Attendance

Everything under Workforce Management → Attendance.

The module has two halves that are easy to confuse. Shifts and Attendance Policies are the rules: set them up once. Attendance Records, Timesheet and Regularizations are the data: they accumulate daily.

The rules are applied when the record is created, not afterwards

Attendance is judged against the shift and policy attached to the employee at the moment the record is made.

Changing a shift today does not retroactively re-judge last month’s attendance. If you correct a shift, expect historical records to keep the old verdict.

Shifts

Attendance → Shifts

A shift defines the hours somebody is expected to work — a start time, an end time, and usually a break.

Every employee should be assigned one on their employee record. It is the baseline the system compares real clock-ins against: without it, “late” and “early” have nothing to mean.

Create one shift per genuinely different working pattern. A 9-to-5 office shift, an early shift, a night shift. Do not create one per person.

Attendance Policies

Attendance → Attendance Policies

A policy is the tolerance applied to the shift. Typically it covers:

Setting	What it controls
Grace period	How many minutes late still counts as on time.
Half-day threshold	How few hours worked counts as a half day.
Absent threshold	How few hours counts as absent rather than present.
Overtime rules	When time beyond the shift starts counting as overtime.

Like shifts, a policy is assigned on the employee record, and like shifts, an employee without one will not have their attendance interpreted correctly.

Shift and policy do different jobs

The shift says when they should be working. The policy says how strictly to judge it.

Two teams can share the 9-to-5 shift while being held to different grace periods — that is exactly the split these two screens exist to express.

Attendance Records

Attendance → Attendance Records

The day-by-day record: one row per employee per working day, with clock-in time, clock-out time, total hours and a status such as present, absent, late or on leave.

How much you see depends on your role. An employee sees only their own days; a manager sees their team; HR sees everybody.

Records arrive here three ways — an employee clocking in, a biometric device import, or somebody entering them by hand.

Filter by status to find the problems

Scrolling a full month of rows is the slow way to work. Filter by status — absent, or late — and you get the exceptions, which are the only rows that usually need a decision.

Timesheet

Attendance → Timesheet

Where attendance records answer were you here, the timesheet answers what were you working on. Entries record hours against a date, and where the module is used for client or project work, against the thing the time was spent on.

Not every organization uses this. If your work is not billed or tracked by project, attendance records alone may be all you need.

Attendance Regularizations

Attendance → Attendance Regularizations

A regularization is a request to correct an attendance record — the fix for the day somebody forgot to clock out, or was working off-site, or the device missed them.

The employee raises the request with a reason; somebody with the right permission approves or rejects it; an approved request updates the underlying attendance record.

Do not fix these by editing the record directly

It is usually possible for an administrator to simply edit an attendance record. Prefer the regularization route anyway.

A regularization leaves a trail: who asked, why, who approved. A direct edit leaves a changed number and no explanation — which is precisely the thing you will want when a payroll query lands three months later.

Biometric Attendance

Attendance → Biometric Attendance

Brings clock-in and clock-out data in from a physical device — a fingerprint or card reader — rather than relying on people clocking in through the browser.

Setting this up is an administrator job, and it needs the device configured under Settings → ZKTeco Settings. See Settings.

If your organization has no device, this screen does nothing

It will still appear in the menu, and it will look empty or inert. That is expected. Nothing is broken and there is nothing to configure unless you actually have a reader on the wall.

Common questions

Somebody’s hours look wrong for a whole month. Check their shift and attendance policy on their employee record first. A missing or wrong shift misjudges every day at once, which is what a whole bad month usually means.

An employee is marked absent but was on approved leave. Check the leave was approved before the attendance record was created. Approved leave should produce an on leave status; if the approval came later, the day may need a regularization.

Can I bulk-correct a month? There is no general bulk edit. Corrections are per record, which is deliberate — each one should have a reason attached.

Who can approve a regularization? Whoever holds the permission for it, typically HR and line managers. If the option is not there for you, your role does not have it.