Attendance and leave tracking for teams under 50: what we use, and what three dollars a person buys

Hashlogics is 34 people across 10 departments, most of them engineers in Lahore, and we track attendance on PeopleMuster, the HR and operations system we built for ourselves and now sell. Say it plainly: it's our product. It exists because we needed it before anyone else did.

Attendance has two paths. A ZKTeco fingerprint terminal sits on the office network, and PeopleMuster pulls new punches from it every 30 minutes on weekdays. Fingerprints stay on the terminal; the system receives only who punched and when. Anyone without a terminal can check in from a card on their dashboard once an admin switches it on. That card works inside a window around the person's assigned shift: it opens 60 minutes before the shift starts and closes 120 minutes after, by default. Miss the window and the check-in becomes a manual punch request that HR reviews, so a gap is a ticket rather than a blank cell.

Shifts are named windows, Morning 10:00 to 19:00 and Mid 12:00 to 21:00 in our case, assigned per person with a start date and a history of who assigned them. That's what turns "late" into a number. The attendance screen shows your on-time rate, late minutes per punch and hours short for the period, and it exports to CSV.

Leave is quota-based. We run seven leave types with annual allocations: Annual 10 days, Casual 5, Sick or Emergency 5, Marriage 5, Paternity or Maternity 3, Unpaid 0, and WFH 12. Work-from-home is a leave type on purpose, so a home day gets requested and approved like any other. Since we started, the system has logged 311 leave requests, and it held 473 attendance records for the month when we read the counts on 19 September 2026.

Each person closes the day with a daily recap: hours logged per project against an expected 40-hour week. Admins get an approvals queue and a logging window that limits how far back anyone can backfill. A scheduled Slack reminder goes out weekly for hours submission and monthly for attendance, so nobody has to chase.

Below about ten people, a sheet plus a group chat works, because one person sees every request and approves it from memory. The rules start to matter the day someone other than you approves leave, or the day a client asks who was on site last Thursday. Four of the six tools in the table have a free plan for a team that small; Clockify's stops at five users. Under ten people, pick one of those and keep your sheet as the export.

The same logic decides which kind of tool fits above ten. A team that schedules open shifts across locations is a rota problem, which is what Homebase's per-location pricing and Deputy's scheduling tiers are built around. If your team runs on client projects, you have a capacity problem instead. That's the shape PeopleMuster was built for: HR and delivery in one database, so your timesheets feed utilisation and approved leave comes straight out of the capacity plan.

For our 34 people, PeopleMuster is one bill at three dollars a person a month, and the bill covers every module. Attendance, shifts, leave, the daily recap, capacity planning, the SOP engine and the device register all sit on one database in our own account, in the region we chose. Sign-in is a one-time code to the work email, so there are no passwords to leak. The PeopleMuster pricing page states the number, the annual rate and the 14-day trial in the open, which is rarer in this category than it should be.

Where it stops is money. PeopleMuster turns hours into utilisation and leaves it there; pay runs stay with your accountant or payroll provider, and the system exports the hours and leave they're built from. If you want the same dated price check across more vendors, the PeopleMuster comparison pages hold them, and its free HR templates (a timesheet, a sick-leave letter, an offer letter) are the paper versions of what the system does.

Whichever tool you pick, the audit trail is the feature to test on the demo. We've argued before that audit trails are the feature nobody asks for until the day they need one, and attendance is where a team of 30 finds that out first.