Manpower services
Attendance for security agencies, post by post
You deploy guards at client gates you do not own, on day and night reliefs, and the muster sits in thirty registers. This page covers what a security agency should switch on first, and what VTClock leaves alone.
Last reviewed: September 2026
What the team looks like
A mid-sized agency runs a small office and a large deployed strength. In the office: the owner, an operations manager who handles client calls, a field officer or two on site rounds, and an accounts person. On the ground: guards, head guards at the bigger posts, supervisors covering a cluster of sites, and a reserve pool that fills absentees. Office staff are on a monthly salary. Most guards are paid per duty, so four absent days is four unpaid duties. Strength moves every time a client adds or drops a post.
What a day looks like
The day relief reaches the gate before eight. The night guard hands over the entry register, the torch and the gate keys, then signs out. At a housing society that handover happens at the boom barrier. At a warehouse it happens at the main gate while the first trucks queue.
Through the day the field officer drives between four or five sites. By six in the evening the operations manager knows which night guard has called in sick. He pulls a reserve guard, or he asks the day guard to stay on and do a double duty. The night relief takes the post at eight and the shift ends at eight the next morning, on the other side of midnight.
Where attendance goes wrong
The muster is spread across thirty client gates
Each site keeps its own register at the gate. Nobody at the office sees any of it until a supervisor collects the sheets near month end. By then a disputed duty is a memory contest between the guard, the head guard and the client's facility manager.
You cannot prove the guard was at the post
A client calls to say the gate was unmanned at two in the morning. Your register says the guard was on duty because he signed the sheet at eight the previous evening. You have a signature on a sheet. The client has a complaint. Nothing in the register settles which one is right.
The night relief breaks across two dates
A duty that starts at eight at night and ends at eight in the morning lands on two rows of a paper register. Some sites write it against the starting date, some against the ending one. At month end the same duty is counted twice or missed entirely.
Reserve guards move and the paperwork does not
A guard is pulled off his usual post on Tuesday to cover a mall site for four days. His own register marks him absent. The mall register carries a name the accounts person does not recognise. Four duties go unpaid until the guard comes to the office and argues.
Advances are handed over at the gate and forgotten
A guard asks the field officer for money mid month and gets it in cash. The amount goes into a diary, or into nobody's diary. Next payday the deduction appears without a trail, the guard disputes it, and the operations manager spends an evening on the phone.
Which modules to switch on first
01 Attendance
Every client site becomes its own office with its own geofence. A guard checks in from the gate he is posted at, or he does not check in at all. Overnight reliefs are handled as one duty.
02 Daily wages
Most of your strength is paid per duty. Wages build straight from the duties recorded at the gate, so a guard who did twenty-eight duties is paid for twenty-eight, without a side sheet.
03 Salary slips
A guard who can read his own slip stops arguing at the office counter. Each slip carries earnings, the duty summary for the month and whatever advance is being recovered, in the same figures you print.
04 Advance salary
Cash handed over at a gate turns into a recorded advance with a recovery spread over the following months. The deduction shows on every slip until it is cleared, so nobody argues about the balance.
05 Salary
The office side is salaried. Operations managers, field officers and accounts staff draw a monthly figure that still has to match leave and holidays, and it builds from the same record the guards punch into.
Rolling it out
Start by adding every client site as an office, then set the geofence radius. A society boom barrier sits right on the road; a warehouse gate can be well back from it. Set the radius against the posts you cover. Then assign each guard to the post he actually stands at, and set the day and night shifts. Tell guards at the morning muster that the phone comes out at the gate, before the handover. Expect a week of wrong-site punches from reserve guards. Fix those from the admin desk and reassign the post.
A worked example
Say a guard is on INR 720 a duty and the month has thirty days on his post. He does twenty-eight duties and misses two. 28 x INR 720 = INR 20,160 for the month. He took an advance of INR 5,000 in the second week, recovered over four months at INR 1,250 a month. INR 20,160 minus INR 1,250 = INR 18,910 payable, and the slip shows all three lines. Figures are illustrative. Your own duty rate is whatever your client contract and the wage schedule notified for your state and category of work require.
Not for you if
- You need to invoice clients per deployed post. VTClock records who was at which site and pays them; it does not raise a bill to your client.
- You want a fingerprint or face reader fixed at every client gate. Check-in here happens on the guard's own phone inside the geofence, and there is no device to install.
- A large part of your strength carries feature phones or shares a handset at the post. Geofenced check-in needs the guard to have the app on him.
Frequently asked questions
Can a guard check in from home if he knows the client's address?
No. Check-in works only inside the geofence you draw around that client site, and a punch from outside it is blocked. Every check-in that does go through lands on the admin desk with a location pin, so the operations manager can see where the guard stood when he punched.
How does a night duty that ends the next morning get counted?
As one duty. Overnight shifts are part of how attendance is set up, so a relief that starts at eight in the evening and closes at eight the next morning stays on one row instead of splitting across two dates. That is the difference between a guard being paid for twenty-six duties and being paid for twenty-four.
A guard is moved to another client site for a week. How is that recorded?
Change the office he is assigned to for that stretch, and his check-ins register at the new gate. If he punches at the wrong site on the first day because nobody told him, an admin can correct the attendance from the console. The duty still counts and the wage still builds from it.
Does this cover our PSARA records and our EPF and ESI work?
No. VTClock keeps the attendance record, builds the salary figure from it, and prints slips. It does not compute, deduct or file EPF, ESI, professional tax or TDS on salary, and its attendance record is not a statutory register for any purpose under the Private Security Agencies (Regulation) Act, 2005. Your consultant handles that side, working from the figures the record gives you.
Can I bill my client from the deployment record?
Not from VTClock. There is no invoicing here and no client billing module. What you get is a dated record of which guard checked in at which site, which is the thing your billing usually argues about when a client says a post was empty on the fourteenth. You raise the bill in whatever you use today.
My salaried supervisors and my per-duty guards are paid differently. Does one system handle both?
Yes. Wage-based guards are paid per day worked, straight from the attendance record. Salaried office staff and supervisors get a monthly figure that builds from the same record, with holidays, weekly offs and approved leave already in it. Both sets of people get a printable slip with the same figures you hold.
Similar businesses
- Facility services companiesA facility management company sells deployed headcount, then spends the last week of every month proving it.
- ContractorsFifteen men on the slab this week and nine of them were somewhere else last week.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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.
- 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.
- SalaryMonthly pay builds from attendance fractions, holidays, weekly offs and approved leave, so there are no side calculations.
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.
- Overnight shiftAn overnight shift is a shift that begins on one calendar date and ends on the next, such as 9:00 pm to 6:00 am.
- Daily wageA daily wage is an amount fixed for one day of work and paid for each day the worker actually attends.
- 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.
- Muster rollA muster roll is the daily attendance register an employer keeps under labour rules, listing each worker by name with the days worked and the hours put in during a wage period.
See VTClock set up for security agencies
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.