A month of attendance is a grid on paper in most businesses: names down the side, days across the top, a mark where somebody was missing. Beelocity draws the same grid and fills in everything it already knows — the rest days, the public holidays, the leave you approved and the extra hours somebody put in — so the only thing left for you is the one thing the app cannot know: who did not turn up.
This page is for whoever keeps the register. What the month’s pay then does with a marked day is Monthly payroll.
Read the month
Open Human Resources › Attendance, which opens on its Attendance sheet tab. Pick the Year and the Month, and the sheet draws itself: one row per person the month covers, one column per day. The page’s other tab, Overtime, is where extra hours are recorded.
Each cell says one thing, and the legend under the sheet names them:
- At work — nothing to report. The person was there as far as anything recorded says.
- Absent — a day they did not turn up for, with nothing approved behind it.
- Leave — a day of leave you approved, named by its type.
- Overtime — extra hours they put in that day.
- Public holiday — a day on your holiday calendar, by name.
- Rest day — a day of the week the business does not work.
A person’s row starts on the day they were hired and stops on the day they left, so the days before and after are blank rather than claiming anything.
Where two of these land on one day, the sheet shows the one you would want to read. Extra hours come first, because somebody who came in has come in. A public holiday comes before a rest day, because it has a name.
Mark a day somebody was away
Click a day on somebody’s row to mark it, and click it again to take the mark back. Only two kinds of square take a mark: an ordinary working day, and a day you marked yourself. A day the calendar or the leave register has already spoken for — a rest day, a public holiday, approved leave — cannot be marked, and hovering it tells you what it is.
Press Save when the month reads the way it should. Cancel puts back what was there before.
Each unbroken run of marked days becomes one unjustified absence on the person’s own record, numbered like any other leave: mark the 5th, 6th and 7th and you get one absence of three days, not three of one. Take the 6th back out and it becomes two. They show on the person’s Leave tab, and the month’s pay takes them off as unpaid days.
If any one of the marks cannot be recorded, none of the month is saved — the sheet is left exactly as you found it and the message names the person it stopped on. Half a marked month would be worse than none, because you could not see which half had landed.
Marking a month needs the authority to approve leave, not only to record it: what you are writing is a decision, not a request. Somebody who may read the register but not decide on it sees the month and no Save.
Bring a month in from a file
A business whose attendance already lives in a spreadsheet does not have to mark it twice.
Press Export and the month comes down as a spreadsheet file: one row per person, one column per day, with what each square says already in it. That file is also the template — fill in the days and bring the same file back.
Press Import, pick the file, and the month on screen fills in from it. Nothing is written yet: the sheet is the preview, so you read the month the way you always do and press Save when it is right.
What the reader accepts, so a file from anywhere stands a chance:
- Rows are matched on the employee number, not on a name — two people share a name, and the number is what the business knows them by. A row naming somebody the month does not hold is listed and left out, and the rest still comes in.
- The day columns are numbered —
1,2,3— so they read the same in any language. The other columns are matched against their heading in English, French or Arabic, which means a file passed between two people who read different languages still opens. - A day is marked by anything you put in its square — a cross, a letter, a word. Empty means the person was at work.
- Only a day you could have clicked is read at all. A rest day, a public holiday and a day of approved leave keep what the calendar says whatever the file puts there, which is also why the file the app wrote goes back in unchanged.
- Semicolons, commas or tabs between the fields, and either kind of line ending. Accented and Arabic names survive the round trip.
People on a rota
For somebody on a crew, the row follows the crew’s rota rather than your business’s week (Shifts and rotas). A day their rota gives them a shift shows the shift’s mark — N for a night, M for a morning — and can be marked absent if they did not come, even on a Friday. A day their rota rests reads Rest day, even on a weekday the office works, and cannot be marked: there was no shift to miss. A public holiday still reads as the holiday, whether or not the rota works it.
A file brought in follows the same rule: a mark on a person’s shift is kept, and one on their rota’s rest day is ignored. Everybody on no crew keeps your working week, exactly as before.
A day whose plan was changed reads as the change says (Change the plan). A day off reads Rest day and cannot be marked. Another shift shows that shift’s mark. A rest day moved to another day leaves the old one a day to be at work, which can be marked. A call-in shows the shift’s mark in the rest day’s shading: the person came in on their rest day, so there is nothing to mark, and once its overtime is recorded the day reads as overtime.
What the sheet does not record
The sheet is a picture of what your records already say, and it keeps nothing of its own:
- Leave comes from the requests you approved, on Holidays and leave. Change one there and the sheet follows.
- Extra hours come from the Overtime register. The sheet shows them; you record and correct them where they live.
- Rest days and public holidays come from your working calendar, which you set once under Human Resources › Setup › Rest days and leave and add feast days to as they are announced.
So there is nothing to save on a day you have not touched, and nothing on the sheet can disagree with the pages it is drawn from.
Hours worked are not recorded
Beelocity records the hours somebody worked beyond their week, not the hours of an ordinary day. A working day nobody reported anything about is taken as the week the contract states, spread over the days the business works.
If your business needs the hours of every day as they were clocked, that is not what this sheet is, and nothing here will produce it. The hours somebody on a crew is due are their shifts’, planned on the rota (Shifts and rotas), and the sheet records only what went otherwise.
A day that ran too long
The law puts a ceiling on a single day: twelve hours, counting the whole span from arriving to leaving. Once the sheet says which days were worked, Beelocity can add one up — the ordinary hours of the contract plus whatever extra was recorded on that day — and it tells you on the payslip when some day of the month went past it.
It is a warning, not a refusal, and the month still closes. What the app counts is hours worked, where the law counts the whole day including breaks, so the figure it reaches is the smallest the real day could have been. Refusing on a figure that low would stop an honest record and still miss a real breach.
An ordinary day is the contract’s week spread over the days you work. Forty hours with only Friday off is a six-day week and 6 hours 40 a day; the same forty with Friday and Saturday off is eight-hour days. So the same overtime crosses the line in one business and not in another, which is what the law intends. For somebody on a crew, a day their rota gives them a shift is that shift’s own hours instead: four extra hours after an eleven-and-a-half-hour shift go past twelve.
A month the pay has been closed for
Closing a month freezes its pay: the payslips keep the figures they were worked out from, and nothing reopens them. You can still read a closed month’s sheet, and a day you mark in one is still recorded — the register has to be able to say somebody was away, even when you find out in November about a day in September.
What it will not do is change that month’s pay. The correction belongs on the next month you have not closed yet, as a day of absence on its variables. Monthly payroll says how.