Attendance, timesheet & compliance terms — explained for Indian teams, with the global equivalents.

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.

Attendance regularization is the process by which an employee fixes an incorrect or missing attendance record, and a manager approves the correction. It covers situations like forgetting to mark in, a device failure, or working off-site. The corrected record then flows into leave and payroll calculations.

Auto-lunch or automatic break deduction is a payroll setting that subtracts a fixed break duration, such as 30 or 60 minutes, from an employee's worked hours without requiring them to punch out for the break. It simplifies attendance for shifts with a standard meal break. If misconfigured, it can under- or overstate hours.

Bench time is time an employee in a delivery role spends without a billable allocation — between projects, awaiting a start date, or unassigned after a ramp-down. The person is paid; no revenue stands against the cost. The term comes from consulting and IT staffing, where being 'on the bench' is a normal phase between engagements.

Billable hours are the units of work time that can be charged to a client under a contract or engagement. They exclude internal activities like admin, training, or bench time that the client does not pay for. For services firms, billable hours are the direct link between effort and revenue.

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.

A blended rate is a single bill rate quoted for a team of mixed seniority, calculated as the hours-weighted average of each role's rate. If a project uses 60 senior hours at ₹2,500 and 140 junior hours at ₹1,200, the blended rate is ₹1,590 — one number that stands in for the whole staffing mix.

Buddy punching is one employee recording attendance on behalf of another — punching a colleague's card, tapping their badge, or logging them in — so the absent person appears present. It is the oldest form of attendance fraud, and in India it is often called proxy attendance.

Compensatory off (comp off) is a paid day of leave an employee earns by working on a designated weekly off, national holiday, or festival holiday. Instead of overtime pay, the employee banks an equivalent day off to take later. It is a common way Indian IT firms and agencies balance project deadlines with rest entitlements.

The cost rate is what one hour of a person's time costs the business — salary plus overheads spread over working hours. The bill rate is what a client is charged for that hour. The ratio between them, the multiplier, is where a services firm's entire economics lives: rent, bench, sales, management and profit all have to fit inside it.

The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (DPDP Act) is India's data-protection law governing how organisations collect, use, and store personal data, including employee and HR data. It requires a lawful purpose, appropriate notice and consent where applicable, and safeguards against misuse. Attendance systems fall squarely within its scope because they process personal information.

Effective hourly rate is the money actually collected from a client or period divided by every hour worked to earn it, including non-billable time. It is the truest measure of what work earns: a studio quoting ₹1,800 an hour that collects ₹3,00,000 for 220 hours of total effort has an effective rate of about ₹1,363.

Field or remote attendance is the recording of presence for employees who work away from a fixed office, such as remote developers, consultants at client sites, or field staff. It replaces the office door or biometric reader with a software-based way to log a verified work session. The goal is trustworthy presence data without a physical device.

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.

Leave encashment is the conversion of unused earned leave into money, computed in India almost universally as monthly basic pay plus dearness allowance divided by 30, multiplied by the days encashed. It arises annually when balances above the carry-forward cap would lapse, and at exit when the accumulated balance is settled in the full and final.

Leave Without Pay (LWP) is approved leave that the employee takes when they have no paid leave balance, so the day is unpaid but authorised. Loss of Pay (LOP) is the resulting salary deduction for any unpaid day, whether authorised or not. In practice LWP is the leave type and LOP is the payroll effect, and many organisations use the terms loosely.

Loss of Pay (LOP) is a deduction from an employee's salary for days they were absent from work without any available paid leave to cover the absence. The day is treated as unpaid, and the per-day salary is subtracted from that month's earnings. LOP is calculated from attendance data at the end of each pay cycle.

A manager approval workflow is the defined path by which attendance, leave, or time entries are reviewed and approved by the right manager before they become official. It turns self-reported data into an authoritative record. Approvals create accountability and an audit trail for payroll and billing.

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.

Overtime (OT) is the additional compensation owed when an employee works beyond the normal daily or weekly hours set by law or contract. In India, statutory overtime is generally paid at a premium rate, commonly twice the ordinary wage for covered workers. Accurate hour tracking is essential to calculate it correctly.

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.

A probation period is the initial phase of employment during which an employer assesses whether a new hire is suitable for the role before confirming them. It usually carries lighter notice terms and sometimes different leave or benefit rules. On successful completion, the employee is confirmed.

Project margin is what remains of an engagement's revenue after the cost of delivering it — primarily the hours consumed, priced at each contributor's cost rate. A ₹6 lakh project that consumes 320 hours at a ₹900 blended cost rate has a delivery cost of ₹2.88 lakh and a gross margin of 52%.

Realisation rate is the percentage of hours worked on client engagements that is actually invoiced to the client. It is calculated as hours billed divided by hours worked. A firm that works 120 hours for a client but invoices 102 has an 85% realisation rate — the other 18 hours were written off before the invoice went out.

Retainer burn is the rate at which a client consumes the hours their monthly retainer purchases. A client on a 40-hour retainer who has used 34 hours by the 20th is at 85% burn with a third of the month remaining. Burn tracking is what makes a retainer a managed product rather than an all-you-can-eat subscription.

Revenue leakage is value the firm earned but never invoiced: hours worked and not recorded, recorded and written off, covered by scope the contract never priced, or billed at rates that were never escalated. Unlike a lost deal, leakage is invisible — the work happened, the cost was paid in salaries, and the revenue simply failed to appear.

Sandwich leave is a policy rule under which non-working days that fall between two leave days are themselves counted as leave. An employee taking Friday and Monday off under a sandwich rule is debited four days — the weekend is 'sandwiched' into the leave count — instead of two.

Scope creep is the gradual expansion of what a project delivers without a matching change in its price or timeline. Each addition is small — one more revision, a extra report, a 'quick' integration — and none triggers a renegotiation. The scope grows; the fee does not; the margin absorbs the difference.

Session-based tracking records attendance as discrete work sessions, each with a start, an end, and a project, rather than a single daily clock-in and clock-out. A day can contain several sessions across different projects, breaks, or locations. This produces a far richer and more accurate picture of how time was actually spent.

A shift roster is a schedule that assigns employees to specific shifts and working days over a period, such as a week or month. It ensures coverage for support, operations, or client time zones while distributing night and weekend duty fairly. The roster is the baseline that actual attendance is compared against.

Time theft is receiving pay for time not actually worked: attendance marked by a colleague, padded timesheet entries, long unrecorded breaks, or hours billed to a client that nobody worked. The term is broad, and its breadth is part of the problem — it is routinely stretched to cover any minute an employer cannot account for.

A timesheet is a record of how an employee's working time was distributed across tasks, projects, or clients over a period. It underpins billing, payroll, and productivity analysis in services businesses. Timesheets can be filled manually or generated from tracked work sessions.

Utilisation rate is the percentage of an employee's available working time that is spent on billable client work. It is a core efficiency and profitability metric for IT services firms and agencies. A higher utilisation generally means more of your paid capacity is generating revenue.

In a services business, work in progress (WIP) is the value of work performed but not yet invoiced — hours recorded against engagements, waiting for billing review, milestone completion or the month-end cycle. WIP is earned revenue in limbo: real cost has been incurred, no cash has been requested.

A write-off is recorded work removed or reduced before invoicing — hours the team spent that the client is never asked to pay for. Write-offs happen at billing review, when a partner or account lead trims entries that overran the estimate, look indefensible, or would trigger an awkward conversation. The difference between hours worked and hours billed is the firm's realisation gap.