Time and attendance is a human resource protocol designed to track actual employee hours and the leaves taken, in order to provide details to payroll. It is one of the largest categories for timesheet systems on the market and is a serious component of most payroll systems in manufacturing units, government, airports, border checkpoint, healthcare, retail, financial institutions, and educational organizations. Time and attendance helps to control time consuming in time tracking related processes. It is mainly used by companies which have more than hundreds or thousands of employees. It is used to simplify the workforce in the management of a company. Time and attendance provides a range of features including creation of comprehensive shift, rotation patterns, and pay schemes.

At the heart of time and attendance is a time tracking device. Different types of time and attendance equipment, systems, and software are available. In highly developed forms, devices can distinguish people simply by reading their fingerprint, hand or retinas. Time and attendance systems are designed to provide cost effective services in the areas of data collection, access control, job costs, and bell ringing. It offers all the features needed in the pay rules and the systems capture time, edits, assign costs, accounting details and reviews, and approves timesheet submissions to payroll.

Time and attendance automatically computes employee wages and time using the payroll policies of the company. In addition, it gives a clear management report that helps to control overpayment of employees and distribution of labor. By using this solution, job labor costs are forecasted and then compared to actual totals. Time and attendance helps to increase greater control over productivity by granting the accuracy needed in the business operations.

Most time and attendance packages offer schedule management that allows supervisors to maintain and create a schedule for each employee. Additionally, there are rules for scheduling the staff on the basis of overtime, holidays, absences, and break times. A number of companies choose software that allows staff to enter their flex-time hours, vacation time, sick days, and other information directly.