Zoho People Attendance and Shifts: Capture, Overtime and Payroll

Which attendance capture options does Zoho People offer?

Zoho People supports several capture methods, and most companies use two or three together. Employees can check in from the web or the mobile app. Zoho says it can capture an employee's face through the web or mobile app and verify it with AI, and its People Kiosk matches a captured photo against the employee's profile picture on a shared device. For offices with hardware, Zoho People integrates with biometric attendance systems; its help lists an FTP plugin for attendance and a biometric ID mapping screen that links device IDs to employee profiles.

Restrictions sit in attendance permissions, where Zoho's help lists IP and geo restrictions. Use IP restrictions for office-only staff and location restrictions for field teams who must check in at a site.

Pick methods by worker group, not by site. A Chennai office might use biometric devices at the door and web check-in for hybrid days, while sales staff in Dubai use the mobile app with location limits. Zoho's attendance settings also let you choose strict or lenient policies, set grace through round-off buffers and define breaks, so write the rules down in one page before you configure them.

How do shifts and rotations work?

Shifts in Zoho People define working hours, weekends, breaks, shift-based holidays and shift allowances, and you can build rosters by department, designation and location. Zoho's help says the Shifts service is included in all subscriptions, turns on with any time and attendance service, and can work even if the Attendance service is disabled.

Shift rotation moves people between shifts on a schedule. Zoho's help lists daily, weekly, bi-weekly and monthly frequencies, applied by role, department, designation, location or individual. Each run checks the employee's current shift and moves them to the next one in the mapping, then emails them the change and its effective date. Employees and managers can also raise shift change requests.

Use shift-based holidays and weekends for teams that do not follow the office calendar, such as a support desk covering US hours from India. Zoho's holiday help lets you apply a holiday to specific shifts rather than whole locations, which avoids marking a night-shift team absent on a day they were meant to work.

How does Zoho People flag overtime?

Overtime is tracked through overtime policies under the attendance configuration. Zoho's help says a policy can apply by work location, department, division or employment type, and sets limits for daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly overtime, plus weekend and holiday overtime. Daily overtime counts only hours worked beyond expected hours, up to the maximum you set.

Alerts can fire when someone exceeds a monthly or yearly limit, or when rolling averages run high. You can allow post overtime, submitted after the work, and optionally pre overtime, requested in advance, with approvals. Two cautions from Zoho's help: overtime policies do not change attendance status, and deleting a policy permanently removes its overtime data. Agree your overtime rules in writing and confirm pay obligations with your HR or legal adviser before you configure them.

How does attendance regularisation work?

Regularisation lets employees fix missing or wrong entries, such as a forgotten check-in or a device failure, through a request. Zoho's help shows the controls you need to stop it becoming a loophole.

1. 1Limit how far back requests can go, for example seven days from the attendance date.
2. 2Cap how many days can be regularised in a period, such as one per week.
3. 3Require a reason from a predefined list, a description and proof where needed.
4. 4Turn on approvals so records change only after a manager approves.
5. 5Choose whether a request adds a new entry or replaces the first check-in and last check-out.

Review the regularisation report monthly. A cluster of requests from one site usually points to a device or network problem, not a people problem.

How does attendance reach payroll?

In India and GCC countries, Zoho People can feed Zoho Payroll directly. Zoho's help says the integration is currently available only in India and the GCC (UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman and Qatar). Employee profiles and work locations sync from Zoho People, and loss-of-pay data from attendance and leave is pushed into the pay run. The sync is one-way, employees must be on a monthly pay period, and the Zoho People processing day must fall on or before payday.

There are setup traps. Zoho's help says the Leave and Attendance module in Zoho Payroll must be disabled first and cannot be re-enabled, and once employee sync is on, you add employees only in Zoho People. Read our answer on whether Zoho Payroll works for India before you connect them. Elsewhere, export attendance and overtime reports to your payroll provider.

When should you use Zoho Shifts instead?

Choose Zoho Shifts when scheduling hourly staff is the main job, as in restaurants, retail, healthcare or assisted living. It is a separate app focused on building schedules, time clocks and timesheets, with team messaging and web, Android and iOS access.

Zoho's Shifts updates describe features hourly operations care about: daily overtime rules for specific weekdays, shift differentials for night, holiday and weekend work, geofencing that can be overridden per schedule or site, a kiosk app, restrictions on early and late clock-ins with auto clock-out, and pay periods you can finalise to lock timesheets. Zoho's help says payroll exports as CSV or XLSX, covering regular time, overtime, double overtime, PTO and pay. If most of your staff are salaried and you need leave, onboarding and appraisals, stay in Zoho People.

How can Flowpeak help with attendance and shifts?

We configure capture methods, shift rosters, overtime and regularisation rules, and the payroll link, then test them with a pilot group before go-live. Work is fixed price in writing and paid by milestone, with 30 days of free fixes. See Zoho People implementation or Zoho Shifts implementation.

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