Time & Attendance Management · Working Hours Records
Time & Attendance Management
What Is Time & Attendance Management?
- The basis for wage calculations and evidence in disputes
- Put the actual-hours recording principle ahead of the approval process
- Inaccurate records can work against you
The first thing that changes once you start keeping proper attendance records is not wage calculation but the nature of the conversation. Without records, 'You worked late that day' collides with 'I don’t remember that.' With records, there is one fact on the table, a 9:40 p.m. departure on March 14, and all that is left is how to calculate the pay. Moving disputes from a battle of memories to a calculation problem is the practical value of attendance management. Conversely, when an employer cannot produce any records of working hours, the weight of the dispute tips toward the employee’s claim.
Recording methods fall into four types, each with a different nature: gate badge taps, attendance system requests, PC on/off, and groupware or work-tool access logs. The first two show 'presence', and the last two show 'work'. The starting point of any design is that time on site is not the same as hours actually worked. Because company dinners, personal outings, and standby time get mixed in, the practical approach is to pick one source log and correct exceptions through requests. Even if you use selective or flexible working hours or deemed working hours, the duty to keep records does not go away. What changes is only that the unit you manage shifts from daily times to the total over the settlement period.
The wage ledger must list days worked, hours worked, and overtime, night, and holiday hours separately, and the employment contract, wage ledger, and related records must, as a rule, be retained for 3 years. Rounding is where companies most often get caught. Truncating a 6:47 p.m. clock-out to 6:30 p.m. shortchanges an employee by 17 minutes of pay every day, which can be treated as unpaid wages. Round only in the employee’s favor, and keep the original records down to the minute.
The most common misconception is 'We have a comprehensive wage contract, so we don’t need to record hours.' A comprehensive wage is only an agreement on how pay is calculated. It does not waive the duty to keep records or the limits on working hours, and without records the company has no way to rebut a claim that the agreed allowance falls short of actual overtime. The second is the approval requirement. If you block employees from logging overtime that has not been approved, records bulk-entered as on-time departures can later be read as signs of concealment. Recording actual hours worked first, and handling whether to pay and the recurring excess workload separately, is the only way to make the records work in the company’s favor. Detailed recording and retention requirements may be amended, so check the latest laws and regulations.
Inwoo LeeExpert in leadership, communication and performance management
Hwi KimCEO of HRDIST & Talent Development Systems ConsultantKorea’s Labor Standards Act requires employers to record working days, working hours, and similar details in the wage ledger and to retain the related documents. The importance of working-hours records has grown as regulation of working hours has tightened.
Company A is a food manufacturer with 180 employees. The plant runs two shifts, office staff work at headquarters, and attendance was entered in bulk in the ERP at month-end. When two former employees filed a complaint with the regional labor office over unpaid overtime, it came out that the only evidence the company could submit was a single table showing everyone at '09:00 to 18:00'. (Hypothetical example)
- The HR director printed the last three months of attendance data and sent it to the company’s labor attorney, who replied, 'This isn’t defense material. It actually works against you.'
- The factory now uses entry-gate tags and office staff use PC on/off logs as the source data, with manual ERP entry demoted to a backup. They reversed the approach so that the system records time, not people.
- When five production team leaders pushed back with 'Why log overtime that was never approved?', the CEO settled it: 'Recording is separate from payment. I will see everything that is logged.' Overtime was switched to after-the-fact approval.
- At the start of each month, an HR associate compared gate logs against attendance requests and pulled out only the cases that differed by 30 minutes or more. Of the 412 cases in the first month, 168 came from a single packaging line.
- Six months later, mismatches fell from 412 to 57. Two people were added to the packaging line, and average monthly overtime per person dropped from 38 hours to 21. A later complaint was closed in three weeks, with the gate logs submitted unedited.