Attendance

Attendance is where every hour your people work becomes a record you can stand behind. Punches arrive from three places, a biometric terminal at the door, the Communicator Pro app in someone's pocket, or a kiosk on a tablet, and they all land against the same employee. Night shifts that cross midnight and multiple breaks in one day are calculated for you, so nobody is adding up hours by hand at the end of the week.

The module is built in two halves. The first half is the plan: what the working day looks like, which pattern each person runs, and what the year holds in terms of public holidays and shutdowns. The second half is the reconciliation: reviewing what actually happened, fixing what is missing, and approving leave, overtime and corrected punches before any of it reaches payroll. Work through this page in that order the first time you set the module up.

The Daily Time Table is the shape of a single working day. You set when the day starts and ends, where the breaks fall and how long they run, and how punches are rounded, for example to the nearest five minutes or to the quarter hour. Everything else in the module refers back to one of these, so it is worth being deliberate here before you build anything on top of it.

Most organisations end up with a small handful: a standard office day, an early shift, a late shift and a night. Give each one a name a supervisor would recognise on a roster rather than a code, because that name is what appears everywhere else in the system.

A Weekly Shift takes the day patterns you built and lays them across a week. You choose which Daily Time Table applies to each day, including the days that are off, and the result is a repeating pattern you can hand to one person, a whole team or an entire department in a single action.

Where someone works a rotation rather than the same week every week, build each week of the rotation as its own Weekly Shift and cycle them. The system keeps track of where in the cycle each employee sits, so a person who joins mid-rotation picks up in the right place.

Shift Groups exist so you are not assigning the same pattern to forty people one at a time. Put everyone who runs an identical pattern into a group, then assign the shift to the group. When the pattern changes, you change it once and everyone in the group moves with it.

Groups are independent of departments, which matters when a pattern cuts across the organisation. A group can hold the four people on the early shift even if they sit in four different departments.

The Yearly Schedule holds everything that overrides the normal pattern: public holidays, company shutdowns, and any day the business treats differently from the week it sits in. Attendance reads this before it reads the weekly pattern, so a public holiday does not get counted as an absence and a shutdown does not eat someone's leave balance.

Set the coming year up before it starts, in one sitting. Malta's public holidays are the obvious entries, but the ones that cause trouble later are the local ones: a village feast that closes a site, or a client's own shutdown week that your team follows.

Daily Transactions is the working view for a single day. It shows every punch against every employee, what the system made of it, and where something does not add up: a clock-in with no clock-out, a break that never ended, a punch from outside a geo-fence. Supervisors live in this screen.

Fixing something here leaves a trail. The original punch is kept, your correction sits next to it, and both carry a timestamp and a name. That record is what makes the hours defensible if anyone questions them later.

Weekly Transactions rolls the same information up so a manager can sign off a whole week in one pass rather than opening seven days one after another. Totals per employee sit beside the daily detail, and anything still unresolved is flagged rather than quietly included.

This is the last gate before payroll. Once a week is approved here, the hours feed straight into the Payroll module, which is why it is worth resolving exceptions in Daily Transactions first rather than at this stage.

Leave requests arrive from the app or the employee portal and queue here with the balance attached, so you can see what someone has left before you decide. Approving or rejecting notifies the employee straight away and, on approval, writes the leave into the schedule so the day stops showing as an unexplained absence.

The overview is the part managers use most: who is off, when, and how much of the team that takes out at once. Checking it before approving is what stops three people on the same shift being off on the same Friday.

Overtime is calculated by the rules you set rather than by anybody's judgement. You define what triggers it, what rate applies, whether regular and holiday rates differ, the minimum block that counts, and how it rounds. Hours past the trigger then queue here for approval.

Because the calculation is rule-driven, disagreements tend to be about the rule rather than the arithmetic, which is a much easier conversation. If a figure looks wrong, check the trigger and the rounding before you check the punches.

Punches get missed. Someone's hands are full, a terminal is down, a phone is flat. The employee raises a correction from the app, says what time they actually started or finished, and it arrives here for a supervisor to accept or reject rather than being edited silently.

Keep an eye on the pattern rather than only the individual request. One person missing punches repeatedly usually means a device in the wrong place or a geo-fence drawn too tightly, and that is worth fixing at the source.