Attendance management that payroll can trust

Excel and manual process vs PeopleVio

How geofenced attendance works

A geofence is a circle drawn around a location — your office, store or site — with a radius you choose. In PeopleVio, admins add one or more office locations with a radius. When locations are set up, an employee can only check in or out when the location reported by their phone's browser falls inside one of them.

The check is done on the server, not just in the app, so it can't be bypassed by editing the page. Because PeopleVio runs in the browser, there's nothing for employees to install: they open the portal on their phone, allow location access and tap check in. The status card then shows whether they're present or late, and how long they've been working.

Geofencing applies across the company once locations are configured, so if you have fully remote staff as well as office staff, talk to us about the best setup in a demo.

Biometric machine integration

Many Indian companies already have biometric attendance machines on the wall. PeopleVio works with them rather than replacing them. Machines that use the ZKTeco protocol — including ZKTeco, eSSL, Realtime and Mantra models — can push each punch to PeopleVio as it happens through their Cloud Server (ADMS) setting.

Machines that can't push can send punches through an API, and punch logs can be imported as a CSV file. Each punch is matched to an employee by machine ID, employee code or email, and becomes an attendance record — with the same late and half-day rules as an app check-in. Payroll then uses those records directly, with no export from the machine software.

• Live push through Cloud Server (ADMS) for ZKTeco-protocol machines
• API option for machines on a local network that can't push
• CSV import of punch logs
• Matching by machine ID, employee code or email

Late marks and half-days: an example

Say your office opens at 9:30 AM, with a 15-minute grace period and a monthly allowance of 3 late marks. An employee who checks in at 9:44 is on time. At 9:50, they're marked late.

The first three late check-ins in the month stay as late marks. From the fourth, each late check-in is marked a half-day automatically — whether it came from the app or a biometric machine. Employees see this on their calendar the same day, not as a surprise on their payslip. If a late mark was genuinely for official work, the employee raises a correction request and the day changes once an admin approves it. Set the allowance to 0 to keep late marks without any half-day penalty.

From attendance to payroll

Attendance only matters if payroll uses it correctly. PeopleVio's payroll reads absent days and half-days directly from attendance records and prorates salary for them. Approved leave, holidays, weekly offs and redeemed comp offs are never treated as loss of pay.

There's also an optional auto-absent rule for companies that want it: when switched on, a past working day with no attendance record at all counts as unpaid. It's off by default, so it never changes anyone's pay until an admin turns it on. For reporting, the hours report shows total hours worked per employee for any date range and exports to CSV.

Geofence or biometric: which should you use?

Both methods feed the same attendance record, so the choice depends on how your people work rather than on the software.

Geofenced check-in suits offices, shops, clinics and sites where employees have smartphones. It costs nothing in hardware, works on the phones employees already have, and makes it easy to add a new location — just draw another geofence. Biometric machines suit factories, warehouses and large offices where many people arrive at once, where shared devices are already installed, or where employees don't all have smartphones.

Many companies use both: biometric at the main plant, geofenced check-in at branch offices or for supervisors who move between sites. Because the same late rules, half-day logic and payroll apply to every punch, it doesn't matter which method an employee used on a given day.

Attendance rules that reduce disputes

Most attendance disputes come from unclear rules applied by hand. A few choices, written into your attendance policy and set in PeopleVio, prevent most of them.

• Set a clear grace period — 10 to 15 minutes is common in offices
• Allow a few late marks a month before any half-day, so occasional traffic isn't penalised
• Use correction requests for genuine misses, with a reason and admin approval
• Let employees see their own calendar every day, not just on payday
• Apply the same rules to managers and staff
• Decide whether the auto-absent rule fits your workplace before switching it on

Attendance for multi-location and field teams

Companies with several offices, stores or sites usually struggle to see attendance in one place: each location keeps its own register or machine report, and HR stitches them together at month-end. In PeopleVio, every location feeds the same record. You can add a geofence for each office and connect biometric machines at the larger sites, and the admin team grid shows the whole company's attendance for the month in one view.

For field teams — sales, service, delivery and supervisors who visit sites — geofenced check-in works at any location you've added, from the employee's own phone. Employees and managers see the same calendar, so questions about a particular day are settled by looking at the record rather than by memory.

Because the rules are company-wide, an employee who moves between offices is treated exactly the same way at each one, and payroll doesn't need to know which location a punch came from.

Attendance management software price in India

PeopleVio is priced per active employee per month, starting at ₹59 on monthly billing or ₹49 billed annually, with lower rates for larger teams. Here's what a typical team pays each month:

Prices exclude GST. See the pricing page for every tier.