Attendance for small Indian teams: the records the law expects you to keep

Attendance is the first thing a growing firm tries to run on a spreadsheet, and the first thing that breaks. It works while it is just you; it stops the day a second person is on site, someone is on leave, and month-end arrives with a column full of guesses. It also happens to be something the law has an opinion about.

The registers you are actually expected to keep

Under most state Shops & Establishments Acts, an employer maintains a muster roll (attendance), a wage register and a leave-with-wages register — often combined into a single prescribed form, and preserved for a period the rules specify. The Code on Wages carries the wage-register duty with no headcount exemption for an ordinary business. In other words, "a shared sheet nobody signs" is not just fragile; it usually is not the record the law expects.

What a small team actually needs

Not much: a daily check-in the team can do from their phones, leave balances that update themselves, a month view you can read at a glance, and an export you can hand to whoever runs payroll. Anything heavier is built for a company ten times your size.

Check-in that surfaces itself

The point of a check-in is not surveillance — it is that late and absent surface on their own, instead of a manager pinging people to find out who is in. When check-in is one tap and the day’s picture is visible to whoever needs it, chasing disappears.

Leave, and the new 180-day rule

Leave should be a request and an approval in one place, with the balance doing the maths. Worth knowing: under the OSH Code, the qualifying period for annual leave was cut from 240 to 180 days worked in the year, accruing at one day per twenty worked. When leave lives in the same system as attendance, the month view is already correct — and month-end becomes an export, not an argument. See how firms in your industry use it.