Attendance
What the Attendance module records, how it differs from Time tracking, and when a workspace needs it
Attendance answers one question: was this person present, when, and under what break rules? It records clock-in, breaks, and clock-out as timestamped punches.
That is a different question from the one Time tracking answers, which is what did this person work on? The two modules are independent. You can turn either on without the other, and turning one off never touches the other's data.
Which module do you need?
| Attendance | Time tracking | |
|---|---|---|
| Records | Presence: in, break, out | Hours against a project work item |
| Primary screen | Clock | My week |
| Typical user | Hourly, on-site, shift-based staff | Project teams billing or costing work |
| Projects | Never asked for | Required for every entry |
A software house that bills by project usually needs only Time tracking. A shop, clinic, warehouse or field team usually needs only Attendance. Some workspaces run both — see Reconciling with project time below.
Turn Attendance on under Admin → Workspace → Modules. Hiding a module never deletes its data; re-enabling restores everything exactly as it was.
What gets recorded
Every clock action writes an immutable punch. Punches are never edited or deleted, even by an admin. A correction adds new records that explain the change and leaves the originals in place, so the history always shows both what was recorded and what was later decided. Erasing a departed person is the single exception, and it scrubs the free text on their punches rather than the instants.
Alongside the punch ledger, SquadBear keeps a shift for each work session with the worked and break totals already calculated. That is what the screens and the API read, so opening your history does not replay months of raw punches.
Expected time
A day's expected time comes from the person's work schedule, minus any approved leave for that date. A public holiday sets expected time to zero.
If someone has no explicit work schedule, expected time shows Not set and no short-day exceptions are raised for them. SquadBear will not invent an eight-hour day to fill the gap, because a fabricated expectation produces fabricated compliance problems. Set a schedule under Work schedules to get expected hours.
Because work schedules define daily durations and working days but not start and end instants, Attendance can tell you someone worked less than expected. It cannot tell you they were late. Lateness needs a planned start time, which the schedule model does not yet have, so no screen claims it.
Reconciling with project time
When both modules are on, My week shows a compact Attendance strip, one line per day you were present:
Attendance 8h 12m · Logged 6h 30m · 1h 42m unallocated
A difference is context, not an error. Some presence is genuinely non-project work. The strip reports the gap and nothing more: it writes no time entry, and no button on it turns unallocated presence into one. You log whatever belongs to a project yourself, in the week grid underneath. Clocking out never creates, overwrites, or approves project time on your behalf.
What Attendance is not
Attendance is operational, not payroll. It does not calculate pay, overtime entitlement, or regulatory compliance, and it does not claim to. There is deliberately no shift rota, no automatic break deduction, no pay period locking, and no kiosk, QR, GPS, photo, or biometric capture.
Next
- Using the clock — the day-to-day employee flow.
- Attendance review — the manager queue and corrections.