Face-scan attendance — from your employee's phone

The shift: the reference everything is measured against

Before there can be lateness there must be a scheduled time, and before there can be absence there must be an expected working day. The shift is that reference — without it, punches are just timestamps that mean nothing.

Weekly rest days are set per employee rather than company-wide. That is what makes a continuous operation manageable: whoever rests on Tuesday does not show as absent every week, and whoever works on their rest day is treated by the rest-day rules rather than the ordinary ones.

Assignment happens individually or in bulk, with import, transfer and duplicate tools — so moving a whole department from a morning shift to an evening one is one operation rather than a hundred, two of which get forgotten.

The attendance rule: the setting that turns a punch into money

A punch is a timestamp, not information. On its own it does not say someone was late, what it costs, or that the day was an absence. The attendance rule says that — the setting standing between a recorded time and a figure on a payslip.

Lateness tolerance

— when lateness starts counting at all, and what it costs — by the minute or in bands.

The absence threshold

— when the day becomes a full absence rather than a deduction for the time missed.

Overtime factors

— a day factor and a night one, so approved time is priced automatically rather than by hand.

Handling a missing punch

— what happens to a day with no check-out — the decision most often overlooked.

Field capture: geofencing and face recognition

A fingerprint device assumes work happens in one place that has a device. That assumption fails for the sales rep, the maintenance technician and the small-branch employee — who in many companies are not the exception but half the team.

Phone capture needs two layers together: one proving identity — that is face recognition — and one proving location, which is the geofence. Either alone leaves a gap wide open.

A location is defined by a point and a radius in kilometres, or by a drawn boundary for irregular sites like a long plant or a construction site. A punch outside the zone is refused and the attempt is logged — the log supports the employee who was at a client site and forgot to raise an assignment, and exposes whoever tries to register from home every morning.

Three cases that are not absence

What damages trust in an attendance system most is not a calculation error but docking someone who was working. The cases producing that deduction look alike — a day without a complete punch record — and mean entirely different things.

A permission

— planned, authorised absence from part of the time, not counted as absence once approved.

A work assignment

— a full day worked away from the workplace — a client visit or a site inspection.

A forgotten punch

— present but not recorded. Approving the request adds no real punch to the device — processing treats it as a virtual punch, so the audit trail stays intact.

Overtime: from request to pay or to a balance

Staying late is not overtime. The essential distinction is that overtime is assigned work rather than time present — and relying on the punch record alone turns every extra minute into a financial obligation the company never decided to take on.

The cycle is three steps: a request with a start and end time, then review, then approval. Minutes are computed from those two times rather than from the punch, and there is one request per employee per day — without which overlapping requests for the same hours pile up and time is counted twice.

Approved time is compensated either as money, priced at the day or night factor from the attendance rule, or as a compensatory leave balance added to the employee's balance. The second is not free — it is a deferral that later appears as paid days away or as an amount in the final settlement.

Two-step processing, and the open-month requirement

Punches alone are raw data. Processing runs the rule over them to produce figures — lateness, absence, overtime — that can travel into pay. It is deliberately split into calculate then post.

Calculation produces the figures and shows them for review, where the anomalies surface: many days with no check-out means a device whose data was never pulled, and an employee with entirely zero figures usually means no shift assigned. Posting is what links the result to payroll.

Both steps require an open month and each has a rollback. Processing computes on what is approved at run time — an unapproved leave request and overtime awaiting sign-off do not enter the calculation. Which is why clearing pending approvals comes before processing, not after.