Food and hospitality
One record behind the front desk, the floors and the lawn
Written for a property owner paying 40 to 120 people across the front desk, the floors, the lawn and the boiler room. This page sets out what to switch on first, and which parts of a hotel month VTClock will not touch.
Last reviewed: September 2026
What the team looks like
A 60-room property carries 50 to 90 names on the muster. Front office has a duty manager, guest relations, receptionists and a night auditor. Housekeeping is the largest department: a floor supervisor, room attendants, a linen and uniform hand, and public area cleaners. Then the coffee shop and room service side, engineering with its plumber and its boiler operator, a bell desk with two porters, and a gate post. Nearly all of them draw a monthly salary, and a good number sleep in the staff block behind the laundry. Banquet hands come in for an evening and are paid for that evening.
What a day looks like
The general shift takes the property at 7. The night auditor closes his tally and hands the desk to the receptionist coming on. Housekeeping musters at the linen store, the supervisor reads out floors and the vacant-dirty list, and checkouts build towards 11. The second shift walks in at 3, into the arrival rush off the afternoon trains.
When a function is booked, the lawn keeps a clock of its own. Casual hands report at 4 for a 7 o'clock reception and stay until the ballroom is stripped and the crockery counted, an hour or two into the next day. At 11 the third shift picks up the desk, the corridors and the gate. A hotel never shuts, so no sheet ever gets ruled off and carried forward.
Where attendance goes wrong
The rota is redrawn twice a week and payroll reads the first draft
The chart on the linen store wall gets pencilled over whenever a receptionist swaps with a colleague or a supervisor pulls somebody onto the lawn for a function. Accounts is working from the photocopy taken on the first. By the thirtieth the two versions disagree about a dozen names, and nobody alive can reconstruct which one happened.
Banquet hands are settled off the back of a function order
Nineteen casual hands work a reception. The banquet in-charge writes their names on the reverse of the function order and pays out cash the next forenoon. Weeks later one of them wants something showing what he worked and what he was given, and the function order is inside a file nobody has opened since.
Season offs are promised in April and still owed in October
The property trades every day of the year, so a weekly off in the wedding months gets pushed into a quieter week and then pushed again. A bell captain carries five owed days in his head. The duty manager remembers three. There is no line written anywhere that settles which of them is right.
Whoever reaches the linen store first signs for the whole block
Attendants who live in the staff quarters walk over together before the shift. One of them picks up the pen and enters four names, including a woman still upstairs with a fever. What that sheet records is who was standing nearest the pen, which is a different question from who worked the floor.
A guest complaint carries a time and the sheet carries none
A guest in 304 says nobody answered the floor bell around nine at night. The evening attendant signed the sheet once, at the start of her shift. Nothing on that sheet tells you whether she was even on the property at nine, so the complaint gets settled by who has been here longer.
Which modules to switch on first
01 Attendance
One geofence takes in the main block, the lawn, the annexe and the staff gate, and every department checks in through the same record. A third shift that starts at eleven at night stays on one working day instead of breaking across two dates.
02 Leave
Leave here gets asked for in a corridor from whichever duty manager happens to be on. Staff apply with dates, a leave type and an attachment, and an admin approves it, rejects it, or marks the days as loss of pay.
03 Salary
Monthly pay for the desk, the floors, engineering and the bell desk builds from that same record, with weekly offs, declared holidays and approved leave already inside the figure, so nobody sits reconciling department sheets by hand.
04 Daily wages
Banquet hands are paid for evenings worked. Eleven functions in a season month become eleven recorded days and a wage that comes off the record, so a cash envelope stops being the only evidence either side is holding.
05 Salary slips
A room attendant opens a printable slip carrying your property's name and reads her own days, her leave and any advance still being recovered, in the same figures your accounts clerk is working from.
Rolling it out
Put the property in as one office and set the radius to take in the main block, the lawn and the staff gate, because an attendant checking in from the fourth floor is still standing inside your building. Configure the three rotating shifts and the off pattern before you load a single name. Bring departments over one a week, front office first and housekeeping last, since housekeeping is the department that will argue about it. Tell each shift at briefing that check-in happens on their own handset and the linen store sheet is being retired.
A worked example
Say a room attendant is on INR 15,600 a month against thirty payable days. INR 15,600 / 30 = INR 520 a day. She takes three days in the season that nobody approved, so 3 x INR 520 = INR 1,560 comes off, and INR 15,600 minus INR 1,560 = INR 14,040 is payable. A banquet hand in the same month is on an evening rate instead: 11 evenings x INR 620 = INR 6,820, built from the evenings he checked in on the lawn. Neither figure is anything more than illustrative. Hold your own rates against your appointment letters and against the schedule notified for your state and category of work.
Not for you if
- You want the duty rota built and published for you. VTClock records who checked in against a shift you configured, and it generates no chart and handles no swap.
- Your banquet hands come through a contractor for the evening and never enter your books. Everybody here needs an employee record and a login code first.
- You are after rooms cleaned per attendant, occupancy against payroll, or any departmental productivity figure. Nothing here reports on rooms, covers or revenue.
Frequently asked questions
Our rota is redrawn twice a week. Does that mean redoing everybody's setup?
No. A shift is configured once and a person is assigned to it, so a receptionist moving from the general shift to the second shift is a change on her record and nothing more. Where two people swap a night between themselves and tell nobody, the record will show what the shift said until an admin corrects it, which is the one habit worth building in week one.
The staff quarters sit inside our compound. Can an attendant check in from her room?
If the quarters fall inside the radius you draw, yes, and that is worth settling before you draw it. Put the circle around the operating blocks and see where the staff block lands. Every check-in still reaches the admin desk with a time and a location pin against the shift, so a check-in from the far end of the compound is visible to you.
Nineteen hands come in for one wedding evening. Do they all need setting up first?
Yes, if you want those evenings to count for anything later. Each person needs an employee record and a login code before a check-in is possible. Put the regulars on a day rate so their wage builds from evenings worked, and keep the setup work in the slack weeks before the season rather than at four o'clock on the day of the function.
My department heads want to clear their own leave. Can I give them that?
Only by making them admins, and an admin gets the whole console rather than one department. There are two levels here, staff and admin, with nothing in between and no chain where a head signs first and the owner signs after. Most properties keep approvals with the owner or one operations person and let the heads recommend on the floor.
Front office has moved over and housekeeping is still on paper. Can the month still close?
Yes. Salary reads whatever sits in the record, so the departments already on the app produce a figure from their own days, and the ones still on paper carry on being handled the way you handle them today. Bringing every department across on the same Monday is the usual way a rollout falls over, so take them one at a time.
Does any of this take care of the EPF and ESI on a property our size?
No. VTClock does not compute, deduct or file EPF, ESI, professional tax or TDS on salary, and it makes no claim that its attendance record satisfies a register your state requires. It holds the days and builds a salary figure from them. Your consultant does the statutory work from those numbers, and current rates and thresholds should be confirmed with him.
Similar businesses
- Restaurants12 to 20 people, two services a day, and a register that gives the whole thing one line.
- 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.
- SalonsWedding season fills eleven days straight and your two senior stylists have not taken a Monday off since the first.
- Retail shopsThere is one of you and there are two shops.
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.
- Daily wagesPay wage-based staff per day worked, straight from the attendance record. Built for crews and site work.
- Salary slipsBranded, printable slips with earnings, an attendance summary and advance recovery. Staff see the same figures you print.
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.
- Weekly offA weekly off is the rest day in each week on which an employee is not required to work.
- Comp offComp off, short for compensatory off, is a paid day away from work given to an employee who worked on a day they were entitled to keep free, such as a weekly off or a declared...
- Daily wageA daily wage is an amount fixed for one day of work and paid for each day the worker actually attends.
See VTClock set up for hotels
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.