Attendance, leave and payroll-ready hours: a monthly routine that works

11 September 2026 · 6 min read

Payroll is painful in most companies for one reason: nobody agreed in advance what counts as a working day. Settle four things and the month closes itself.

Every month the same conversation happens. Was that a holiday? Did she take a half day? Why does his attendance say absent when he was on leave? None of it is hard, but all of it is slow, and it recurs because the underlying rules were never written down anywhere the software could read.

The four things that decide a day

1. The work schedule — which days of the week your company works, and the expected hours in a day. Everything else measures against this.
2. The holiday calendar — the specific dates the whole company is off.
3. Leave policies — the types of leave you offer and how many days each one gives.
4. Approved leave requests — which spend those days.

Set the first three once, at the start of the year, and the fourth takes care of itself as the year goes.

Why the order matters

A worked example. Somebody takes Monday to Friday off, and the Wednesday in the middle is a company holiday. They should spend four days of leave, not five, because the Wednesday was never theirs to spend.

Software gets this right only if it knows about the holiday. If your holiday calendar is in a spreadsheet somewhere, somebody will do this subtraction by hand, twelve times a year, and sometimes get it wrong.

Attendance and hours answer different questions

Attendance answers who was here. Timesheets answer how long they worked and on what. Payroll usually needs both, and they should be built from the same tracked time so they can never disagree.

If your attendance comes from one system and your hours from another, budget a day a month for reconciling them, forever.

The monthly routine

1. Approve timesheets weekly, so the month is already four approved weeks.
2. Open the attendance grid for the month and scan for red — absent days on working days.
3. Check each one against leave. Anything left is a genuine absence worth asking about.
4. Export payroll-ready hours: regular hours, overtime, and unpaid break time separated.
5. Keep the export. It is your record of what you paid and why.

A small thing that saves an argument

Keep break time separate from worked time everywhere, and be explicit that it is unpaid. The gap between somebody first clock-in and last clock-out is not their working day, and a system that conflates the two will overpay some people and underpay others.

Happy Tracker keeps the work schedule, holidays, leave policies and attendance in one place, so an approved leave day is never counted as an absence and the payroll export is built from the same hours your team actually tracked. See how it fits together.