What's the difference between attendance management and time tracking?
Attendance management records when someone was at work: check-in, check-out, lateness and absence against a shift. Time tracking records what those hours were spent on: which project, which client, billable or not. PeopleMuster keeps both in one database, so attendance shows who worked eight hours and timesheets show where those eight hours went.
Each one answers a different person on your team. Attendance is HR's question: was this person here, on time, for the full day? Time tracking is the delivery lead's question: how many hours went into this client this week, and does the plan still hold?
Mixing them gives bad numbers both ways. A clock-in time says nothing about the project. A timesheet showing 8 hours on Client A says nothing about whether the person arrived at ten or at noon. If your company runs client work, you need both, and you need them to agree.
In PeopleMuster, attendance comes from a ZKTeco fingerprint terminal or the browser check-in card. For every day you get working hours, late minutes and a status of Present, Absent, Partial or Leave. Your overview rolls those up into an on-time rate.
Your team logs time in the daily recap, by project. Each person sees logged hours against expected hours for the week, and managers work an approvals queue. A logging window sets how far back anyone can fill in a missed day.
Reading the two side by side is where the value is. Someone with 40 hours of attendance and 22 hours logged has a gap worth a question. Maybe it's meetings nobody logged, internal work, or a timesheet still in draft. You'd never see that gap with the records in two separate tools.
Utilisation comes from the time-tracking side: the share of expected hours logged to project work. Deltek's Clarity study of architecture and engineering firms, published 12 May 2026, put staff utilisation at just under 60%. Keep that yardstick in mind before you judge your own figure. PeopleMuster's utilisation report breaks the number down by project and department and posts it to Slack.
Related questions
Is a timesheet the same as an attendance record?
No. An attendance record holds a check-in and a check-out for a day. A timesheet splits the day's hours across projects and clients, and goes through its own approval before it counts.
Why do attendance hours and logged hours differ?
Because people rarely log every minute they're at work. A gap of a few hours a week is normal. A wider one points at unlogged meetings, internal work or a timesheet left unsubmitted.
Which one measures utilisation?
Time tracking. Utilisation is logged project hours divided by expected hours. A person with 32 project hours in a 40-hour week sits at 80%, whatever their attendance shows.