Glossary
Attendance Register
Also known as: Attendance record
An attendance register is the ongoing record of which employees were present, absent, or on leave each working day, along with their hours. It is used for payroll, compliance, and workforce planning. In India it also supports statutory record-keeping obligations.
Historically the attendance register was a physical book where entries were made by hand each day. It answered simple but important questions: who came to work, when, and for how long, which in turn drove wages and proved compliance during inspections.
Paper registers are easy to backdate, lose, or fill inconsistently, which undermines their value as evidence. Digital registers solve this by timestamping entries and preventing silent edits, so the record reflects what actually happened rather than what someone wrote later.
A modern attendance register is really a byproduct of accurate presence capture. If every work session is logged and approved, the register is generated automatically and stays consistent with payroll, leave, and billing rather than diverging from them.
India context
Employers are generally required to maintain attendance and wage registers under laws such as the Factories Act, Shops and Establishments Acts, and the Code on Wages, 2019, with digital records increasingly permitted where they are reliable and auditable.
Outside India
What the register must contain and how long it must be kept is set nationally. US employers under the FLSA keep payroll records three years and time cards two; Australian employers keep employee records seven years under the Fair Work Regulations; Spain keeps the registro de jornada four years; Singapore keeps records two years for current employees and one year after they leave; the UK keeps working-time records two years but National Minimum Wage records six. The underlying data is identical — the retention window and export format are not.
Compliance by jurisdiction →How Workclave handles this
Workclave generates a consistent digital attendance register from approved sessions, with timestamps and no silent edits. Records export cleanly for inspection, audit, or payroll reconciliation. what an attendance system does.
Related terms
A muster roll is the official record that lists workers and marks their daily attendance, hours worked, and wages payable. It is a statutory document under several Indian labour laws and serves as legal proof that workers were present and paid. Traditionally kept on paper, it is increasingly maintained digitally.
Read definition →The Labour Codes of 2019 to 2020 consolidate India's many older labour laws into four codes covering wages, industrial relations, social security, and occupational safety and working conditions. For attendance, they matter because they shape working-hour limits, overtime, weekly rest, and record-keeping. Employers are expected to keep reliable, inspectable attendance and wage records.
Read definition →Payroll inputs are the data points fed into payroll each cycle to compute salaries, such as days present, leave taken, loss-of-pay days, overtime, and comp off. They convert attendance and policy into rupee amounts. Accurate inputs are the difference between correct and disputed salaries.
Read definition →Biometric attendance uses a physical identifier such as a fingerprint or facial scan to confirm that a specific person was present when they marked attendance. It reduces buddy punching, where one employee marks another as present. The verified event is then recorded as the attendance entry.
Read definition →