Setup Considerations: attendance and the pay period

What this achieves

Attendance decides how much of a period someone worked, and payroll turns that into money on a payslip. This page covers the point where one hands over to the other, and the decisions to settle before a period closes rather than during the week it goes wrong.

Where the handover actually is

The two sides do not call each other on screen. Nothing in the attendance screens names a pay period or a pay run, and a payroll run is not started by anyone approving attendance — a run resolves its own population and then calculates on its own schedule.

What connects them is timing. Attendance is reconciled day by day and signed off by approval; a payroll run later reads the period it covers and calculates from what it finds there. Whatever is in attendance at the moment the run calculates is what gets paid.

That has one consequence worth stating on its own: the handover is a moment in time, not a button. Nobody presses anything to send attendance to payroll, so nobody gets a warning that they were late.

Example: if HC Corp UK Ltd’s warehouse days for March are still unapproved and uncorrected when Priya Raman calculates the March run, the run calculates anyway. It does not wait for the attendance to be finished.

The boundary that cannot be crossed

Once payroll has processed a day, that day can no longer be corrected in attendance. The correction is refused outright, and the message says so: the day has already been processed by payroll and needs an off-cycle payroll adjustment instead.

This applies to both routes into a correction — an employee’s correction request and an administrator editing a punch directly. Neither one reaches a day payroll has taken.

This is the most expensive sentence on this page. Before the run, a wrong day is a two-minute fix in attendance. After it, the attendance record stays wrong permanently and the money is fixed somewhere else entirely, in a different system area, by a different person, against a period the correction does not belong to.

Example: Tom Hargreaves forgot to check out on 12 March. Caught on 20 March, it is a correction request his manager approves. Caught on 5 April with the March run finalised, the 12 March record stands as it is and the underpayment becomes an off-cycle adjustment for Priya Raman to make.

Decision 1: where your attendance cutoff sits

You need a date, before the calculation date, after which attendance for the period is considered final. The product does not impose one, so if you do not set one you do not have one.

Option	Description
Several days before calculation	Managers get a defined window to approve and correct. Corrections still land inside the period. The cost is that the last days of the period are cut fine.
The day before calculation	Maximum time to record attendance, minimum time to fix it. Anything found on calculation day is already too late to fix comfortably.
A cutoff that falls after the period ends	Cleanest, because every day of the period exists before anyone signs off. It requires the gap between period end and pay date to be wide enough to hold it.

The question behind all three is how much of the period you are willing to pay on unreviewed data. The wider the gap between cutoff and calculation, the more of the period is reviewed — and the more of it is stale by the time it is paid.

Example: HC Corp UK Ltd’s monthly period ends on the last of the month and calculates on the third working day of the next. The cutoff is the first working day, which gives managers a day to clear exceptions and Priya Raman two days to work the run.

Decision 2: who owns the cutoff

Attendance is approved by the people who manage the teams. Payroll is calculated by an administrator. That split is normal and it is also where a missed cutoff hides, because the person who suffers from unapproved days is not the person who approves them.

Decide who chases, and on what signal. Unapproved days are countable before a run — that count is what a chase should be based on, not on someone remembering.

Example: Olivia Bennett approves Engineering’s attendance, and Priya Raman runs payroll. If nobody has agreed that Priya chases and Olivia responds, March closes with Engineering unapproved and nobody was at fault.

Decision 3: what you do with unresolved exceptions at the cutoff

Flagged days — a missing punch, a geofence violation, overtime beyond what the policy expects — will still be open when the cutoff arrives. You have two positions and you should pick one before it happens rather than case by case at speed.

Option	Description
Approve them anyway	The period closes on time and the flag is accepted as it stands. Fast, and it pays a figure somebody already doubted.
Hold the period open	Nothing is signed off until the flags are cleared. Accurate, and it puts the pay date at risk if a manager is away.

Most employers land between the two: a rule for which flags may be approved as they stand and which must be resolved. Excessive overtime is worth resolving because it is money; a geofence violation on someone who plainly worked is usually worth accepting and noting.

Example: HC Corp UK Ltd approves geofence flags where the shift was clearly worked, and holds any day with a missing punch until the finish time is established.

Decision 4: what an approval means in your organization

Approving a day is a sign-off on the record. The daily grid offers approval and no reversal — there is no unapprove control on the screen — so treat approval as a statement someone is making, not a step to be cleared.

Decide whether approval means “I have read this day” or “I have checked this day against what I know happened”. Bulk approval makes the first easy and the second unlikely, which is why the flagged days deserve to be handled separately from the clean ones.

Example: a manager who selects a whole week and approves it in one action has signed off days they did not read. Approving the unflagged days in bulk and the flagged ones individually gives the same speed and a defensible record.

What is expensive to get wrong

Decision	Cost
Having no cutoff at all	High. The period closes on whatever attendance happened to be there, and the first anyone knows is a payslip query.
Discovering an attendance error after the run is finalised	High. It cannot be corrected in attendance and the payslip cannot be edited. Both sides are permanent.
Leaving the cutoff unowned between managers and payroll	High. It fails silently, every period, until someone complains.
Approving flagged days by habit	Medium. It pays figures the flags exist to question.
A cutoff too close to the calculation date	Medium. It works until one manager takes leave.

What happens next

Once attendance for the period is approved and the cutoff has passed, the pay run reads the period and calculates from what is there. After the run is finalised its payslips are immutable and its period is closed, so any error found afterwards is handled on the payroll side — as an off-cycle run or an adjustment in a later period — and the attendance record for those days stays as it was.