> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.ontime.hosai.app/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
# Attendance overview
> How attendance is captured, reconciled into day records, and corrected when something goes wrong.
Attendance is the part of OnTime everything else reads from. Payroll counts its paid days, compliance registers list its hours, and reports aggregate it. Getting capture and correction right is most of the work.
## Capture, reconcile, correct
```mermaid theme={null}
flowchart TB
subgraph capture[Capture]
T[Biometric terminal]
M[Mobile app]
W[Web console]
end
capture --> R[Day record
one per employee per date]
R --> X{Something wrong?}
X -->|missing or wrong punch| REG[Regularization]
X -->|extra hours worked| OT[Overtime request]
X -->|nothing| OK[Day stands]
REG --> R
OT --> R
```
Punches are raw facts. The **day record** is the reconciled answer for one person on one date, judged against the shift they were rostered onto. See [The attendance day lifecycle](/help/concepts/attendance-day-lifecycle) for how that derivation works and when it is final.
## Where to go
Clocking in and out — selfies, geofences, and what a pending punch means.
Who is in right now, and the punch feed as it lands.
The day report, the month matrix, and per-employee views with CSV export.
Recording a punch on someone's behalf, and overriding a day or a range.
The correction workflow: filing, the Manager to HR chain, evidence and discussion.
Requesting and approving extra hours, and when they earn comp-off instead of pay.
## Punching at a terminal
Biometric hardware is set up separately from the rest of attendance — the terminals talk to a small connector service on your network, not directly to OnTime. Everything about [registering devices](/terminals/register-a-terminal), [mapping their users to employees](/terminals/map-terminal-users) and [troubleshooting missing punches](/terminals/troubleshooting) lives in the [Biometric Terminals](/terminals/overview) tab.
## Two things worth knowing early
Employees cannot change their own attendance. They *request* a change, and somebody approves it. Administrators *can* edit directly — and every such edit is written to the audit log with who did it and why.
Once a payroll cycle freezes a month, corrections to days inside it are refused rather than silently dropped. Clear your regularization queue before the freeze.