Manpower services
Deployed headcount you can prove at month end
A facility management company sells deployed headcount, then spends the last week of every month proving it. What follows is where to start, what the first fortnight feels like, and the work VTClock will not do for you.
Last reviewed: September 2026
What the team looks like
Head office is small: the owner, an operations or contracts manager, one accounts person, and a recruiter who does little else but find replacements. Everything else is deployed. Each contract carries a site in-charge, housekeeping attendants, a pantry hand or two, and a sweeper. One area manager rides between five or six of the smaller premises. Attendants are on a monthly wage that shrinks with every absent day. Plumbers, electricians, lift and pump technicians come in for a job and are paid by the day. Headcount rises and falls with every contract you win and every one a client trims at renewal.
What a day looks like
The first crew reaches the IT park gate before half past six, an hour ahead of the client's own people. Washrooms, pantry counters, the cafeteria floor and the lobby glass have to be finished before the badge readers start beeping at nine. The pantry hand starts at half past eight and works the tea rounds till five.
By eleven the site in-charge has a message from the client's admin about a blocked washroom on the third floor, and pulls somebody off the lobby. At two the area manager is at a hospital contract across town doing the same walk. The second crew comes on at six where the contract is priced for two shifts, and the mall only starts once the shutters come down at ten.
Where attendance goes wrong
The client's sign-off sheet and your wage sheet never agree
The client's admin keeps her own attendance book at reception and signs your monthly deployment sheet against it. Accounts pays from what the site in-charge sent over. When the two differ by four attendant days, the client deducts those days from the bill and you have already paid the wages.
The half past six crew works before anyone from your office is awake
Cleaning has to finish before the client's people badge in, so the crew starts hours ahead of your site in-charge. Whether four attendants reached at half past six or two reached at eight is something you learn at ten, when the client rings about the third floor washroom.
Half your deployed strength turns over between two paydays
An attendant joins on the twelfth, works nine days and vanishes. The reliever the recruiter sends reaches the site a fortnight later. Neither of them is on the deployment list you printed on the first, so accounts rebuilds two part months on payday out of a site in-charge's memory and a recruiter's notebook.
Monthly attendants and per-day technicians sign the same site book
Your housekeeping strength is on a monthly wage. The plumber who came for three days, the lift technician on a quarterly visit and the extra hands hired for the Diwali facade clean are paid by the day. Every one of them signed the same book at the gate, and accounts pulls them apart by hand.
Village leave is told to the site in-charge and never written down
An attendant tells the in-charge on a Friday that she is going home for a wedding and will return in a week. She comes back after twelve days. Nothing was recorded, so at month close those five extra days sit in an argument: leave, loss of pay, or quietly marked present to keep the client's headcount looking full.
Which modules to switch on first
01 Attendance
Each contract premises becomes an office with its own geofence. The half past six crew is stamped at the client's gate at the hour it reached. An in-charge who arrived at nine no longer writes up those hours from memory.
02 Salary
Most of your deployed strength is on a monthly wage that moves with days present. The figure comes off the attendance record with weekly offs, holidays and approved leave already inside it.
03 Leave
Village weddings, hospital visits and sudden absences get applied for with dates and a type, then approved or marked loss of pay. The office sees the request the day it is raised instead of reconstructing it on the second of next month.
04 Salary slips
Handing an attendant a printed slip ends the monthly queue outside the accounts room. Earnings, the day summary and any advance being recovered sit on one sheet in the same figures your office is holding.
05 Daily wages
Plumbers, lift technicians and the extra hands you pull in for a quarterly deep clean are paid for the days they stood at that property, straight off the same record the monthly attendants punch into.
Rolling it out
Add every contract premises as an office before you add one person. A corporate floor inside a shared tower and a standalone warehouse canteen need different radii, so set each against where staff really stand when they punch. Assign each attendant to the premises she works at, then set the early, general and second shifts separately. Brief the site in-charges first, at the Saturday review, since the client's admin will put her questions to them. The first fortnight will be thick with people who left the phone at home.
A worked example
Suppose a housekeeping attendant at a corporate site draws INR 15,080 a month against 26 payable days. INR 15,080 / 26 = INR 580 a day. She was away four days with nothing applied for, so 4 x INR 580 = INR 2,320 comes off as loss of pay and INR 12,760 is payable. The lift technician who attended on three days that month sits on a day rate of INR 940, so 3 x INR 940 = INR 2,820. Both figures come off the one record. The amounts here are invented for the example. Your own rates come from the contract you signed and from what your consultant confirms has been notified for that category of work.
Not for you if
- Your attendants cover three or four small premises before nine. VTClock assigns one office per person, so every extra stop turns into an admin correction.
- You want the mops, machines, chemicals and uniforms issued against each contract tracked here. VTClock carries people, days and pay, and keeps no stock or asset record.
- You want next week's deployment built inside the app, with relievers moved between contracts when somebody fails to reach. Neither rostering nor shift swapping exists here.
Frequently asked questions
An attendant joined on the twelfth and stopped reaching before the month closed. What does she get paid?
She is paid for the days she was present, taken from the same record as everyone else deployed at that premises. Her monthly wage is spread across the payable days in the month, and the days she checked in build her figure. The slip carries that day count beside the amount, so she can see it too. VTClock does not draft a full and final settlement letter or work out notice period, and it gives you the day count that argument starts from.
Can the early cleaning crew and the pantry hand at one premises run on different timings?
Yes. Timings are set per person, so a crew starting at half past six and a pantry hand starting at half past eight both sit under the same client premises. Shift grace and a late allowance are configured as well, which matters on the day a crew of eight shares one auto and every one of them is four minutes late together.
Our people announce a village trip to the site in-charge, never to head office. Does this change that?
It moves the request off a chat thread. Staff apply with dates and a leave type, and attach something where there is a reason to. An admin approves it, rejects it, or records it as loss of pay. Head office knows on the day it is raised, so the month is not rebuilt from memory on payday. For anyone who will not open the app at all, someone with admin access enters it and corrects the attendance from the console.
Our client's facility manager wants to see attendance for her own building. Can we give her a login?
There are two kinds of access here, staff and admin. An admin sees your whole organisation across every contract you run, which is more than you want a client looking at. There is no client-facing view and no read-only role scoped to one premises. Most companies show the client the printed slips and the day summary for that building instead, and keep the console inside their own office.
Our principal employer audits our wage records every year. Is this record enough for that?
No. The attendance record and the salary slip are your own working documents, and neither one is a statutory register. VTClock does not compute, deduct or file provident fund, state insurance, professional tax or tax deducted at source, and it makes no claim about your position under the Minimum Wages Act, 1948 or the Code on Wages, 2019. Your consultant does that work from the day counts and salary figures the record gives them, and current rates and formats should be confirmed with them.
Similar businesses
- Security agenciesYou deploy guards at client gates you do not own, on day and night reliefs, and the muster sits in thirty registers.
- HotelsWritten for a property owner paying 40 to 120 people across the front desk, the floors, the lawn and the boiler room.
- 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.
- 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.
Modules to look at
- 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.
- LeaveStaff apply with dates, type and attachments. Approve, reject or mark loss of pay without chasing WhatsApp threads.
- 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
- GeofencingGeofencing is drawing a circle of a chosen radius around a work location and accepting an attendance punch only when the employee's phone reports a position inside that circle.
- 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.
- Pro-rata salaryPro-rata salary is the share of a monthly salary an employee earns when they are on the payroll for only part of the month, or on two different salary rates inside it.
- 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.
- Weekly offA weekly off is the rest day in each week on which an employee is not required to work.
- 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 facility services companies
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.