Overview
Attendance data is only worth collecting if it survives the journey to the payslip. In most companies it does not: the fingerprint machine exports a file, someone opens it in a spreadsheet, someone else fixes the rows where a person forgot to scan out, and by the time a number reaches payroll it has been touched by three people and can no longer be defended.
Nama treats the punch as a document, the schedule as a master file, and the deduction as a calculation. Nothing is exported and nothing is re-typed.
First, what the day was supposed to be
A shift is the reusable weekly template — eight to four, Sunday to Thursday, with up to three start-and-end pairs a day so a split shift with a long midday break is just a shift. An attendance plan is the document that hands a shift to a range of employees for a period. Shifts are built once; plans are how they are assigned.
Three shift types cover what actually happens on the ground:
- Normal — one fixed weekly pattern.
- Automatic — several candidate windows, each with its own arrival range. The employee punches in and the system files the punch under the window it matches, so staff who might work either a morning or an evening turn are recognised rather than docked for arriving at the wrong time.
- Rotational — groups cycling through a rotation on a schedule, for operations that never stop.
Then, what actually happened
Punches arrive two ways. A time attendance document is a batch: it takes the machine’s exported file as an attachment and imports the lines using that machine’s own layout, with switches for the realities of imported data — drop stray rows outside the date range, skip codes that match no employee instead of failing the whole import, or let this batch coexist with punches already recorded elsewhere for the same people.
Electronic attendance is one employee checking in from the mobile app, with the GPS point captured at the moment of the punch and checked against an allowed zone. Check-in and check-out are geofenced independently, and each records how far it was from the zone it was measured against — which is the honest way to handle a site visit rather than a blanket refusal.
Both end in the same place: a per-employee, per-day record of in and out.
The exceptions that make the record true
The most common attendance problem is not fraud, it is a forgotten scan. Nama has explicit handling for punches that overlap or contradict each other, so a missing check-out is corrected as data rather than argued about as lateness.
Short absences get their own lightweight documents, because a two-hour errand is not a vacation. A leave permission records authorised time away — early leave, late arrival — and a mission document records time spent out of the office on company business. Neither posts to the ledger. Their entire job is to make sure a gap in the day is explained on the record instead of turning into an unexplained deduction.
And then it is money
Worked time, overtime, lateness and absence roll up per day and reach payroll through performance indicators: a daily indicator is factored per working day, a periodic one takes the month’s total. The rate, the rounding and the thresholds live in the salary formula, so an overtime policy is a configuration rather than a promise. Nobody exports anything, and the figure on the payslip can be traced back to the punch that produced it.
The machine import formats, the geofenced mobile flow, the overlap rules and the shift types are documented in the time and attendance section.
