalments come off the month's salary, mark themselves paid as their dates pass, and close the loan when the last one clears.

Incentives

Rule-driven on weekly and monthly thresholds, or entered by hand against a reason code — with quick amounts your supervisors configure themselves.

Allowances

Recurring, one-off or per-day, each effective-dated and resolved by the date it is being applied to. Added on the calendar, visible in the month total.

Refreshment

Effective-dated rates for the first stretch, the second stretch and overtime, kept as one chained master rather than three settings that can drift apart.

Punishment minutes

Deducted from overtime first and only then from the working day — the order matters, and it is the order the shop floor already expects.

The Employee Deduction dialog for Sakthivel Ganesan, dated the 9th of July 2026.
A token deduction of one Canteen Meal at 25 rupees a book, and a custom deduction
of 500 rupees with the reason Advance Loan typed beside it, totalling 525 rupees. — A day's deductions — token books priced at the rate in force that day, plus anything one-off, with its reason.

Cost, not just attendance

What the day cost you, by seat and by machine

The same punches that pay a man also tell you what he cost to bring in and what he cost to run a machine for a shift. Both are derived from data you are already keeping — there is nothing extra to enter.

One IN punch by Gopinath Sundar at 07:58 on a Wednesday feeding three answers:
his own day pay of 705 rupees for nine hours on Shift I; a van seat costing 45
rupees, one of 32 riders totalling 1,645 rupees that day; and Power Press 100T
carrying eight seat-hours of his time — the same 705 rupees, attributed to the
machine rather than added to the bill. 750 rupees leaves the business.

Van cost

Works transport, as a month calendar. Each day carries how many riders turned up and what their seats cost, with the month set against the one before it. Click a day and the rail lists exactly who rode.

A rider counts on any day with an IN punch — the seat was used whether or not the shift was finished.
Scope to a contractor, or to the employees who have no contractor at all.
The day's manifest — name, code, shift, scheduled start against actual in-time, and the cost per head.
Export the month or a single day, covering the whole set rather than the page on screen.

Machine & man cost

Assign men to machines and the cost of running each one falls out of the attendance you already have. Seat-hours are clipped to the shift, so a machine is never charged for time nobody was standing at it.

The machine health table. Three counters across the top read 2 need attention, 0 watch and 10 running fine. Below, one row per machine with its code, department, and a verdict chip — two read CAN’T FILL SEATS in red, the rest STEADY in green — then usually staffed, days short, seats short, changes, first-timers, median stay, absent and bench.

The assignment churn table: one row per machine with the number of placements, swaps, median hold, people and a placements-per-day figure. Power Press 100T and 150T lead with five placements and five people at 0.16 a day; CNC Lathe A sits at one placement and 0.03.

The cost view for 1 to 31 July 2026, 26 working days, with weekends and unpaid holidays excluded. Four figures: planned 350,220 rupees as day rate times time in seat, base pay 315,815 with absence already deducted, overtime 29,187 from attendance, and an actual of 345,002 — 5,218 under plan. A note says incentive of 4,100 is reported separately because payroll does not consume it. Below, a chart of unfilled seats per day, and a shortage-by-machine panel reading that every machine was fully staffed in this range.

Staffing

Which machines are actually manned

A verdict per machine, not a number to interpret. Two here cannot fill their seats; the other ten are steady. The columns behind the verdict are the evidence for it.

Churn

How often people move

Placements, swaps and how long a person typically holds a seat. A machine that churns is a machine nobody stays on — which the cost figure alone will never tell you.

Cost

Planned against actual

What the seats were meant to cost, what they did cost, and the gap. Overtime is broken out because it is the part that moves; incentive is kept outside Actual because payroll does not consume it.

An assignment board for the supervisors who staff the line, searchable by employee code or name.
A health view that flags the machines running under-staffed, as a table or as cards.
Cost per machine across the plant, and a dashboard for any single one.
Derived, never stored — change an attendance correction and the cost follows it, with no re-run to remember.

Late report

Who is late, and by how much

Not a list of everyone who arrived after the hour — a list of everyone who arrived after the hour their role allows. The grace buffer is part of the rule, so this report and the calendar never disagree about who was late.

The Late Report for July 2026, 58 employees. Each row carries the
employee code and name, department, number of days in the period,
present and absent counts each with a view link, then late days in red
and total late hours — 10 late days and 4 hours 42 minutes for one man,
7 days and 4 hours 33 minutes for another, and a dash for those with
none. A search box and an Only late tick sit in the toolbar.

The late-day drill-in for Kannan Periyasamy, July 2026. Five rows, each
with a date, the 08:30 to 17:30 shift, a shift start of 08:30 AM, the
actual in time — 09:10, 08:57, 08:52, 08:47 and 09:05 — the out time,
and a Late badge reading 40, 27, 22, 17 and 35 minutes. A summary panel
on the right totals 31 days, 24 present, 2 absent, 5 late days and
2 hours 21 minutes late.

The list

The month, ranked

Every employee for the period, with the days they worked, the days they were late and the time it came to. Tick Only late and the people with nothing to answer for drop out of the list.

The drill-in

One person’s month

Every late day with its evidence: the shift they were on, when it started, when they actually arrived, and the gap between the two — so the figure in the list is auditable rather than asserted.

The role’s grace buffer decides it — an arrival inside the buffer is on time, and never appears here.
The badge shows the real gap — how far past the scheduled start they actually walked in, not a rounded band.
Any period — a week, a month, or a range you type — with the same figures on screen and in the export.
Step between employees from the drill-in without going back to the list.
Overnight shifts are handled, so a 20:00 start is late at 20:20 and not at midnight.
Exports the whole set, honouring the search and the Only late filter rather than the page on screen.

Dashboards & reports

The questions you ask before payroll day

Who is in today, who has quietly stopped coming, who is late often enough to matter, and who changed that punch last Tuesday. Each has a screen, and each reads the same data the salary sheet does.

The dashboard overview: four cards reading 58 total employees, 44 present at a 75.9 per cent attendance rate, 14 absent, and 10 late arrivals checked in past grace. A banner below flags 3 long-inactive employees, active staff with no attendance for more than 50 days. Under that, a card per department showing yesterday against today as two bars, with a present-out-of-total count and percentage.

The comparison view: present went from 49 yesterday to 50 today, a gain of one; absent fell from 9 to 8; late rose from 5 to 8, a gain of three. Below, two grouped bar charts, attendance by department and a status breakdown of present, absent and late, each plotting yesterday beside today.

The daily board: cards for 50 present up one on the 14th, 8 absent, nobody absent 4 or more weeks, nobody absent 12 or more weeks, and a van cost of 1,645 rupees for 32 riders, up 60 rupees. Below, a department table split by Shift I, II and III, each carrying required employees, actual head count and a late count that links to the names, then present, absent and total per department and a plant total row.

The audit log for July 2026, 35 entries. Each row carries the date
and time, the user who acted with their employee code, an action
chip reading UPDATE, ADD or EXPORT, the module — attendance rows
also carrying a MANUAL source chip — the employee the change was
about, and a plain-English summary such as Corrected a missing
punch-out or Added a salary revision effective 2026-04-01. Rows
expand for the before and after values, and the toolbar filters by
user, action and module.

Today

The overview

Head counts for the day with the rate beside each, then the same split by department — yesterday against today, so a number that moved is visible without doing the subtraction.

Movement

Yesterday against today

The same figures as a comparison rather than a snapshot. Present barely moved here; late jumped by three, which is the number worth asking about.

The board

Shift by shift, against plan

Required head count beside actual, per shift and per department — so a shift that is short is a number you can see rather than one you work out. The late counts link straight to the names.

Accountability

The audit trail

Every attendance edit, master change and export, with the actor, the timestamp and what the value was before. Device pushes are excluded — those are not decisions anyone made.

Role-based permissions per screen — view, add, edit, delete and export are separate rights, not one "admin" switch.
Overtime can be hidden from a role entirely, across the calendar and the reports it feeds.
Comparison and leaderboard views for department-against-department and man-against-man over a period.
Employees who quietly stopped coming are surfaced on the overview — still active on the master, but no attendance for weeks.
Employee, monthly, salary, late and incentive reports, each exportable.
Employee cards and salary slips as PDF, rendered server-side so they look the same wherever they were asked for.
Multi-tenant — separate companies, separate data, one deployment.

At a glance

The short version

Wage types	Daily, weekly and monthly, side by side in one plant and one salary sheet. Rates are effective-dated.
Attendance sources	ESSL biometric readers, QR scan of the printed ID card, and manual entry — all writing one log, paired by one rule.
Pairing	First IN of the day, matched to the last OUT inside 24 hours. Shifts may cross midnight.
Shifts	Defined per attendance role, with early and late grace buffers, a next-day flag, and automatic selection of the shift the punches fall inside.
Day status	Ten states — present, part day, half day, partial, absent, holiday, paid holiday, unpaid holiday, weekend, weekend worked.
Overtime	Counted in role-defined units at a role-defined rate, escalating past a threshold. Whole-day OT for weekend and holiday working. Hideable per permission.
Leave calendar	Declared per year in six day types, with the weekend days configurable. Drives pay, overtime eligibility and incentive qualification.
Deductions	Token books priced at the rate in force on the day, custom one-off amounts, punishment minutes, and loan EMIs.
Loans	Amount, tenure and an EMI schedule. Instalments deducted monthly, auto-marked as their dates pass, loan closed on the last one.
Incentives	Rule-driven on weekly and monthly thresholds, plus manual daily entry against configurable reason codes and quick amounts.
Cost views	Van cost by day and by rider; machine and man cost per machine, derived from assignments and attendance rather than stored.
Reports	Employee, monthly, salary, late, incentive and audit. Excel throughout; salary slips and employee cards as PDF.
Access control	Per-role permissions per screen, split into view, add, edit, delete and export.
Mobile	The attendance calendar is rebuilt for handsets — fully editable, with a collapsible mini-month, a day agenda and bottom-sheet dialogs.
Deployment	Browser-based and multi-tenant. Runs on the plant network or hosted; the scanning app runs on ordinary Android phones.

See it run on last month's data

Send us one month of punches, your shift timings and a handful of wage rates. We will load them, run the month, and walk you through the salary sheet it produces against the one you actually paid.

Book a walkthrough Request the overview PDF

Typically a 30-minute session. No installation required.