Time and attendance
Nobody types the hours.
People already walk through the door. A face terminal on the wall turns the first scan of someone's day into their clock-in and the last into their clock-out, and the hours are ready for payroll without a spreadsheet in between.
Example names. The behaviour is the real thing: a scan the system cannot attribute to a person is shown and not counted, and a second scan moments after the first changes nothing.
Figures from the Daynight Technologies account, our own company, read on 15 October 2026. The day records cover 48 dates: a trial in January, March and April, then every working day since 9 September.
The derivation
Seven scans. One working day.
Scans arrive as events, not as a timesheet. The day is worked out from them every time a new one lands, which is why somebody stepping out at lunch and coming back needs nobody to intervene.
Five of the seven change nothing. The day is its first scan and its last, and the five in between are kept anyway, because the record should be what the door saw rather than what we decided was worth keeping. A scan within two minutes of another is discarded as the same person going through twice: 971 of those on our own terminal so far.
The week
And then the week reads itself.
Your rules, not ours.
Start time, the grace period before a late arrival counts, and the hour after which a late arrival becomes a half day. All three are set per company, and the board shows the week against them.
- An approved holiday is not an absence, so only real gaps are left to chase
- Late minutes measured against that company's own grace period
- A correction never edits the original scan away
What actually happened to us
Eight months arrived in nineteen minutes.
A terminal went up on our own wall in January and spent eight months recording to its own memory, because nothing was connected to it yet. This is what happened when something finally was — and it is the best answer we have to what a terminal does when it loses its link.
- 17 January The terminal goes up An ordinary Hikvision face reader, screwed to the wall by the door. It starts recording immediately — to itself.
- January to September It keeps its own log Nothing reaches us. The device fills up quietly with every arrival and departure of every person who walks past it.
- 9 September, 13:41 The bridge connects A small service on the office network finds it and starts draining what it has kept. Nineteen minutes, in batches of up to 163 at a time.
- Out of order January lands next to April 550 scans arrived before ones that had happened earlier, and 971 were the same face twice inside two minutes. The day is rebuilt from what happened, not from the order we were told.
- The same afternoon 143 days, assembled Every working day from 19 January onward, computed from the events. It has run every working day since: a scan now reaches the record in under twenty seconds.
Where the line is
It is not a tracker.
It records that somebody arrived and that somebody left, at a door, in an office they already walk into. Everything beyond that is somebody else's product. An employee sees their own record in full; their manager sees their own team's, and that is enforced in the database rather than by what a screen chooses to show.
- No locationNothing follows anybody once they are through the door, or anywhere else.
- No screenshotsWe do not look at anybody's screen, and there is nowhere in the product that could.
- No keystrokes or idle timeHours come from a door opening, not from whether a mouse moved.
- Nobody browses anybodyA colleague cannot look up when you got in. Your manager can, for their own team.
- Two timestamps and the hours betweenThat is the whole record, and the original scan is never edited away when somebody corrects it.
Before you ask
The practical questions.
Do we have to buy your hardware?
No. The terminals in use are ordinary Hikvision face readers, bought from whoever sells them where you are. A small bridge on the office network passes scans through to us. If you already have readers on the door, tell us the model and we will tell you honestly whether we can read them.
What if we have no terminal at all?
People clock in and out from the app, and everything downstream behaves the same way. The terminal removes the step where somebody has to remember; it is not what makes the rest work.
What happens when the network goes down?
The terminal keeps scanning to its own memory and the bridge sends the backlog when the link returns. We know this holds because it is how our own eight months of history arrived: out of order, with duplicates, and the days came out right.
Somebody forgot to scan on the way out. Then what?
They raise a correction with what actually happened, their manager or an administrator decides, and the day is recomputed. The original scan stays, so the record still shows both what the door saw and what a person changed. On our own account this has happened five times in 583 days.
Does this work across several offices and countries?
Yes. Working weeks, public holidays and schedules are set per company and per location, so a team in one country is not measured against another country's calendar.
The last question
Will your door talk to us?
It is the question that decides whether any of this is useful to you, and it has a short answer. Send us the model on the wall and we will tell you plainly whether we can read it — including when the answer is no.
What we read today