Rules per employee, not per company
Own start time, grace window and late policy per person. A rotating support roster and a flexible engineering team can coexist without a second system.
Attendance
Employee attendance software for growing teams
Per-employee shifts, a grace window that matches your policy, automatic lunch deduction, regularisation with an approval trail, and a month-end export payroll can actually use. For office, remote and hybrid staff alike.
- Shift and late policy per employee
- Regularisation with approvals
- CSV for payroll
- Cloud or self-hosted
What attendance covers
Check in from anywhere it makes sense
Web portal, or the desktop app when time tracking is switched on. Nothing is tied to one machine, so a hybrid week does not create gaps.
Lunch deducted automatically
On the schedule you configure, shown as its own line rather than quietly removed from the total.
Late, half-day and absent, derived
Computed from the policy instead of typed in by an admin, so the register is consistent even when the admin is on leave.
Regularisation with a trail
A missed punch becomes a request with a reason and an approval, not an untraceable edit to the register.
A month-end file payroll accepts
Present, absent, late, half-day, leave and total hours per employee, as CSV or over the API.
The policy decisions you make once
These are the settings that decide what the register says. They are worth an hour of HR time before rollout and are then rarely touched again.
| Setting | What it controls | Typical value |
|---|---|---|
| Shift start and end | The window a normal working day is measured against | 09:30 to 18:30 |
| Grace window | How late is still on time | 10 to 15 minutes |
| Late policy | When a late mark becomes a half-day deduction | 3 lates = 1 half day |
| Lunch deduction | Unpaid break removed from total hours | 45 to 60 minutes |
| Half-day threshold | Minimum hours to avoid an absent mark | 4 to 5 hours |
| Week off and holidays | Days the register must not flag | Sat/Sun plus the holiday calendar |
| Regularisation limit | How many corrections a month an employee may request | 2 to 3 |
Attendance for remote and hybrid teams
A biometric machine at the door stops answering the question the moment half the team stops walking through it.
Employee Desk records attendance against the employee, not against a device. A person working from home marks attendance in the browser; the record is the same shape as an office one, so the month-end register does not need two sources stitched together.
Where you need more than a self-reported start time, the optional desktop tracker records actual active hours alongside the attendance mark. The two are separate on purpose: plenty of companies want reliable attendance and no monitoring at all, and that combination is fully supported.
Common patterns
- Office-first. Attendance only, no tracker. Most Starter customers.
- Hybrid. Attendance for everyone, tracker for staff on client-billable work.
- Fully remote. Attendance plus tracker with screenshots disabled, so hours are measured without surveillance.
- Client-site staffing. Attendance plus tracker with per-project hours for invoicing.
Frequently asked questions about attendance software
What is employee attendance software?
Employee attendance software records when each person started and stopped work, applies your shift and late policy to those timings, and produces a month-end summary you can pay against. Employee Desk does this for office, remote and hybrid staff from the same record.
Can each employee have a different shift?
Yes. Start time, grace window and late policy are set per employee, so a support team on a rotating roster and a development team on flexible hours can be governed by different rules in the same company.
How does it handle work from home?
Attendance is marked from the web portal or the desktop app rather than from a fixed device, so a remote employee is recorded the same way as an office one. If you want the desktop tracker to confirm actual working hours, that is an optional add-on.
What happens when someone forgets to check in?
They raise a regularisation request with a reason, their manager approves or rejects it, and the corrected entry carries the approval trail. The original omission is not erased, which matters when the month-end register is questioned.
Does it deduct lunch breaks?
Yes, automatically, on the schedule you configure. The deducted time is shown separately rather than silently removed, so an employee can see exactly how the paid hours were arrived at.
Can we export attendance to payroll?
Yes. Attendance summaries export as CSV for any date range, with present, absent, late, half-day, leave and total-hours columns. The same data is available through the REST API if you would rather it moved without a person clicking export.
Does it integrate with a biometric device?
Attendance can be posted through the REST API, which is how most biometric and access-control systems are integrated. There is no direct out-of-the-box driver for a specific device model, so plan for a short integration if biometric punches must be the source of truth.
Related reading: attendance documentation, leave management, time tracking and managing attendance and leave in one system.
Put your attendance register on autopilot
Start a 7-day trial with your real team, or open the demo and look at a month of seeded attendance data first.
- 7-day trial
- No credit card
- Cancel anytime