How time and attendance differs from plain attendance
Plain attendance answers one question per day: present, absent, on leave or half day. Time and attendance answers a second one: how many hours, and which of them are payable at what rate. For a monthly-salaried office employee the first question is usually enough. For a factory operator, a guard on a 12-hour post or a daily-wage helper, hours drive the money, so the second question is unavoidable.
The difference shows up in the data model. Attendance stores one status per day. Time and attendance stores punch-in and punch-out events (possibly several a day), break deductions, the assigned shift, and derived fields: worked hours, shortfall, overtime hours and the man-hours that a contractor bills a client.
What a time attendance machine or system computes
A 'time attendance machine' in Indian shop-floor vocabulary is the terminal at the gate – fingerprint, RFID card or face. On its own it stores punches. The software behind it does the arithmetic: pair the first in with the last out, subtract the unpaid break the shift defines, compare the result with the shift length, and classify the remainder.
Under the Factories Act the reference points are 9 hours a day and 48 a week with a 10.5-hour spread-over; anything beyond 9 hours in a day or 48 in a week is overtime at twice the ordinary rate. The Code on Wages keeps the double rate. So the system must know the shift, the daily cap and the weekly cap, not just the punch times. The hourly rate itself is usually derived as monthly wage ÷ 26 ÷ 8 – try it with the overtime pay calculator.
- Worked hours = last out − first in − unpaid break (or the sum of all in/out pairs if multiple punches are allowed)
- Shortfall = shift hours − worked hours, used for half-day or late-deduction rules
- Overtime = worked hours above the daily shift cap, or weekly hours above 48, whichever the policy applies
- Night hours = hours falling inside a defined night window, for night-shift allowance
How it feeds payroll
Payroll needs three numbers per employee per month: paid days (including weekly offs and paid leave), LOP days and OT hours (sometimes split into 1x and 2x buckets). A time and attendance system produces exactly these, ideally locked after a cut-off so the salary run is reproducible. The steps are laid out in how to prepare attendance for payroll.
Where companies go wrong is exporting raw punches to Excel and recalculating hours by hand. A 300-person plant generates about 18,000 punch events a month; manual pairing of ins and outs is where missed punches, double punches and midnight-crossing shifts create wrong OT. Read timesheet vs attendance for how the two records should be kept apart.
Shift 20:00–08:00 with a 1-hour unpaid break. Punches: in 19:52, out 08:41. Worked = 12h 49m − 1h = 11h 49m. Shift length is 11 payable hours, so 49 minutes is OT; policy rounds to the nearest 30 minutes, giving 0.5 OT hours. Monthly wage ₹18,200 → hourly ₹18,200 ÷ 26 ÷ 8 = ₹87.50; OT at 2x = ₹175 × 0.5 = ₹87.50 for that night.
Attend Mitra records punches from face, selfie, GPS, QR, kiosk and biometric devices against shift templates (including shifts that cross midnight), applies break, grace, early-exit and overtime rules per shift, and derives LOP and OT into attendance-linked payroll runs, with Excel export for companies that run salary elsewhere.