Attendance policy basics for Indian companies

Attendance looks trivial until payroll day, when a marketing executive disputes two absents, a field engineer's punches are missing, and nobody remembers who approved what. A good attendance policy is really a small set of precise definitions plus one correction process. Get those right and the month closes itself.

Define the states, exactly

Every day in an employee's month should resolve to exactly one state. The standard set:

• Present: the employee met the day's attendance criteria, whether that is a biometric punch pair, a web check-in, or a manager's confirmation for field staff.
• Half-day: worked less than the full-day threshold but more than the half-day threshold. Define both thresholds in hours; a common pattern is full day at 8 hours or more, half day between 4 and 8, and below 4 counts as absent.
• Absent: no attendance recorded and no approved leave covering the day.
• On leave: an approved leave request covers the day. Leave is not absence; the two must be separate states or payroll deductions go wrong.
• Weekly off: the scheduled off day, usually Sunday plus alternate or all Saturdays. Assign weekly-off patterns per employee or per team, because support and field teams often differ from office staff.
• Holiday: a declared public holiday for that employee's location. Multi-city companies need location-wise holiday calendars, not one national list.

Decide two edge rules explicitly: what happens when someone works on a weekly off or holiday (compensatory off or overtime, with an approval step), and whether late arrivals beyond a grace period convert to half-days after a set number of instances per month. Write the grace period down; 10 or 15 minutes is typical.

Regularisation: the correction process

Punches go missing for honest reasons: client visits, forgotten check-ins, a dead biometric device, work from home. Regularisation is the formal request to correct a day's state after the fact.

The flow should be:

1. Employee raises a regularisation request for a specific date, stating the corrected in and out time or the corrected state, with a reason.
2. The reporting manager approves or rejects. HR only handles escalations and device faults.
3. On approval, the day's state updates and the audit trail keeps who changed what and when.

Put a window on it: requests allowed up to 3 or 5 working days after the date, and never after the payroll cut-off for that month. Also cap volume; if someone files ten regularisations a month, the problem is not the process, and the manager should see that pattern.

Corrections should replace, not stack

This is the detail that quietly corrupts attendance data. When a day is corrected, the new state must replace the old one so the day still resolves to a single value. Systems or spreadsheets that append corrections as extra entries produce days that are both absent and present, and payroll then depends on which row someone read last. One day, one state, with history in the audit log rather than in the live record. If you evaluate attendance software, test exactly this: correct a day twice and check what payroll sees. In ZekoHR a regularisation overwrites the day's status and the earlier entries remain only as history.

Linking attendance to payroll

The point of all these definitions is a clean handoff on payroll day:

• Freeze attendance at a stated cut-off, commonly the 25th or the last day of the month, after which only next-month adjustments are possible.
• Compute payable days as present plus half-days at 0.5, plus approved leave, weekly offs and holidays. Loss of pay equals absent days plus any leave taken beyond balance.
• Send payroll one number per employee: LOP days. Payroll should never re-derive attendance from raw punches.
• Publish each employee's monthly attendance summary before the freeze so disputes happen before salaries are computed, not after payslips land. Self-service visibility, as in the attendance features, moves this argument from payday to mid-month, where it is cheap.

Handle mid-month joiners and exits by pro-rating from date of joining or last working day, and state that in the policy.

Keep the policy short

One page covers it: the states and thresholds, grace rules, weekly-off and holiday assignment, the regularisation window and route, and the payroll cut-off. Link it from wherever employees see their attendance. For worked examples and setup guides, see the knowledge base, and if you are pairing attendance with salary processing, the payroll module page explains the LOP handoff.

Precision here is kindness. Nobody enjoys attendance disputes, least of all HR.