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Attendance and shifts · verified August 2026

What is Attendance register?

Also called muster roll, attendance record.

Definition

The attendance register is the record of who worked, on which days, and for how long. It is a statutory record for most Indian employers and the source of every figure in payroll.

How it works

Whatever else changes, payroll is a function of attendance. If the register is wrong, the salary is wrong, the loss of pay is wrong and the overtime is wrong, and none of it can be corrected without going back to the same record.

What it means in India

The obligation to maintain registers of attendance and wages, and the prescribed forms, come from the applicable state Shops and Establishments Act rules or the Factories Act 1948 rules, and they differ between states. Retention periods are also prescribed, so a register is not something to discard at the end of a financial year.

What people get wrong

  • Keeping attendance in a WhatsApp group or a personal notebook, neither of which survives an inspection or a dispute.
  • Reconstructing the register at month end from memory, which produces a record that is internally consistent and factually wrong.
  • Not keeping it for the prescribed retention period.

Work out your own number

The arithmetic on this page is easier to check against a real salary than to follow in prose, so there is a free page that does it for you. No sign-up.

Free attendance register format

Terms this one depends on

Muster roll. A muster roll is the statutory attendance record prescribed under Indian labour rules, showing each worker name and their attendance for each day of the wage period in a prescribed form.Biometric attendance. Biometric attendance verifies identity at the moment of the punch using a physical characteristic such as a fingerprint or a face, at a device installed at the workplace.Loss of pay. Loss of pay is a deduction from salary for days absent without any leave balance to cover them. The size of the deduction depends entirely on which divisor the employer uses, and there is no single correct one.

More on attendance and shifts

GeofencingProxy attendanceShift rosterWeekly offOvertimeNight shift allowance

Where this shows up in practice

Almost everything on this page ends up as a line on a payslip or a figure in a register. Shiftelio keeps attendance, leave, salary structure and the statutory deductions in one place, so the number in the letter and the number in the payslip come from the same record.

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This entry was written and checked in August 2026 for Indian employers. It is general information, not legal or tax advice. Statutory thresholds, contribution rates and slab tables are revised from time to time, and several of the rules described here come from state legislation that genuinely differs between states, so check the position that applies to your own establishment before acting. If you believe anything here is inaccurate, write to support@shiftelio.com and we will correct it.