Construction and site work
Site attendance when the crew changes every week
Fifteen men on the slab this week and nine of them were somewhere else last week. This page is for the contractor who pays by the day, and it is straight about which parts of that VTClock records and which parts stay yours.
Last reviewed: September 2026
What the team looks like
A contractor's payroll has two halves that behave nothing alike. On the salaried side sit the owner, a site supervisor or two, a site engineer on the larger jobs, and someone in the office who keeps the bills and the material accounts. On the wage side sits the crew: masons, bar benders, shuttering carpenters, mixer operators and helpers, brought in through a mistri or a labour sardar. Crew strength follows the stage of work. A slab pour wants thirty men for two days and eight the week after.
What a day looks like
Work starts around eight, earlier through summer. The mistri counts heads near the gate, calls out who has not turned up, and splits the crew between the pour and the plaster work on the first floor. A tempo of material reaches the site at half past ten and four helpers are pulled off to unload it.
The break runs from one to two. By four the supervisor knows he is short of shuttering carpenters for tomorrow, so he rings the other site and borrows three. Work stops at six, or it runs past nine when concrete has already started and cannot be left standing. The hazri book gets written up at the end, from memory, by whoever is still on the plot.
Where attendance goes wrong
The hazri book belongs to the mistri and not to you
The count that decides Saturday's payout is kept by the man whose own crew is being counted. He writes fifteen for a day when thirteen worked, and you find out only when the money runs shorter than the concrete poured. Arguing it a week later goes nowhere.
One man works two of your plots in the same week
A carpenter is borrowed for three days by the site across town. The plot he left marks him gone. The plot he reached never adds him because his name is not on that page. Come payout, he has worked six days and he is being paid for three.
Kharcha goes out on Wednesday and is disputed on Saturday
A helper asks the supervisor for money to send home and gets INR 2,000 in cash at the site. It goes into a diary if the supervisor remembers. On Saturday the man says he took INR 1,000. There is nothing on paper with his name against the amount.
Rain stops the pour at noon and the day is still a full day
Work is called off after the morning because the mix will not set. Some of the crew leave, some stay back to sheet the steel. Nobody records who did which. The whole plot ends up marked present for a full day, or the whole plot argues about it for a week.
The name on the payout list matches nothing you hold
Half the crew is known by one name at the site and another at the bank. Men leave for the harvest and come back with a cousin instead. By the third month the office cannot tell whether a name on the list worked last season or has never been on the plot at all.
Which modules to switch on first
01 Attendance
Every running plot becomes its own office with a geofence around it. A man checks in standing on the site he actually worked, and the day is dated the moment he punches instead of at six from memory.
02 Daily wages
Most of the crew is paid per day worked, and the days come straight off the attendance record. Twenty-two days is twenty-two days, whatever the mistri remembers about the Tuesday it rained.
03 Advance salary
Cash handed over at the plot turns into a recorded advance against that man's name, cut back across the next few payouts. The balance stops being a matter of two memories at the payout table.
04 Salary slips
A printable slip carries the day count, the rate and whatever advance is being recovered. A mason who can read his own sheet stops holding up the line asking for the arithmetic again.
Rolling it out
Add each running plot as an office before the crew reaches it, then set the radius. Draw it wide enough to take in the material yard and the labour shed, tight enough to leave out the road and the tea stall. Assign every man to the plot he works on and set the site timings. Tell the crew at the morning count that the phone comes out before the first load is lifted. Expect a week of men punching at last month's plot. Those are admin corrections. When a job finishes, add the next site and reassign the people who move to it.
A worked example
Suppose a mason is on INR 780 a day and worked twenty-two days in the payout month, losing the rest to rain and a trip home. 22 x INR 780 = INR 17,160. He took INR 6,000 as kharcha in the second week, being recovered over three months at INR 2,000 a month. INR 17,160 minus INR 2,000 = INR 15,160 to hand over, and the slip shows the day count, the rate and the recovery together. Figures here are illustrative. Your consultant should confirm the day rate you are obliged to pay for that category of work.
Not for you if
- You settle a lump sum with a labour sardar and he pays the crew himself. Those men are not on your books, so there is nobody here to record.
- Your work is priced per square foot of plaster or per metre of bar bending. Pay here builds from days recorded at a site, and no piece rate is computed.
- You want labour, material and machinery hire rolled into a project cost sheet. VTClock holds people, days and pay, and tracks nothing else on the job.
Frequently asked questions
Do I have to set up a new plot before the crew starts working on it?
Yes. A site has to exist as an office with a geofence around it before anybody can check in there, and setting that up is a few minutes of configuration you do yourself. If a crew reaches a plot that was never added, their days for that stretch go in as admin corrections from the console. That works, but it makes more evening typing than adding the site on the Monday.
My mistri brings different men most weeks. Does every one of them need setting up?
Every person you pay needs an employee record and a login code, so a man who is with you for four days does have to be added. The gain is that the record stays. When the same carpenter comes back after the harvest, his old record, his rate and any advance still outstanding are already there, and he does not get entered twice under two spellings.
It rains and half the crew leaves at noon. Can that be recorded as half a day?
Attendance is a record an admin can correct, so a day cut short is marked from the console rather than fought over on Saturday. The cleanest habit is to have the men check out when work is called off, then have the supervisor tell the office who stayed back to sheet the steel. The correction is made once and the payout follows it.
There is no network in the basement or the lift shaft. Can a man check in down there?
No. There is no offline check-in in VTClock, so a punch needs the phone inside the geofence with a working connection at that moment. On most sites the crew punches at the gate or the shed before going down, which is where the head count happens anyway. Anything that still fails gets corrected by an admin the same day.
Does this handle our BOCW cess and the EPF on site labour?
No. VTClock keeps the attendance record, builds the wage from it and prints slips. It does not compute, deduct or file anything under the Building and Other Construction Workers Act, 1996, the Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act, 1970, the Employees' Provident Funds and Miscellaneous Provisions Act, 1952 or the Employees' State Insurance Act, 1948, and nothing it produces is a statutory register. Get that side handled by whoever files your returns, using these day counts as the input.
A client asks three months later who was on site the day a slab was poured. Can I answer that?
You can pull the dated attendance for that plot and see who checked in, at what time, with a location pin against each check-in. That is your own record of who stood on the site, which is usually the thing the argument turns on. It is not a certified document and nobody is obliged to accept it, though it holds up better than a page of the hazri book.
Similar businesses
- 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.
- Facility services companiesA facility management company sells deployed headcount, then spends the last week of every month proving it.
- Security agenciesYou deploy guards at client gates you do not own, on day and night reliefs, and the muster sits in thirty registers.
- Manufacturing unitsYour shift in-charge is the only person who knows who stayed back on Tuesday, and by the third of next month nobody can check him.
- WarehousesPickers, loaders and forklift operators come through one gate on shifts that overlap by an hour, and half of them are paid by the day.
Modules to look at
- AttendanceGeofenced check-in and check-out near assigned offices, with shift grace, late marks and overnight shifts handled for you.
- Daily wagesPay wage-based staff per day worked, straight from the attendance record. Built for crews and site work.
- Advance salaryGive an advance when staff need one. Recovery spreads over the following months and shows up on every slip.
- Salary slipsBranded, printable slips with earnings, an attendance summary and advance recovery. Staff see the same figures you print.
Terms worth knowing
- Daily wageA daily wage is an amount fixed for one day of work and paid for each day the worker actually attends.
- Piece rate wageA piece rate wage pays for output.
- Advance recoveryAdvance recovery is the taking back of a salary advance through fixed deductions from later pay.
- 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.
- 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.
- Minimum wagesMinimum wages are the lowest wage an employer may lawfully pay for a given kind of work, fixed by the appropriate government under the Minimum Wages Act, 1948 and carried forward...
See VTClock set up for contractors
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.