Time and attendance
The practice of recording when staff start, break and finish, so hours worked can be verified and paid accurately.
Time and attendance is the practice of recording when people start work, when they break, and when they finish, so that the hours you pay for match the hours somebody actually worked. It covers the moment of capture, the record that capture produces, and the review a manager does before those hours reach payroll. In shift work it is the backbone of both the wage bill and the compliance file.
Why it is more than a clock
A clock captures a moment. Time and attendance is what makes that moment defensible: who punched, where, against which shift, and what a manager changed afterwards. When a pay dispute or an inspection arrives, the question is never whether you had a clock. It is whether the record explains itself without somebody reconstructing it from memory.
- Start, break and finish times per person, per shift
- The scheduled hours those actuals are measured against
- Any edit, who made it, and why
- Overtime and premium hours, separated from base hours
Where it usually goes wrong
Two failure modes dominate. The first is capture: a punch never happens, so the record has a hole somebody fills in later from memory. The second is reconciliation: the hours are captured but never checked against the schedule, so nobody notices a shift that ran three hours long until payroll has already run. Both are cheaper to catch at the moment of the punch than at period close.
“A time record is only worth what it can prove a week after anyone remembers the day.”
How Formclock handles this: time clock.
Explore time clock