How do I track attendance and late arrivals automatically?
Late arrivals track themselves once each person has an assigned shift and every clock-in records the real time. PeopleMuster measures each check-in, from a ZKTeco fingerprint terminal or the browser check-in card, against that person's own shift, and writes the gap as late minutes beside an on-time rate for the period.
Most late-arrival tracking fails at the first step. You can't call anyone late until you've said when they were due, and one company-wide start time is wrong for anyone on a later shift. Picture a Morning shift at 10:00 and a Mid shift at 12:00. Judged against ten o'clock, every noon starter looks two hours late.
So fix the yardstick first. In PeopleMuster, shifts are named time windows assigned to each person with a start date, and an assignment history keeps every change. When somebody moves from Morning to Mid, you can see which shift applied on any given day.
Punches then arrive on their own, by one of two paths. A ZKTeco fingerprint terminal on the office network is read every 30 minutes on weekdays, and the attendance header shows when it last synced. Your browser check-in card, once an administrator switches it on, writes the time the moment an employee presses it. Both land in one attendance table.
From there nobody does arithmetic. Each row carries User, Date, Status, Check In, Check Out, Working Hours and Late Minutes. On-time rate sits at the top of the overview, with the count of late arrivals behind it. A filter called Late Arrivals Only cuts the table down to the days worth reading.
Read the trend rather than the single morning. One late day is a missed train. A person whose on-time rate slides across two months is telling you something a short conversation can fix while it's still small. Export the table to CSV when you want the numbers in front of you in a one-to-one.
Write the rule before the first report goes out. Decide how many minutes of grace your policy allows, if any, and put it in the attendance policy your team can read. Otherwise your first argument is about the rule, and the data never gets discussed.
Related questions
Can I see only the days someone arrived late?
Yes. The Late Arrivals Only filter on the attendance management screen narrows the table to late days. Combine it with user, department and period filters to read one person or one team.
Does late tracking need a fingerprint machine?
No. The browser check-in card records the same Late Minutes against the same assigned shift as a terminal does. You can run either path, or both side by side, and the reports read identically.
How often do terminal punches update in the report?
Every 30 minutes on weekdays. PeopleMuster pulls new punches from the ZKTeco terminal over TCP port 4370. A Last synced time on the attendance screen tells you how fresh the figures are.