Attendance

Employee attendance software for growing teams

Per-employee shifts, a grace window that matches your policy, automatic lunch deduction, shift rosters, and a month-end export payroll can actually use. For office, remote and hybrid staff alike.

  • Shift and late policy per employee
  • Shift roster
  • Feeds payroll
  • Remote and hybrid

What attendance covers

Shifts

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.

Marking

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.

Breaks

Lunch deducted automatically

On the schedule you configure, shown as its own line rather than quietly removed from the total.

Exceptions

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.

Corrections

Corrections with a trail

A missed punch is fixed by an admin, and the record keeps who corrected it and when, not an untraceable edit to the register.

Output

A month-end file payroll accepts

Present, absent, late, half-day, leave and total hours per employee, as a CSV export.

Monthly attendance register in Employee Desk showing each employee with check-in time, check-out time, late markers, break deduction and total worked hours.
The month-end register, already in the shape payroll asks for.

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.

Attendance policy settings
SettingWhat it controlsTypical value
Shift start and endThe window a normal working day is measured against09:30 to 18:30
Grace windowHow late is still on time10 to 15 minutes
Late policyWhen a late mark becomes a half-day deduction3 lates = 1 half day
Lunch deductionUnpaid break removed from total hours45 to 60 minutes
Half-day thresholdMinimum hours to avoid an absent mark4 to 5 hours
Week off and holidaysDays the register must not flagSat/Sun plus the holiday calendar

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.
  • 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?

An administrator with attendance permission adds or corrects the entry, and the record keeps who corrected it and when, 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 register also exports as XLSX, and payroll inside Employee Desk reads it directly.

Does it integrate with a biometric device?

Not today. There is no biometric connector or punch API. Attendance is marked from the web portal or the desktop tracker, and an administrator can add or correct entries.

Related reading: attendance documentation, leave management, time tracking and managing attendance and leave in one system.

Screenshot

Shifts & roster

A weekly roster showing who is on which shift. Approved leave, holidays and weekly offs appear in the grid, and a one-day swap sits on top of a longer block without editing it.

Employee Desk - Weekly roster with general, early, afternoon and night shifts per employee
Screenshot

My attendance

An employee’s own attendance: today’s sessions and lunch, this month’s hours and a calendar of the month.

Employee Desk - Employee attendance with today’s sessions and monthly calendar

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.

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