Attendance without a smartphone
Half your crew has no phone. That should not put you back on paper.
One supervisor marks their whole crew in and out. Scoped to the workers they are responsible for, stamped with their name, and blocked from marking themselves.
Sound familiar?
- The masons and helpers on site do not own smartphones, and never will
- Every attendance app you have looked at assumes one app per worker
- So the site runs on a paper register, filled in at the end of the week from memory
- You have no idea who wrote which line, or when they wrote it
- The register reaches the office days later, and payroll waits for it
What one supervisor with one phone can do
One phone, whole crew
The supervisor opens their roster and marks each worker in or out. The workers need no phone, no app and no account.
Permission, not seniority
Only the owner and roles you have explicitly granted it can mark for others. It is off by default for every role that already exists.
Only their own crew
A supervisor sees the workers inside their role scope of departments and locations. Nobody can mark a crew they do not run.
Cannot mark yourself
Self-marking through this route is refused outright. It is the obvious hole, so it is closed in the same check as everything else.
Names on every entry
Each record stores who marked the check-in and who marked the check-out. Supervised days are visibly supervised, not disguised as self check-ins.
Same payroll, same reports
These days flow into the same attendance record, the same overtime rules and the same payroll run as everybody else. No parallel system.
How do I record attendance for workers who have no phone, without buying a biometric machine?
One supervisor marks the whole crew in and out from a single phone in Shiftelio. The workers need no phone, no app and no account of their own, and you need no terminal on a wall, because the record is created here rather than pulled off a device. Those days land in the same attendance record, the same overtime rules and the same payroll run as the staff who check themselves in.
A feature like that has to be built defensively, or not at all.
Letting one person record attendance for another is, on the face of it, exactly the thing attendance software exists to prevent. Build it carelessly and you have handed every supervisor the ability to pay their friends for days nobody worked.
So it is not a button that trusts whoever presses it. Four things are checked in order before any record is written, and every one of them happens on the server, where the app cannot talk its way around them.
First, that the request comes from somebody signed in. Second, that they are either the business owner or hold a role you have explicitly given the mark-for-others permission to. Granting it is a deliberate act; no existing role picks it up automatically when the feature ships. Third, that the worker being marked falls inside that person scope. Roles carry departments and locations, and a supervisor outside that scope is refused, so the Pune site cannot touch the Nagpur crew. Fourth, that they are not marking themselves, which is refused whoever they are.
Only then does the record get written, and it gets written differently from an ordinary punch. It carries the identity of the person who marked the check-in, the person who marked the check-out, and a status you can review. You can see at a glance which days on a timesheet were supervised and by whom.
The time comes from our servers, not from anybody phone. The supervisor is online by definition at the moment they mark, so there is no reason to trust a device clock, and the absent worker own last-seen time is not permitted to shift the record either.
The result is not a loophole in your attendance system. It is a muster roll that knows who filled it in.
If you already own a ZKTeco machine
We do not connect to your terminal
Where a ZKTeco terminal is the right answer, and we are not
A fingerprint or face terminal at a door is a genuinely good machine for one shape of business: a single fixed site where every single person walks past that one door at the start and end of their shift. A factory gate. One office floor. A workshop with one entrance. If that is you, and the machine is already bought, already mounted and already working, buying a subscription to replace it is money spent on a problem you do not have. Keep it. A finger on a sensor at a gate everybody uses is fast, it needs nothing from the worker, and it does not care whether they own a phone.
The same goes for staff who carry no phone at all and never leave the premises. A terminal asks nothing of them. That is the strongest thing about it and it is why it has sold in the numbers it has.
Where the machine stops working, and this does not
A terminal can only record the people who walk up to it. That single sentence is the whole argument. The moment your workforce stops passing one door, the machine stops being an attendance system and becomes an attendance system for head office only.
| Situation | ZKTeco terminal plus its PC software | Shiftelio |
|---|---|---|
| One fixed site, everybody walks past one door | Well suited. Buy the machine. | Works, but you are paying for reach you do not need |
| Field staff, site crews, home visits | Not recorded at all unless they come to the office first | Recorded where the work happens, with GPS and a selfie |
| Several branches | A machine per branch, each with its own install and its own log | One account, per-site geofences, no hardware per location |
| Workers with no smartphone | Handled well, the terminal is the point | Handled by a supervisor marking the crew from one phone, as described above |
| Where the attendance record lives | Typically a database on the one Windows PC the software was installed on | A hosted database you open from any phone or browser |
| Getting from attendance to a salary sheet | Export to Excel, then work out hours, overtime and deductions by hand | Attendance feeds payroll in the same system, no export step in between |
| When it breaks | An AMC, a service call and a technician visit to the site | Nothing to visit. A phone that broke is replaced by any other phone |
| What you pay | Hardware up front per door, plus installation, plus an annual maintenance contract | A subscription starting at 999 rupees a year, with GPS included on every plan |
The Excel step nobody mentions in the brochure
The part owners underestimate is not the machine, it is the gap after it. The terminal gives you punches. The bundled software gives you a report. Somebody then opens that report in Excel and turns it into hours, late marks, overtime, half days, leave adjustments and finally a salary figure. That person is usually you, on a Sunday, at month end, and every mistake in the salary run enters at that step rather than at the sensor. Here the attendance record and the payroll run are the same record, so there is no export and no retyping.
What a terminal costs, stated as a range
We do not sell terminals, so we do not quote a model. Commonly seen figures for a fingerprint terminal run from roughly 5,000 to 30,000 rupees depending on the model and whether face recognition is included, and that is the box only. It excludes installation and wiring, and it excludes the annual maintenance contract, which is the line that keeps recurring. Treat those numbers as the range people report rather than as a quote from us, and get a real one from a dealer before you compare anything.
If you decide to replace it
Questions site owners ask
How do I record attendance for workers who have no smartphone?
A supervisor opens their roster in the app and marks check-in and check-out on behalf of those workers. The worker needs no phone, no app and no account of their own. The supervisor needs one phone for the whole crew.
Who is allowed to mark attendance for somebody else?
Only the business owner, and any role you have explicitly granted the mark-attendance-for-others permission to. It is off by default for every existing role, so nobody gains it by accident when the feature appears.
Can a supervisor mark attendance for anyone in the company?
No. A supervisor only sees the workers inside their own scope, meaning the departments and locations attached to their role. A site supervisor in Pune cannot mark somebody in the Nagpur crew. A role with no scope set covers the whole business, which is the deliberate default for a single-site company.
Can somebody mark their own attendance this way and skip the selfie?
No. Marking your own attendance through this route is blocked outright. It is the obvious hole in a feature like this, so it is closed in the same guard chain that checks everything else, not left to the interface to hide.
Is there a record of who marked it?
Yes. Every record marked on behalf of somebody stores which employee marked the check-in and which marked the check-out. It is visibly a supervised punch, not an ordinary one, and it can be reviewed and approved.
Which time is used when a supervisor marks attendance?
The server time at the moment they mark it. The supervisor doing the marking is online by definition, so there is no need to trust a device clock, and the absent worker last-known-online time is not allowed to influence the record either.
Is this not just a digital version of a manual register?
It is better in the way that matters. A paper register is written after the fact by whoever is holding the pen, with no record of who wrote it. Here the entry is timestamped by the server as it happens, tied to the named supervisor who made it, restricted to the crew they are responsible for, and visible to you the same day rather than at month end.
Can I mix this with normal self check-in?
Yes, and most sites do. Staff with phones check themselves in with GPS and a selfie, and only the workers without phones are marked by the supervisor. Both land in the same attendance record and the same payroll run.
Can Shiftelio read the logs from my ZKTeco machine?
No. There is no device sync, no ZKTeco SDK, and no importer for a log exported out of ZKTime, ZKAttendance or ZKBioTime. We will not pretend otherwise, because it is the first thing you would test. Shiftelio replaces that setup rather than sitting on top of it: the supervisor marks the crew from a phone and the record is created here, so there is nothing to pull off the terminal. If you want to keep the machine, keep it and keep its own software with it.
Should I stop using my ZKTeco terminal?
Not if it is working for you. One fixed site, one door everybody walks past, a machine already paid for and a technician who turns up: that is the case a terminal was built for and we are not a better answer to it. Replacing it makes sense when your people do not pass that door, meaning field staff, site crews or several branches, because a terminal only records the workers who walk up to it.
What happens to my attendance history if the office computer dies?
With a terminal and its bundled Windows software the log usually lives on that one PC, so a failed hard disk or a reformatted machine takes the attendance history with it. Shiftelio keeps every punch in a hosted database that you reach from any phone or browser, so the record does not depend on one computer in one room continuing to boot.
Included from 999 rupees a year, on every plan.
All platform features ·Multi-site attendance ·Offline attendance ·Attendance for construction crews
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