Professional services
Attendance in an office where everybody is salaried
The first objection in a professional office is that everyone here is qualified, salaried and trusted, so why record attendance at all. The answer is leave balances, loss of pay, and the settlement when a junior walks out mid-season.
Last reviewed: September 2026
What the team looks like
A practice of eight to sixty people is stacked by qualification, and there is no shift anywhere in it. Partners at the top, then qualified assistants and associates on a monthly salary, then article assistants on a stipend set by the institute's rules. Under that sits the office strength: an accounts and billing clerk, a typist, a receptionist, an office assistant, and in a law office a clerk who spends his mornings at the court registry. Everybody draws a monthly figure and nobody is on a day rate, which is precisely why no register survives past March.
What a day looks like
The office opens at ten. By half past, two audit teams have left for client premises and will not be back before evening, and the court clerk has gone the other way with a file bag. What remains inside is a partner taking calls, the typist, the accounts clerk, and whichever articles were not sent out.
In the quiet months people leave by six. In the season the pattern inverts: the office fills after five as the teams come back, Saturdays are working, and the lights go off close to midnight in the fortnight before a filing deadline. Then the deadline passes and half the staff take the days off they were promised in week three.
Where attendance goes wrong
Half the staff work out of client premises all season
Two teams leave at half past ten and report in by phone. Whether they reached the client at eleven or at one is known only to the client's accountant. Your own register, if anyone keeps one, gets signed on whichever days they come back to the office for something.
The register is filled in on the first, for the whole month
Nobody signs anything while the season is on. On the first of the next month the clerk sits down with a pen and reconstructs four weeks from memory, from courier slips and from who he remembers seeing. Leave balances are then adjusted against that reconstruction.
Articles vanish before an attempt and the stipend keeps running
An article assistant stops coming six weeks before his exam. Everyone knows and nobody writes it down. When the same article asks for leave again the following term, there is no record of what he already took, so the conversation starts from zero and ends in a guess.
The day off after a deadline is promised out loud
Staff who worked three Saturdays and two midnights are told to take a couple of days once the filing is through. Some take two, some take four, one takes none and remembers it for a year. None of it reaches the person preparing the salary.
The court clerk's morning is invisible to the office
He is at the registry by ten and back at the desk by one, four days a week. On the fifth day he is at a different court and reaches the office at four. Nobody in the office can say which day was which, and he is marked present for all of them regardless.
Which modules to switch on first
01 Leave
This is the part that actually breaks here. Staff apply with dates and a type, a partner approves or marks loss of pay, and the balance becomes one number instead of three people's recollections.
02 Attendance
For the people who are in the office: the clerk, the typist, accounts and the juniors on desk work. Check-in near the office, with the days visible while the month is still running and long before the salary is prepared.
03 Salary
Monthly pay builds from the same record, with approved leave, weekly offs and holidays already inside the figure, so nobody sits down on the first to prepare a separate sheet.
04 Salary slips
A junior who has queried her deduction twice gets a printed slip carrying the month's attendance summary and the deduction on the same page, and the query usually stops there.
05 Advance salary
Juniors ask a partner for money before a wedding or a festival and it is handed over informally. Recorded as an advance, the recovery spreads over the following months and appears on every slip.
Rolling it out
Begin with the leave types you actually grant and with the holiday calendar, including the days your office closes that the bank does not. Then set the office and its radius; a floor in a commercial building needs a tight one. Put the office-based staff on first and leave the audit teams for the second month, once you have settled whether client premises become offices or stay as admin corrections. Tell the articles in week one that leave is applied for in the app and no longer asked for in the corridor, because that habit is the one that decides whether any of this holds.
A worked example
Say an audit assistant is on INR 32,400 a month and your payroll month runs thirty days. Her day figure is INR 32,400 / 30 = INR 1,080. She took three days beyond her leave balance during the season, marked loss of pay: 3 x INR 1,080 = INR 3,240 off, leaving INR 29,160. She had taken an advance of INR 15,000 in April, recovered over five months at INR 3,000 a month, so INR 29,160 minus INR 3,000 leaves INR 26,160 to pay. Her slip carries all four lines. The figures are illustrative.
Not for you if
- Everyone in your office is a partner or family, and nobody's pay moves with the days they were present. There is nothing here for you to run.
- You want time booked against clients and matters so you can bill hours. VTClock records that a person was present, and nothing about what the day went into.
- Your staff spend most of the month at client premises you cannot add as offices. Attendance then becomes typing work for an admin, which is a weaker record.
Frequently asked questions
Our audit team sits at a client's office for three weeks at a stretch. How does that get recorded?
Two ways, and both cost you something. Add that client's premises as an office and assign the team there for the stretch, which works when the same client takes the same people for weeks. Or leave them assigned to your office and have an admin enter those days from the console. A person is assigned one office at a time, so no arrangement accepts a punch at either place.
We are twelve people, all salaried, and nobody punches anything today. What would we actually get out of this?
Three things a register does not give you: a leave balance every person reads the same way, a monthly salary figure that already has approved leave and loss of pay inside it, and a dated record when somebody leaves mid-month and the settlement has to be worked out. If none of those has cost you an argument in the past year, wait a year.
Our articles take exam leave every term. Does the stipend keep running while they are away?
That depends on your own policy and on the institute's rules as they stand today, which you should confirm before you decide. What the product does is hold the days: the article applies for the leave, a partner approves it or marks it loss of pay, and the stipend figure for that month follows whichever mark was made. It does not know the institute's rules and does not apply them for you.
The office works Saturdays and till late for the fortnight before a filing deadline. Does the app do anything with those hours?
It records them as check-in and check-out times on a working day, and that is the whole of it. There is no overtime calculation, no compensatory-off ledger and no rule that turns a run of late nights into an entitlement. Where you give people days off afterwards, they apply for those days as leave and the approval sits on the record.
We are a CA firm. Can we run our own staff TDS and Form 16 work out of this?
No. VTClock does not compute or deduct TDS on salary, does not generate Form 16, and does not touch professional tax, provident fund or gratuity for your own people. What it gives you is attendance, days payable and a gross figure per person per month. Everything downstream of that happens where you already do it for your clients.
Our partners come and go all day and will not use an app. Can we keep them out of it?
Yes. You decide who goes on the roll, and a partner whose drawings do not move with days present has no reason to be on it. Put the salaried staff and the articles on, leave the partners off, and give the console to whoever prepares the salary each month. Holding admin access is a separate thing from being on the attendance roll.
Similar businesses
- ClinicsBetween the morning list closing at one and the evening list opening at five, the clinic is shut and almost everybody on the premises is still drawing a monthly salary.
- Schools and coaching centresBetween the last exam paper and the first day of the new session, teaching staff draw a full salary while the register sits blank.
- Real estate site officesEight people at a project gallery does not sound like a headcount that needs software, and for the first month or two it is not.
- Retail shopsThere is one of you and there are two shops.
Modules to look at
- LeaveStaff apply with dates, type and attachments. Approve, reject or mark loss of pay without chasing WhatsApp threads.
- AttendanceGeofenced check-in and check-out near assigned offices, with shift grace, late marks and overnight shifts handled for you.
- SalaryMonthly pay builds from attendance fractions, holidays, weekly offs and approved leave, so there are no side calculations.
- Salary slipsBranded, printable slips with earnings, an attendance summary and advance recovery. Staff see the same figures you print.
- Advance salaryGive an advance when staff need one. Recovery spreads over the following months and shows up on every slip.
Terms worth knowing
- Casual leaveCasual leave, usually written CL, is paid time off an employer grants for short personal reasons that arrive at little notice: a bank errand, a family matter, a day of travel.
- Earned leaveEarned leave is paid leave an employee builds up by working, credited in proportion to days actually worked rather than granted upfront at the start of the year.
- Loss of payLoss of pay, usually written LOP, is a day an employee is absent with no leave balance or approval to cover it, so the employer pays nothing for that day.
- Salary advanceA salary advance is money handed to an employee before the pay it belongs to falls due, taken back from later salaries.
- Advance recoveryAdvance recovery is the taking back of a salary advance through fixed deductions from later pay.
- Full and final settlementA full and final settlement is the closing payment made when an employee leaves, covering everything still owed in both directions.
See VTClock set up for ca and law offices
Tell us your headcount, your shifts and how you pay people today. We will walk through the modules that fit and the ones you can leave off.