Attendance — turning days into a number payroll can pay

One number per person per day, and everything is a way of getting it right.

Attendance in Deetzo is not a surveillance tool. It is the input to payroll. Every screen in this guide produces or corrects one fact — what fraction of this day did this person earn? — and the month rolls those fractions into present days, leave days, absent days and payable days. Payroll then prices them.

Where it lives

Attendance is part of the HR module. If these screens are missing, the module has not been enabled for your account.

Four settings, in this order. Getting the order wrong is the most common bad first month.

1 · The working week

More → Work week & pay basis. Tap the days you actually work. Until you do, Deetzo assumes "the first N days from Monday", which cannot express a Tuesday weekly off or a Sunday–Thursday week — and gets expected days wrong silently.

2 · What a paid day means

On the same screen. Monthly salary (the default) pays holidays and weekly offs, and prices an absence as loss of pay. Daily wage pays only the days attended — no holidays, no weekly offs, and no loss-of-pay line, because a daily wage has fewer days rather than a deduction.

3 · Shifts

More → Shifts. Every tenant starts with one default shift, 09:00–18:00 with a 60-minute break. Edit it before anybody punches — see §02.

4 · Holidays

More → Company Holidays. A holiday is a day nobody is expected in; it shows on everyone's leave calendar and never reads as an absence.

Five numbers that decide whether a day is full, half or absent.

A shift is not just a start and an end. It carries the tolerances that make a real workplace work, and the thresholds that turn hours into a day:

The editor shows a live line — "a full day is 8h 00m, overtime after 8h 00m" — under the form, because the five numbers interact and nobody gets them right blind.

Assigning a shift is a field on the team member, not a third list. Anyone with no shift of their own gets the default, and exactly one shift is the default at a time.

The rules, in the order they are applied.

1. Before the tracking start date? Not scored. Nothing to see, nothing to pay.
2. Is it a holiday, or not a working day for this shift? Holiday or week off. Neither is an absence.
3. Is there approved leave? The leave fraction (full or half day) is credited. An approved day never reads as an absence.
4. Is there a punch? Elapsed time, less the break, is compared to the half-day and full-day thresholds. Grace forgives small lateness before a late arrival is recorded.
5. Nothing at all, and the day is over? Absent. Until the day is over it reads not marked, because somebody who has not left yet is not absent.

Quarter days do not exist. A day is 0, half or 1 — deliberately, because no Indian payroll prices a quarter day and letting one appear would export a number nobody could reconcile.

What an employee sees, and the only two buttons they need.

Check in when you arrive, Check out when you leave. The screen shows the month as a list of days with the status of each, the hours worked, and anything the shift flagged — late arrival, early departure, a missing check-out.

Reached from the Attendance button on People → Timesheet on the desktop, and from the attendance button in the app bar on a phone. Everybody has it; no permission is needed to see your own days.

If a day is wrong — you forgot to punch out, you were on site, the device failed — you do not edit it. You raise a correction: §06.

Everybody, one day, and four things a supervisor can do about it.

People → Time & Leave holds the roster: every active team member for the chosen date with their shift, their punch and where the day stands. The counters at the top — present, on leave, absent, not marked — are what a supervisor scans at 10 a.m.

The ⋮ menu on a row offers exactly four choices:

"I was here, the punch is wrong, please fix it."

A correction is a request, not an edit. The employee opens the day and states what actually happened; a supervisor approves or declines; only then does the record change. The request, the reason and the decision are the audit trail — the same reason a leave request is not an edit to a calendar.

Reasons offered: forgot to check in, forgot to check out, on duty (client site, factory visit), wrong time recorded, device failure, and other. The in and out times are independent — fix one without inventing the other.

Requests land in People → Approvals alongside timesheet approvals, with a pending count on the tab. Approving applies the corrected times and re-derives the day.

The five numbers payroll actually reads.

The month report lives on People → Attendance Report and can be read for any person and any month. It is also what an employee sees on their own attendance screen.

Three things that decide whether a day off costs anybody anything.

Paid and unpaid leave types

Each leave type carries a paid switch. Payroll joins the month's approved leave to those switches itself: paid leave is a normal day, unpaid leave is loss of pay. A leave type that has been deleted is treated as paid — docking somebody because an administrator removed a type is the worse of the two failures.

Holidays

A company holiday is credited on a monthly salary and not on a daily wage. It never reads as an absence on either.

The lock

Approving a pay run locks every attendance day in the period. You can also close a month yourself before the run: on People → Time & Leave, the lock icon on the roster offers Close month for payroll, and Reopen undoes it — except for a month a pay run has already paid. Punches, marks and corrections for that window are refused afterwards. This is what the lock is for: without it, somebody could regularise a day that has already been paid, and the payslip and the roster would stop agreeing.

Reversing the pay run unlocks exactly the window that run locked — not the month it names, because a second run may have locked more and guessing would reopen a month somebody else has closed.

The things that surprise people in the first month.

• Overtime is recorded, not paid. The minutes accrue and are shown, but nothing prices them. Until overtime approval ships, an employee who forgets to punch out and is regularised to 23:59 would otherwise be paid for it. Enter overtime as a manual earning if you pay it.
• A missing check-out is not an absence. It is flagged as a missing check-out, and the hours are whatever the punch supports. Fix it with a correction, not a mark.
• The default six-day week. Out of the box Deetzo assumes Monday–Saturday. If you work five days and never say so, Saturdays count as expected working days.
• Marking absent removes the punch. Deliberate — a day cannot show "absent" beside a check-in time — but it means the original punch is gone. Use Clear the day if you want the punch re-derived instead.
• Attendance is per login. Somebody you pay who does not use the app has no attendance at all, and payroll pays them their full month. That is correct for a monthly salary and impossible for a daily wage.
• Changing the working week does not rewrite history. A run already approved keeps the week it was computed on.

Two permissions, and a deliberate absence.

Attendance supervision reuses the existing approve time permission rather than adding a new flag — if you already trust somebody with timesheets, you trust them with the roster.

Next: the Payroll guide — what happens to these days once the month closes.