Time & Attendance

What this achieves

Time and attendance records when people actually worked and what they were scheduled to work. It turns raw clock-in events into a reconciled day that says present, absent, or on leave, with hours and overtime attached.

Punches, then reconciliation

The section has two layers, and the difference explains most questions about it. A punch is a raw event. A reconciled day is what the system concludes from all of that day’s events, and it is the reconciled day that anything downstream uses.

Example: Tom Hargreaves clocks in and out twice on 14 January 2026. That is four punches, which reconcile into one day with total worked hours and any overtime.

How a punch arrives

Option	Description
Self check-in	Employees clock in and out from mobile or web, optionally capturing GPS location and a photo.
Attendance device	Physical biometric or RFID devices, registered and issued an ingest token, with device PINs mapped to employees. See Register an attendance machine.
HR entry	HR adds, edits, removes, or backdates a punch directly.

Geofencing validates that a mobile punch happened on site, by checking it against office geofences you define.

Devices produce punches that do not match a known employee. Those go to an unmatched-punch queue rather than being discarded, so somebody resolves them instead of a day silently going missing.

HR corrections are audited and re-reconcile

When HR changes a punch, the change carries a before-and-after audit trail and the day is reconciled again. Both halves matter: the audit trail because attendance affects pay, and the re-reconciliation because a corrected punch that left the day’s conclusion unchanged would be pointless.

Employees can also raise attendance-correction requests — the “I forgot to clock in” case — which route to a manager or HR rather than being edited silently.

Scheduling

Scheduling is the other half of the section: what people were supposed to work, against which attendance is judged.

Option	Description
Shift templates	Reusable shift definitions.
Rotation patterns	Repeating cycles built from those templates.
Shift instances	Concrete shifts, open or assigned to a person.
Rosters	Schedules that move from draft to published to locked, with staffing-coverage analysis.

The draft, publish, lock sequence exists so a schedule is not treated as final while it is still being worked on. People plan their lives around a published roster.

Coverage rules warn when a shift falls below the headcount a role or department requires, so a gap is visible while it can still be filled.

Example: if HC Corp’s Operations department requires a minimum on an early shift, a roster leaving it short is flagged before publication rather than discovered on the morning.

Employees declare their availability, including recurring patterns and exceptions, and can swap or give away shifts or claim open ones — with manager approval.

Policies

Attendance policies set the tenant-wide rules the reconciliation applies: grace periods, late thresholds, and overtime rules. These decide whether arriving a few minutes late counts as late at all, so agree them before you start reporting on lateness.

What happens next

Where payroll is in use, reconciled attendance feeds prorated attendance pay, so this section becomes an input to what people are paid. Leave interacts with it directly: a reconciled day distinguishes absent from on-leave, which is the difference between an unexplained gap and approved time off. Attendance and overtime reports can be grouped by employee, department, or team and exported.