What gets regularized
The common cases are a missed punch (forgot to punch out, phone battery dead), a punch outside the geofence with a genuine reason, on-duty work at a client or vendor site not in the system, work from home on an approved day, and a late mark caused by an official reason such as a bank visit for the company. Less common but important: a shift the roster had wrong, or a holiday worked that should be a comp-off.
Regularization is not for converting an absence into presence without evidence. If the employee was not at work, the correct route is leave or loss of pay, not a correction.
How the workflow should run
The employee raises the request in the app against the specific date, selects a reason category, adds the corrected in/out time and a note. The reporting manager sees it in a queue with the original record beside it – system punch at 08:12, requested 08:00, reason 'punched at wrong gate' – and approves, rejects or edits. HR may be a second approver for corrections above a threshold. On approval, the attendance status recalculates and the change is written to the audit log.
Set a cut-off: requests for a month must be raised by, say, the 3rd of the next month and approved by the 5th, after which attendance locks and payroll runs. Without a cut-off, salary is reworked repeatedly. The attendance regularization process and policy guide has a full policy draft.
- Request within 2–3 working days of the date; monthly cut-off before payroll lock
- Reason categories: missed punch, outdoor duty, WFH, official late, roster error
- Cap the number per month (3–4 is common) and report repeat requesters
- Manager approval mandatory; HR second approval for bulk or late corrections
- Every change logged with requester, approver, timestamp and original value
Why the audit trail matters
A regularization without an audit trail is indistinguishable from tampering. When a terminated employee disputes a loss of pay deduction, or an inspector asks why the register shows a change, you need to show the original punch, the request, the approver and the date. This is the difference between an electronic register that a labour officer accepts and an Excel sheet that anyone could have edited.
The audit trail also shows patterns. An employee with four missed punches every month is either badly trained or testing the system; a manager who approves 100% of requests in bulk on the 5th is not reviewing them. Both are visible in a regularization report, not in the register itself.
A machine operator on the 22:00–06:00 shift punches in at 21:55 but his phone dies before punch-out. The system shows a single punch and marks the day as 'incomplete', which would become a half day at payroll. On the 2nd he raises a regularization for out-time 06:05 with reason 'phone switched off'; his supervisor confirms from the shift handover sheet and approves on the 3rd. The day recalculates to full present; the log records both the original single punch and the correction.
Attend Mitra includes attendance corrections and regularization with an approval workflow in the app, a manager queue showing the original record beside the request, and an audit trail of every change, so the locked monthly attendance that feeds payroll can be defended line by line.