Attendance problems: late arrivals, missing records, and leave clashes

What stands out in the table is that none of the problems come from the device. The card reader records the right time; the information that explains what that time means lives somewhere else. These problems also have something else in common: they all surface at once at month end. On payroll day the late-arrival argument, the missing-record corrections, and the leave clashes land on the same desk. HR tries to get payroll out on time while piecing together the story of past weeks.

Example scenario: Picture a technician at a lift maintenance firm in Ankara. In the morning they go straight to a fault in an apartment block and reach the office towards midday. The device records a late arrival. HR counts it as lateness; the technician says 'I was out on a job'. By month end nobody remembers who was right; the argument repeats every month, and trust wears a little thinner each time.

The same thing happens on building sites, in shops, and in sales teams. A representative at a branch opening, a project lead back from a customer meeting, or a fitter who stopped to collect materials in the morning is late as far as the device is concerned. The reason for each is written in another record: the visit, the task, or the vehicle record.

Nobody needs to collect explanations from the technician; the explanation shows up in records that already exist. If the visit record, the work order, and the vehicle's location sit next to the clock-in time, the manager reads the reason at a glance. The manager still makes the call, only now by reading the record rather than guessing.

One morning the device fails to read, someone leaves their card at home, someone else forgets to clock out. These are ordinary things. The problem is that it takes weeks for anyone to notice. On payroll day gaps appear in the file and everyone turns to memory; memory gets it wrong, and so does payroll.

In companies that run on paper timesheets the burden is heavier: the supervisor fills in the sheet, HR types it up again, accounting carries it into payroll. Each hand-over creates a new chance of error, and nobody can find out whose hands it happened in.

Missing records also have a leave side. When an employee is on leave, the device records nothing; if the leave was granted by message, HR takes the gap for an absence. When the leave request and the attendance record do not sit in the same place, a day of leave and a day of absence get mixed up at month end, and the correction falls to memory again.

The person who arrives early but does not finish their task sits beside the one who arrives late but closes the job, in the same table. The clock gets measured because it can be; the work stays out of the measure because it lives in another file. So employees stop trusting the table, and employee of the month becomes whoever comes to mind in the meeting.

Scoring has a timing problem as well. Employees do not know where they stand during the month; the table reaches them at month end, and the surprise turns into an argument. When the table is open throughout the period, people see where they stand and raise objections while events are still fresh.

A fair score reads attendance together with task and field records and ties the weighting to a rule everyone can see. How the score is built from the work itself is covered in our article on how a performance review stays fair.

The Board addressed this question directly in its principle decision No. 2026/921 of 29 April 2026. According to the decision, the legislation contains provisions on tracking working hours but no explicit provision requiring that tracking to be done with biometric data. Because of the power imbalance between employee and employer, the employee's consent on its own is not treated as a sufficient legal basis either. While less intrusive methods exist, the biometric method does not meet the principle of proportionality.

The Board also lists the alternatives: encrypted card or PIN-based systems, RFID or NFC identity cards, traditional signatures and paper attendance sheets, and manual entry under a supervisor. The full text of the public announcement is on the Personal Data Protection Authority website. This section is general information and does not replace legal advice; consult your legal adviser about your own workplace.

For a company using a fingerprint device, the attendance problem takes a new turn here. What moving to cards or PINs will change for the team, the day of the switch, and what happens to the biometric records already held are all part of the same conversation. If the device is changed without that conversation, the missing-record problem grows again in the week of the switch.

When the day closes, an unfinished shift is closed by the system and goes for approval with the employee's explanation; the manager approves or rejects it. Late arrivals, clock-outs away from the set location, and late departures also reach the approval centre with the employee's explanation and department. The manager reads the reason while the event is fresh, not at month end. Leave, advance, and travel expense requests go through the same approval flow, and the leave calendar sits in the Human Resources screens.

Team pulse turns events such as a late arrival, a completed task, a closed quote, and a customer's thanks into points; the manager writes the reward rule. Attendance data is personal data: in Corex360 it is processed under KVKK (the Turkish Personal Data Protection Law), access is role-based, and every opening and download is logged; the setup runs on Corex360 Cloud or on your own server.

Let us draw the line clearly. If the device often fails to read, the problem is the hardware; software asks about the missing record but does not repair the device. If the shift and overtime rules are not written down in the company, the software cannot know what to measure either; the rule has to be agreed first. We make no promise of payroll calculation, official filings, or compatibility with every device for Corex360.

The team itself is another subject to discuss before setup. Staff should be told plainly that clock-ins will be read together with location and which records the score will be built from, and this should also go into the privacy notice. A system set up without explanation breeds mistrust rather than fairness.

If you are still choosing a device, you can read about reader types and set-ups for different workplaces in how to choose a time and attendance system. How clock-ins, leave and overtime approval sit in one module in Corex360 is shown on the attendance software page. In the demo we talk through your own device records, your own field team, and your own payroll day, and show on screen how a late arrival turns into a visit.