Healthcare
Clinic attendance, from fasting samples to the last patient
Between 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. This page covers what a clinic should record and where VTClock stops.
Last reviewed: September 2026
What the team looks like
A clinic pays somewhere between four and twenty five people. There is an owner-doctor, sometimes a resident doctor who carries the evening list, and visiting consultants who come in on fixed days. Around them sit nurses or dental assistants, a receptionist who also handles cash and the appointment phone, a technician if you run a collection centre, a boy who sterilises instruments and wheels the trolley, and a housekeeping woman who comes twice a day. Salaried staff draw a monthly figure. Locum cover and relief technicians are on a day rate for the days they work.
What a day looks like
Housekeeping opens up at half past seven and the technician is at the collection window by eight, because fasting samples cannot wait for the clinic to fill. The receptionist opens the appointment book at half past eight. The morning list runs from nine to one, or until the last walk-in has been seen, which is rarely one.
The clinic then shuts until five. Assistants go home, the doctor operates at a nursing home across town, and one person stays back for phone bookings. The evening list opens at five and runs to nine. On Tuesdays and Fridays a visiting dentist takes the last two hours, so the assistant who normally leaves at eight stays until half past nine and the receptionist closes the cash after her.
Where attendance goes wrong
Attendance gets reconstructed from the OPD register
The only book anybody writes in through the day is the OPD register, and it records patients. On the first of the month whoever does the accounts reads it backwards, deciding which assistant was in on the fourteenth from whose handwriting sits against the entries. A thin Wednesday with nine patients leaves almost nothing to read.
Locum cover is fixed on a nine at night phone call
Your regular assistant messages after dinner to say she cannot come tomorrow. You ring two people and one agrees to take the morning list. She ends up covering four mornings scattered through the month, one of them arranged at ninety minutes' notice on a Saturday. The only record of which four is your call log, and she remembers five.
Leave is sanctioned between two patients
An assistant puts her head around the door while you are examining somebody and asks for Thursday off. You nod and go back to the patient. Nothing is written down, no leave type is set against the day, and at month end nobody can say whether that Thursday was casual leave or loss of pay.
Nobody is there to see the seven a.m. collection
The technician who draws fasting samples starts two hours ahead of everyone else and has the tubes labelled and spun before the doctor parks. His in-time exists only in his own account of it, and on the two mornings he reached at eight the corridor was empty and nobody was there to notice.
A Sunday camp buys a comp off nobody wrote down
You take three staff to a Sunday screening camp and promise each of them a day off in return. Two take theirs that month. The third asks for hers in February, by which time you have no note of the promise, and the argument happens across the reception desk with patients listening.
Which modules to switch on first
01 Attendance
02 Leave
A day off asked for between two patients becomes a request carrying a date and a type. You approve it, reject it, or mark it loss of pay, and locum cover then gets arranged against something written down.
03 Salary
Assistants, receptionists and technicians draw a monthly figure that has to move with leave, weekly offs and festival closures. It builds from the same attendance record, with nothing worked out on the side.
04 Salary slips
Pay in a clinic gets discussed at the reception desk with patients waiting. A printed slip carrying earnings, the days behind them and any advance recovery ends that conversation in one sheet of paper.
05 Daily wages
Locum assistants and relief technicians are paid for the days they actually covered, taken straight from the attendance record, so four days of cover is paid as four days, without anyone reconstructing which four they were.
Rolling it out
Draw the geofence tight. A clinic in a market building sits a few metres from the chemist next door, and a loose radius will accept a check-in from the pavement. Set the morning and evening lists as two shifts before you add a single person, and give the early technician his own start. Then add staff, hand out login codes, and put the salaried people and the day-rate locums on their right basis. Tell the assistants at the morning huddle that the phone comes out before the first patient of the morning.
A worked example
For example, a dental assistant on INR 19,400 a month against 26 payable days works out to INR 19,400 / 26 = INR 746.15 a day, rounded to two decimals. Two days marked loss of pay come off as 2 x INR 746.15 = INR 1,492.30, leaving INR 17,907.70 for the month. A locum assistant on a day rate of INR 1,520 who covered five days draws 5 x INR 1,520 = INR 7,600. Figures are illustrative. What you pay is your own arrangement and the schedule notified for your state and category of work.
Not for you if
- You pay visiting consultants by the session, and a busy Tuesday gives one of them two sessions. Pay here counts days worked, so every second session becomes an admin correction.
- Your doctors are partners splitting collections at the end of each quarter. Nobody counts their days, so there is no monthly figure here for the system to build.
- Housekeeping and your ward help come from an agency that bills you per head and pays them itself. The agency counts those days, and you never see them.
Frequently asked questions
Our visiting dentist is paid per session. Can this handle that?
Partly. Wage-based pay here builds per day worked from the attendance record, so a consultant who takes two sessions on one day counts as one day on that record. If your session rate is steady, set a day rate that matches a full day and correct the record on the days he takes only one session. Plenty of clinics keep visiting consultants off the system altogether and use it for the people they pay a salary or a day rate.
My technician starts at seven for fasting samples and the clinic opens at nine. Will he be marked late?
No, provided his shift is set to a seven o'clock start instead of the clinic's opening time. Shifts are assigned per person, with a grace period you decide, so his morning is measured against his own start and the receptionist is measured against hers. A check-in outside that grace lands on the admin desk as a late mark, and you can waive it there.
Can this pick up staff timings out of the clinic management software we already run?
No. There is no import, no export, no spreadsheet upload and no integration with practice management, billing or diagnostic software. Attendance is recorded by each person checking in on their own phone inside the geofence around the clinic, and salary and slips are built from that record. Your existing software carries on doing patients, prescriptions and billing, and the two never speak to each other.
An assistant takes the morning off and comes back for the evening list. What does she get paid for?
Half the day. Monthly pay builds from attendance fractions, so a half day counts as half a day of pay instead of being rounded up to a present mark or down to an absence. Where the two lists are set up as separate shifts, somebody who works only the evening one is measured against that shift. If she gave no notice, the day can be corrected from the admin desk or the request can be marked loss of pay.
My assistant argues about her days every payday. What can I actually hand her?
A printed slip. It carries her earnings, an attendance summary for the month and any advance still being recovered, and the figures on it are the same ones you are holding. The salary came out of her own check-ins, so the days on the slip are the days the record shows, and there is no second sheet anywhere for either of you to reach for.
Similar businesses
- PharmaciesThe licence on your wall carries a pharmacist's name, and the book in your drawer cannot say how many of the store's open hours he actually stood in it.
- SalonsWedding season fills eleven days straight and your two senior stylists have not taken a Monday off since the first.
- CA and law officesThe first objection in a professional office is that everyone here is qualified, salaried and trusted, so why record attendance at all.
- 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.
- HotelsWritten for a property owner paying 40 to 120 people across the front desk, the floors, the lawn and the boiler room.
Modules to look at
- AttendanceGeofenced check-in and check-out near assigned offices, with shift grace, late marks and overnight shifts handled for you.
- LeaveStaff apply with dates, type and attachments. Approve, reject or mark loss of pay without chasing WhatsApp threads.
- 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.
- Daily wagesPay wage-based staff per day worked, straight from the attendance record. Built for crews and site work.
Terms worth knowing
- 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.
- Payable daysPayable days are the number of days a monthly salary is spread across, and the number of days in a given month the employee is actually paid for.
- Daily wageA daily wage is an amount fixed for one day of work and paid for each day the worker actually attends.
- Half dayA half day is a working day on which an employee is present for only part of the shift and is counted for half the day's pay.
See VTClock set up for clinics
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.