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All-in-one HR platform · v2.0
14-day free trial · No credit cardhello@HrMagix.com
All-in-one HR platform · v2.0
14-day free trial · No credit cardhello@HrMagix.com
Attendance is the input payroll cannot do without and the one most companies capture least reliably. HRMagix takes punches from the hardware you already own, from a phone in the field, and from a browser at a desk, into one ledger.
Attendance & Shifts at a glance
There is a specific kind of dispute that only happens in companies with good attendance hardware and no attendance system. The machine says a person entered at 09:47. The person says they were at a client site from 08:30. Both are true. Neither is in the payroll input.
Capture is not the hard part, most Indian offices have had biometric readers for a decade. The hard part is that a workforce is rarely all in one place, and the exceptions are where the entire argument lives: field staff, night shifts, plant rotations, a warehouse that runs on Sundays, a developer working from Pune for a fortnight.
Several branches, paper registers, buddy punching, overtime nobody approved and a roster built in a messaging group.
The moments that usually start the search
Opening another branch multiplies the registers to reconcile.
Overtime cost spikes with no approval trail behind it.
A seasonal surge brings in staff faster than attendance can be set up for them.
Read in that order. How presence gets in, what the rules do with it, and where the result ends up, because the third is what makes the first two worth configuring properly.
Attendance is the input payroll cannot do without and the one most companies capture least reliably. HRMagix takes punches from the hardware you already own, from a phone in the field, and from a browser at a desk, into one ledger.
HRMagix accepts attendance from the biometric hardware already installed, eSSL, Matrix, Realtime and ZKTeco devices push over a secure API or a local sync service, from the iOS and Android app, and from the browser. What matters is that these are not three systems. They are three inputs to the same ledger, so a person who badges in at the plant on Monday and checks in from a client site on Tuesday has one continuous record.
Mobile check-ins can be constrained by a GPS geofence drawn around office coordinates, client sites or branch warehouses, with optional selfie validation. For field teams, that turns a check-in from an assertion into evidence.
A twenty-four-hour operation does not have a schedule so much as a pattern. HRMagix models it as one: rotating multi-shift schedules, auto-detection of which shift a punch belongs to based on its timestamp, grace periods for late arrival configured per policy rather than per manager, night-shift differential allowances, and compensatory off credited automatically when approved weekend or holiday work occurs.
The point of each of these is the same. Every rule expressed as configuration is a rule that does not have to be applied by hand at month end, and therefore cannot be applied inconsistently.
Loss of pay is where attendance stops being an HR topic and becomes a finance one. In HRMagix the LOP register is derived from the same ledger the presence board is drawn from, which means the number the payroll team sees at cutoff is the number the reporting manager has been looking at all month.
It also means corrections behave properly. A regularisation approved on the 28th changes the register before the run, rather than becoming an arrear to process next month.
Every attendance management system can total the hours between a punch-in and a punch-out. The harder question is which of those hours the employer has agreed to pay at a premium, and that is a policy question rather than a measurement one.
Time beyond the shift is not automatically overtime. It becomes overtime when it was authorised, or when it crosses a threshold the policy defines, and the rate depends on whether the day was a working day, a weekly off or a public holiday. Some employers compensate with a day off rather than a payment, which turns the same hours into a comp-off entitlement with an expiry date instead of a line on a payslip.
Holding those rules in the system rather than in a supervisor's judgement is what makes the overtime figure reproducible. It is also what makes it easy to defend, because the record shows the hours, the rule applied to them and the person who authorised the exception.
Attendance data is read twice: once by payroll at the end of the month, and once, much later, by somebody asking a question about a specific day. The second reading is the one that determines how the ledger should be designed.
Muster rolls and wage registers under the Shops and Establishments Acts and the wage legislation are attendance records by another name, and an inspector's question is almost always specific, this person, this date, why were they marked absent. Answering it requires the original capture, the correction if there was one, the reason given and the person who approved it.
This is why a regularisation is recorded alongside the original punch rather than replacing it. An attendance ledger that can be edited to say whatever the current answer needs to be is not evidence of anything.
Employee attendance software written for an office assumes a desk, a device and a network. A large part of the Indian workforce has none of the three: field sales, service engineers, retail floor staff, drivers, site supervisors and plant operators.
For them the capture method has to come to the work rather than the other way around. A geo-fenced mobile punch establishes that somebody was at the client site or the branch, not merely that they were logged in. A shared kiosk at the factory gate handles a shift changeover of a hundred people faster than a hundred phones would. A biometric device stays the right answer where a controlled entry point already exists.
The design consequence is that the capture method is a property of the location or the role, and all three write to the same employee attendance record. Mixing methods across a company should not mean maintaining separate ledgers.
Attendance systems are judged on their exceptions, not their happy path. These are the ones Indian workforces produce most often.
Grace period configured per policy; late marks accumulate against the rule rather than a manager's memory.
Auto-shift detection assigns a punch to the correct shift across midnight; differential allowance applies automatically.
Compensatory off credited on approval, with its own expiry and consumption rules.
Geo-fenced mobile check-in with location tagging and optional selfie validation.
Regularisation request routed to the reporting manager; approval updates the ledger and therefore the LOP register.
Calculated from the shift definition and eligibility on the employee record, and carried into the payroll run.
The questions that separate an attendance system that survives a real shop floor from one that does not.
In most cases yes. HRMagix integrates with leading biometric hardware, eSSL, Matrix, Realtime and ZKTeco, over a secure API push or a local sync service. Punches flow to the cloud presence board in real time and reflect automatically in shift calculations, late marks and the monthly loss-of-pay register.
Employees check in through the HRMagix iOS or Android app. Organisations configure a GPS geofence radius around specific office coordinates, client sites or branch warehouses, with optional selfie validation. Remote employees can submit check-ins with automatic location tagging.
Yes. Shift patterns, grace periods, overtime eligibility and weekly offs are configured per location and grade, so three plants can run three patterns and still file one set of returns.
By rule rather than by arithmetic alone. Hours beyond the shift qualify when they were authorised or cross the threshold the policy sets, and the rate depends on whether the day was a working day, a weekly off or a public holiday. Where the employer compensates with time off instead, the same hours become a comp-off entitlement with its own expiry.
The original capture is never overwritten. A regularisation is recorded alongside it with the reason and the approver attached, so the corrected position and the original are both visible. An editable ledger is not evidence, which matters when the question arrives months later and is about a specific person on a specific date.
By the thresholds the policy defines, a grace window, a cut-off after which the day counts as a half day, and a consequence for repetition. Because the rule is configured rather than applied by judgement, the same lateness produces the same outcome across departments, which is usually the reason the policy existed in the first place.
Yes, and most companies need this. Capture is a property of the location or role: biometric at a controlled entry point, a shared kiosk at a factory gate, geo-fenced mobile punch for field staff. All three write to the same attendance record rather than to separate ledgers.
The shift is treated as one unit attributed to the day it began, rather than as two partial days. This is the single most common source of disagreement between an attendance report and a payroll run, because splitting a night shift at midnight produces two short days and an incorrect overtime figure.
Looking for a custom walkthrough or have specific statutory policy requirements? Connect with our product specialists in Pune for a 1-on-1 consultation.
A walkthrough against your own policies, with a dry-run before the first live cutoff.
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