One office is easy. You can see who walked in. Add a second branch, a warehouse and a few people on client sites, and attendance quietly turns into a spreadsheet that someone at head office rebuilds every month from photos of registers, WhatsApp messages and machine exports.

This is a practical playbook for running attendance across many locations — from two branches to ten sites — with one live picture instead of ten inboxes.

Why multi-site attendance breaks

  • Every site does it differently. One uses a register, one a machine, one a group chat.
  • Data arrives late. Head office only sees attendance when someone sends it, usually at month-end.
  • Rules drift. Shift timings, grace periods and holidays differ by site, and the spreadsheet can't keep up.
  • Nobody owns corrections. A missed punch at a branch becomes an email thread instead of a fix.

Step 1: Model each location as a unit

Start by listing every place people work from: offices, branches, warehouses, stores. Each one becomes a unit with its own location and its own team. Employees belong to a unit, which decides where they can punch and which reports they appear in.

Departments sit across units — sales can exist in three branches — so you can slice reports by place or by function.

Step 2: Choose how each site punches

There's no single right answer. Match the method to the site:

  • Head office or factory with a fixed entrance: a biometric machine (fingerprint, face or card) at the door. Fast, and no phone needed.
  • Small branches and stores: geofenced mobile punching. No hardware to install, and the GPS check stops punches from outside.
  • Sales and field staff: field visits, where each customer meeting is logged with its location.

The important part is that all three land in the same system, so a punch from a machine in Ludhiana and a phone in Pune are graded by the same rules.

Step 3: Set the radius per site

For geofenced sites, pin each location carefully and choose a radius that fits the building — around 100–200 metres for a normal office, more for large campuses or places with weak indoor GPS. Getting this right on day one avoids most "it says I'm outside" complaints.

Step 4: One rulebook, applied everywhere

Define shift timings, a late grace period and day-length thresholds (what counts as a full, half or quarter day) once. Employees with unusual shifts can have their own weekly schedule. Holidays and week-offs are set centrally, so a festival holiday doesn't get marked absent at one branch and present at another.

Step 5: Look at today, not last month

The point of going digital is seeing attendance while you can still act on it. A live dashboard filtered by unit shows who has punched in, who's late and who's absent today. A branch manager can sort out a missed punch the same morning instead of head office discovering it four weeks later.

Step 6: Let managers handle their own people

Head office shouldn't approve every leave request in every branch. Give each branch manager permission to see their team and approve leave and regularisations, while keeping company-wide settings with the admin.

Step 7: Close the month by unit

At month-end, review the attendance report and payroll register one unit at a time, fix exceptions, then export. Because every site followed the same rules all month, there's nothing left to reconcile.

Doing this in Punchly

Punchly is built around units: each has its own map pin and radius, its own biometric devices, and its own slice of every dashboard and report. Plans are sized by the number of units, employees and devices, so you can start with one site and add branches as you grow. Read more about geofence attendance, biometric machines and field staff tracking.