Records & inspection
Does work from home count as attendance?
Yes. Attendance is a record of working time, not of physical presence at a premises. Remote working days are working days and must appear in the attendance register with their hours, and the same overtime, rest-interval and record-keeping rules apply to them.
The statutory registers ask for hours worked, not doors entered. A person working a full day from home has worked a full day, and recording them as absent — or leaving the day blank because the badge reader saw nothing — produces a register that does not reflect reality, which is the defect an inspection looks for.
Several states amended their Shops and Establishments rules to accommodate work from home explicitly during and after 2020, and the Labour Codes' record-keeping provisions are drafted around hours rather than premises. Where an employer permits remote work, the obligation to maintain accurate working-time records travels with it.
The practical difficulty is evidentiary, not legal. Badge and biometric systems capture nothing for a remote day, which is why many employers ended up with a two-track record: a clean electronic register for office days and an informal email or spreadsheet trail for remote ones. That split is the actual compliance risk, since only one of the two would survive scrutiny.
A single capture method that works identically from anywhere — with the same approval step for both — removes the problem. It also settles the related payroll question: a remote day recorded with its hours needs no special treatment for leave, overtime or loss of pay, because it is simply a working day like any other.
Where this comes from
- §State Shops and Establishments Acts and rules — hours and register provisions, several amended for work from home
- §Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020 — records of working hours
General information, current to August 2026, not legal advice. Labour rules vary by state and the Labour Codes continue to roll out — confirm your position with your compliance advisor before acting.
How Workclave handles this
Workclave sessions work identically from an office, a home or a client site, with the same approval trail — so the register has one shape regardless of where the work happened, and no parallel spreadsheet is needed.
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