How is attendance captured today?
Pick the closest description, not the ideal one.
HR software for Salt Lake, New Town, Howrah and the Kolkata belt
Greater Kolkata is several labour markets sharing one metro map. Tap a location to see what changes.
IT, ITeS and shared services
Night shifts that cross a date boundary
Sector V runs rotating rosters, including shifts that start on one calendar day and end on the next. Attendance logic that assumes a shift lives inside one date produces wrong overtime every night.
- Cross-midnight shifts treated as one block, so night allowance and overtime compute correctly.
- Face or app punch — touchless at the office, boundary-based at a client site.
- Self-service for payslips and mis-punch corrections through the ESS portal.
Corporate campuses, GCCs and hospitals
One employer, several buildings, one payroll
New Town organisations spread across blocks and towers, with staff moving between them in a single day. Attendance has to consolidate across entry points without double counting.
- Multi-gate consolidation — first in and last out across any number of readers.
- Roster depth — large campuses run well over a hundred shift patterns as rules, not exceptions.
- Department roll-ups, because staffing decisions are made at unit level.
Finance, legal, trading and family firms
Small headcount, long history, real exposure
The central business district holds long-established firms of thirty to two hundred people, often with decades of payroll history and a Shops and Establishments registration older than anyone in the building.
- Starts small — BiOKnox Lite covers one office at a one-time cost, device included.
- History preserved — old punch logs archived against employee codes before a legacy machine retires.
- Clean statutory output — PT, PF, ESI and LWF from the payroll run itself.
Engineering, fabrication and manufacturing
Permanent operators and contract workmen at the same gate
Across Howrah, Dankuni and the Hooghly belt, the register at the gate and the payroll in the office are usually two different truths — and the contractor's muster roll is a third.
- One device, both workforces — the system knows which payroll each person belongs to.
- Overtime from punch times, not from a supervisor's estimate.
- Documents that expire loudly — a workman is blocked when a licence or safety document lapses. See CLMS.
Leather, garments, food and light industry
High turnover, statutory obligations unchanged
Bantala's leather complex and the Taratala belt run large, fluid workforces where output matters day to day, but PF, ESI and minimum wage compliance apply to everyone on the floor.
- Enrollment as routine — adding and deactivating workers is an operation, not a project.
- Palm or face where chemical exposure makes fingerprint reads unreliable.
- Bengali payslips, which removes most disputes at the window.
Ports, petrochemicals, logistics and projects
More contractors than employees
Around Haldia the contractor count is the management problem. Forty vendors means forty sets of licences and one principal employer carrying the liability for all of them.
- Vendor self-service — contractors upload documents and raise bills themselves.
- Gate pass tied to compliance, so nobody polices it manually.
- Works without a signal — punches stored on the device, uploaded when the network returns.
What the state adds
Payroll Software in Kolkata: three things West Bengal adds to a national payroll run
Professional Tax runs on two certificates. An enrolment certificate covers the establishment's own liability; a registration certificate covers deducting from employees. Deductions follow the state slab, are deposited monthly and reported annually. In BiOKnox the West Bengal slabs ship configured, so the PT register is an output of the payroll run rather than a parallel exercise.
The Labour Welfare Fund is half-yearly. It belongs in the June and December cycles with the employer share attached. Eleven months of silence is exactly why payroll systems built for monthly deductions never look for it.
Minimum wages move twice a year, generally effective 1 January and 1 July. Because a revision applies from its effective date, arrears are normal rather than exceptional — which only works cleanly if wage rates carry an effective date.
Illustrative screen. Every figure traces back to a verified punch, which is what makes a register defensible in an inspection.
The September peak
Statutory bonus before Durga Puja: what the Act actually says
Bonus under the Payment of Bonus Act, 1965 is legally payable within eight months of the accounting year close. In West Bengal almost nobody waits that long, because it is paid before Durga Puja — which is what compresses September and October into the hardest fortnight of the HR year.
Eligibility is not the same as the calculation base. An employee drawing up to ₹21,000 a month is eligible, but the bonus is worked out on ₹7,000 or the applicable minimum wage, whichever is higher. So a worker on ₹18,000 is included, and their bonus is calculated on the capped figure rather than on what they actually earn. This single distinction is where most internal estimates go wrong.
The rate is a band, not a number. It runs from 8.33 per cent as the statutory minimum to 20 per cent as the maximum, with the figure inside that band depending on allocable surplus.
Bonus is proportionate to days worked. Computed from a headcount list, the total will be wrong in both directions: over-stated for people who joined mid-year, under-stated for anyone the list has missed. Computed from attendance, it is simply correct. That is the case for having bonus come out of the payroll run rather than a spreadsheet built beside it.
Use the estimator to size the outlay, then confirm the declared rate with your consultant before committing to it.
The eligibility ceiling under the Act
Calculation is capped at ₹7,000 or minimum wage, whichever is higher
Illustrative only. Assumes a full year of eligible service and a ₹7,000 calculation ceiling. Actual liability depends on days worked, the minimum wage for your scheduled employment and allocable surplus.
At the gate
Biometric Attendance System in Kolkata: fingerprint, palm and AI face
Kolkata has a long tail of installed attendance hardware, much of it a decade old, much of it feeding a log file somebody exports by hand. The question is rarely whether to have biometrics. It is whether the device is connected to payroll or merely near it.
BiOKnox connects to terminals through a direct SDK with no middleware application in between, which removes the second vendor and the second point of failure. Over 10,000 biometric devices run on the platform today.
Fingerprint suits most offices and workshops. Palm vein is the answer where oil, dust or worn fingertips cause constant read failures, which is why it turns up in engineering, leather and food units. AI face terminals give hands-free recognition with liveness checks that reject a photograph. For field engineers and project sites with no gate at all, boundary-based attendance does the same job from the mobile app.
If you are replacing an older machine, export and archive its raw log against employee codes before anything is disconnected. Biometric templates rarely transfer between manufacturers, so re-enrollment is expected, but the punch history can be preserved. Once a legacy controller is unplugged it usually cannot be recovered.
The Haldia terminal keeps punching. Its encrypted log uploads the moment the network returns, so a day without connectivity leaves no gap to reconstruct.
Bring your Puja fortnight to the demo
Not a quiet month. Bring the one with the bonus run, the July wage revision and the contractor whose licence had lapsed. Thirty minutes, on your own numbers.
- ✓We will tell you whether your existing devices can be reused
- ✓A migration plan for your legacy attendance history
- ✓A rollout estimate for your actual headcount and units
- ✓One written price for everything shown, not per module
Or call +91 73288 22601 · sales@bioknox.in
Questions Kolkata HR teams ask us
Pricing, setup, MP compliance and contract labour, in plain terms.
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