What OnTime does
1
Capture punches from wherever people work
A punch is a single clock event. It can arrive from a biometric terminal on a factory wall, from the employee mobile app (with a selfie and a GPS geofence check), or from the web console when an administrator records one on someone’s behalf.
2
Reconcile them into one day record
All of an employee’s punches for a date collapse into a single day record — worked hours, break time, late minutes, overtime, and a status such as Present, Absent, Half Day, Leave or Holiday. The day record is evaluated against the shift the employee was rostered onto, so grace periods and overtime bands come from policy rather than from a person’s judgement.
3
Route the exceptions to a human
OnTime never silently auto-approves. An out-of-geofence punch, a missing punch, a leave request, or claimed overtime becomes a request in somebody’s queue. Leave and overtime go to the manager; regularizations (attendance corrections) go to the manager and then to HR.
4
Pay from the reconciled data
A payroll cycle freezes a month’s attendance, collects inputs, calculates each employee’s gross, deductions and net, gets approved, and disburses payslips. Loss-of-pay days and overtime hours come from the same day records.
5
File what the law requires
From the cycle, OnTime generates PF, ESI, Professional Tax and TDS (Form 24Q) filings, the five statutory registers, and annual Form 16 documents.
Who uses OnTime
Employee
Employee
Punches in and out, checks whether today looks right, applies for leave, requests a correction when a punch is missing, and reads their payslips and tax documents. Almost everything an employee needs is in the mobile app.
Manager
Manager
Sees where their direct reports are right now, and clears an approvals queue — leave, regularizations and overtime for their own team. A manager is also an employee, so the same self-service surfaces are available to them.
HR
HR
Owns the people data and the policy: the employee directory, leave types and quotas, holidays, documents, and the second approval step on regularizations. HR can act across the whole organization rather than a single team.
Admin
Admin
Configures the organization — locations and their geofences, departments, shift templates, rosters, roles and permissions, biometric terminals, API keys and webhooks — and runs payroll and compliance.
The three apps
OnTime is not one app with a role switch inside it. Each audience gets its own front door, sharing one login and one set of data.
Signing in once gets you into whichever apps your role allows. A manager can move between the manager app and their own employee self-service without signing in again.
Beyond the apps
Three programmatic surfaces sit alongside the user interfaces:Public API
A key-authenticated REST surface for reading employees and attendance from your own systems.
Webhooks
Outbound HMAC-signed notifications when things happen — a leave request is approved, a payslip is published.
MCP server
Lets an AI agent operate OnTime as a specific employee, with exactly that employee’s permissions.
Biometric connector
A small service that sits near your terminals and forwards their punches to OnTime over HTTPS.
Where to go next
Set up your organization
The administrator’s first hour: profile, locations, shifts, leave types, people.
Understand the day lifecycle
How a punch becomes a day record, and what can still change it.