Two populations, one payroll
Shift workmen and office staff have different shifts, different leave entitlements and different overtime rules, but they are paid from the same monthly process.
Industries
Attendance and leave for manufacturing companies
A plant runs two populations with different rules on the same payroll: shift workmen on the floor and salaried staff in the office. The system has to hold both without one policy being forced onto the other.
The problems this sector actually has
Written from what customers in this sector tell us goes wrong, rather than from a generic list of benefits.
The register is maintained on paper
A supervisor keeps a book, HR types it up, and the difference between the two is discovered at payroll.
Overtime is calculated by hand
Which makes it slow, contested and occasionally wrong in a way that becomes an industrial-relations problem.
Leave rules differ by category
Statutory entitlements for workmen and a company policy for staff, both of which have to be tracked accurately.
Contract labour sits outside the system
Tracked by the contractor, invoiced in a format nobody can reconcile with the plant’s own records.
Nobody on the floor has a computer
Which rules out anything that assumes an employee will log in to submit their own attendance.
How Employee Desk is used here
Per-employee shift assignment
Floor shifts and office hours coexist because the shift belongs to the employee, not to the company. Night shifts crossing midnight are handled as one working day.
Leave policy by category
Separate leave types with their own accrual and carry-forward rules for workmen and staff, both maintained automatically rather than in two spreadsheets.
Attendance without a computer per person
Supervisors mark attendance for their section from a shared terminal or a phone browser, or punches are posted from an existing biometric or access-control system through the REST API. Office staff mark their own.
A payroll file that handles both
Present, absent, late, half-day, leave and worked hours per employee for any period, with the categories intact, exported as CSV.
A configuration that usually works
A starting point rather than a prescription. Most teams adjust one or two of these in the first month.
| Setting | Typical choice | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Plan | Starter for the floor, Growth for office staff | The tracker is only relevant to desk-based roles |
| Shifts | A, B and general, assigned per employee | Reassign on rotation instead of editing policy |
| Attendance entry | Supervisor entry, or API from an existing device | Nobody on the floor logs in individually |
| Leave types | Separate sets for workmen and staff | Different entitlements, tracked separately |
| Overtime | Derived from worked hours beyond the shift | Removes the manual calculation and the dispute |
| Tracker | Office and design teams only, if at all | There is nothing useful to measure on a shop floor |
| Deployment | Self-hosted where the plant network is isolated | Common where the plant runs its own infrastructure |
Frequently asked questions
Can supervisors mark attendance for a whole section?
Yes. A supervisor with the right role can record attendance for their team from one screen, which is how plants without a device per person operate.
Can we connect our existing biometric machines?
Punches can be posted to the REST API from your device middleware. There is no packaged driver for a specific device model, so plan a short integration.
Does it calculate overtime?
Worked hours beyond the assigned shift are computed and exported, which is the input your payroll rules need. The multipliers and statutory treatment stay in your payroll system.
Can it handle contract labour?
Contract workers can be recorded as employees with their own category and shift so the plant has its own record, but there is no contractor billing or compliance module.
Does it work if the plant network is isolated?
Yes. A self-hosted installation runs on the plant network, and an air-gapped installation with an offline licence file needs no outbound connectivity at all.
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