> ## 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.
# What is OnTime?
> How OnTime captures attendance, reconciles it into day records, routes approvals, and feeds payroll and Indian statutory compliance.
OnTime is a Time & Attendance platform for organizations that need to know, reliably, who worked when — and to turn that into pay and statutory filings without a spreadsheet in the middle.
Attendance is the spine. Payroll and compliance sit downstream of it, reading the same day records everybody else sees.
## What OnTime does
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.
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.
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.
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.
From the cycle, OnTime generates PF, ESI, Professional Tax and TDS (Form 24Q) filings, the five statutory registers, and annual Form 16 documents.
```mermaid theme={null}
flowchart LR
T[Biometric terminal] --> D
M[Mobile app
selfie + GPS] --> D
W[Web console
manual punch] --> D
D[Day record
DailyAttendance] --> A
A[Approvals
leave · regularization · overtime] --> D
D --> P[Payroll cycle]
P --> F[Statutory filings
PF · ESI · PT · TDS · Form 16]
P --> S[Payslips]
```
Approvals are **inputs** to the day record, not a separate ledger — approving a leave request or a regularization rewrites the affected days, and payroll reads the result.
## Who uses OnTime
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.
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.
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.
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.
These four are the roles OnTime ships with. They are presets over a permission catalog, and an administrator can define additional roles from the same catalog — see [Roles & permissions](/help/concepts/roles-and-permissions).
## 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.
| App | Where it lives | Built for |
| ----------------- | --------------------------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **Admin console** | `https://app.ontime.hosai.app` | Desktop. HR, payroll and operations — directory, attendance board, rosters, payroll cycles, compliance, settings. |
| **Employee app** | `https://app.ontime.hosai.app/employee` | Mobile. Today, History, Leave, Pay, Me. |
| **Manager app** | `https://app.ontime.hosai.app/manager` | Mobile. Team, Approvals, Reports, Me. |
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:
A key-authenticated REST surface for reading employees and attendance from your own systems.
Outbound HMAC-signed notifications when things happen — a leave request is approved, a payslip is published.
Lets an AI agent operate OnTime as a specific employee, with exactly that employee's permissions.
A small service that sits near your terminals and forwards their punches to OnTime over HTTPS.
## Where to go next
The administrator's first hour: profile, locations, shifts, leave types, people.
How a punch becomes a day record, and what can still change it.