Employee attendance management software is the phrase a small employer types after the third argument about points. The word management is doing real work in it: the buyer is not asking for a clock, they are asking for the events to be managed against a policy so that the same tardy scores the same half point on every shift, every lead and every month, and the total is visible before the threshold is crossed rather than discovered at the termination. This page says what that software has to manage, what it must compute from the employer's own policy numbers, and which of it the free tools on this site already do with no account.
The four things it manages, and the link between them
Employees, shifts, events and write-ups, each linked to the next. An employee has shifts; a shift has an event or none; an event has the points the policy assigned on that date; a write-up cites the events it rests on and the policy paragraph that set the threshold. Break any link and the record becomes a set of lists: a roster, a calendar, a points spreadsheet and a folder of letters, which is the state most small employers are in when they search for this. Software that manages attendance is software where one employee's screen shows all four together, and where deleting a shift takes its event and its points with it rather than leaving orphaned points in the window.
What it must compute without being asked
From the policy's five numbers it must compute the points in the rolling window on any date, the room left under the threshold, the date the oldest points age out, and the attendance and on-time rates for the crew and for each person. On this site's worked example (1 point per unexcused absence, 0.5 per tardy, 2 per no-call, threshold 8, 12-month window), an employee with two absences, four tardies and one no-call carries 6 points, has 2 points of room, and drops to 5 points on the day the oldest absence leaves the window. The attendance points calculator does that on the page; the tracker template does the rates. Management software that only lists events has left the arithmetic to the person who is about to be wrong about it.
Where management ends and scheduling, payroll or the clock begin
A small employer is offered this software inside a suite: the rota, the clock-in app, payroll export and an HR file, priced per user. Those are adjacent products for adjacent jobs, and each has its own buyer. Employee attendance management software starts when the shift was scheduled and ends when the write-up is filed; the rota that scheduled it and the payroll that paid it are upstream and downstream. Buying the suite to get the middle is a decision about the whole crew's monthly bill, and the attendance management system guide on this site works that arithmetic against the flat crew price of RollCallWorks Pro.
The exceptions it has to hold at zero
Some absences must be recorded and scored at nothing, and the software has to hold them that way with the reason attached. Leave protected by the FMLA, absences that are a reasonable accommodation under the ADA and service absences under USERRA are the ones a crew meets most; the Department of Labor's and the EEOC's pages linked below describe each. Software that manages attendance shows an excused event in the record, in the window, at zero points, so the write-up that follows the next unexcused one can show the exception was honoured. Software that hides excused events cannot prove it.
Questions people ask about employee attendance management software
What does employee attendance management software do that a spreadsheet does not?
It keeps the link between the employee, the shift, the event and the points, applies the policy's numbers to every event the same way, and shows the total in the rolling window and the room under the threshold without anyone re-adding a column. The spreadsheet does the arithmetic once, by whoever is holding it that day.
Can I run attendance management without a time clock?
Yes. The capture is the shift lead's roll call at the start of the shift; the software scores what the roll call recorded against the policy. The tracker template on this site does that from scheduled and missed shifts with no hardware.
How is RollCallWorks Pro priced compared with a suite?
The suites charge per user per month: Deputy Lite is $5, Core is $6.50 and Pro is $9 per user per month in USD. RollCallWorks Pro is $6.50 per month for the whole crew, flat, and keeps employees, shifts, points in the window and write-ups against the person.