What is time and attendance? How clock-in data reaches leave and payroll

A biometric reader is considered disproportionate for tracking working hours under a Personal Data Protection Board decision; when choosing a reader, cards, PINs, or phone clock-in come first. Each of these parts can come from a different vendor. The device at the door is from one company, the software that reads it from another, and the payroll program from yet another. Problems usually appear in the gaps between the parts.

In a small office these parts may be no more than a card reader and an Excel file. In a plant running shifts, the work calendar is a job in itself; shift changes, weekend work, and public holidays are each defined separately.

Example scenario: Picture a factory in Gebze running shifts. An operator on the night shift clocks out before dawn. The record falls on the next day. If the calendar does not know the shift, this person looks as if they never left one day and never arrived the next.

The same happens on a day of leave, an off-site assignment, or a training day. The device sees only who passes the door; it does not know why someone did not. Other records tell the reason: the leave request, the assignment, the shift plan. At the Gebze plant, the person who interprets the raw record is usually the shift supervisor. The supervisor knows who works on which line; the system does not. Until what the supervisor knows is written into the calendar, the same corrections are made by hand every month.

In most companies leave runs separately: a form, an email, sometimes a WhatsApp message. The attendance system sees nobody that day and records an absence. At month end HR puts the two lists side by side and fixes them by hand. The person making the fix is usually not the one who approved the leave, so later nobody knows why a given day was changed.

In Corex360 a leave request goes through an approval flow in the HR module, and the approval is logged with who gave it and when. The attendance device is tied to the same core, so clock-in records land on the same staff card.

When leave and attendance meet, the manager's job gets easier too. Looking at who has not arrived in the morning, they see in the same list who is on leave and who is on an off-site assignment; whatever gap remains is a record that really needs an explanation.

A payroll calculation is more than a sum of hours. Overtime has to be approved, the type of leave has to be known, advances have to be deducted. If this information sits in different places, payroll day turns into a day of stitching lists together.

At the Gebze plant, payroll day goes like this: the attendance export is pulled, compared with the leave list, overtime approvals are gathered from emails, and advances are added from a separate spreadsheet. Every step is a copy, and every copy is a chance for error. The mistake is noticed not in payroll but in the wage that reaches the employee's account, and that is where it hurts trust.

The software that carries this flow is usually sold as a time and attendance program, but the deciding question is how well it talks to payroll, not to the device at the door. In Corex360 clock-in records land on the staff card. We covered day-to-day issues such as missing records and late clock-ins separately in common time and attendance problems.

In its principle decision 2026/921 of 29 April 2026, the Personal Data Protection Board stated that processing biometric data to track working hours does not meet the principle of proportionality, even with the employee's explicit consent. The Board points to less intrusive methods such as a card, a PIN, an RFID or NFC ID card, and a signature sheet. Choose your clock-in method in light of this decision together with your legal adviser.

Retention is a decision too. How long attendance records are kept, what happens to them when an employee leaves, who can see the backups; the answers should be written down before the system is set up. An answer given afterwards usually comes after a complaint.

In Corex360 access to attendance and payroll data is role-based and logged, and personal data is processed under KVKK (Turkey's personal data protection law). If corporate policy does not allow the cloud, the installation runs on your own server. Detailed HR and attendance questions are answered separately in the site's FAQ section.

The choice turns on compatibility with the existing device, shift rules, how early a missing record is caught, and access to personal data; in Corex360 the attendance device connects to the core and clock-ins build up on the employee's card. You can read about reader types, KVKK (Turkish data protection) notes, and setups per workplace in the time and attendance buying guide.

The attendance device connects to the Corex360 core, and the clock-in and clock-out record lands on the employee card. A leave request passes through the approval flow in the HR module; the approval is recorded with who gave it and when, and approved leave sits on the same card as the attendance record. Access to attendance and payroll data is role-based and logged; if your corporate policy does not allow the cloud, the system is installed on your own server.

The events that come up for approval are a shift not ended that the system closed at the shift time, a late clock-in, a clock-out away from the location, and a late clock-out, that is, overtime. The record shows the employee's explanation and department. Under the PDKS heading there are screens for shift management, overtime tracking, attendance tracking, timesheets and the leave calendar. Salary calculation and official filings are not promised.