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Devices find you

You do not enter a device’s details by hand. Once the connector is running and a terminal has been pointed at it, the device announces itself and appears in OnTime by serial number, waiting to be claimed.
An unregistered serial is handled gracefully. OnTime records it as an unclaimed device and still returns success to the connector, so the terminal’s queue drains rather than backing up behind a rejection. No tenant data is touched until you register it.

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Registering

1

Open Attendance → Devices

The Machines tab lists registered devices with their status.
2

Enter the serial, then Verify

Match the serial against the physical device — it is printed on the unit. Verify tells you what OnTime already knows about it before you commit (see below).
3

Give it a name and location

A readable name such as Main gate — Pune HQ, and the location it sits at. The name is what you will see everywhere afterwards; the serial stays underneath as the key OnTime matches on the wire. The location matters for reporting and for the fleet view.
4

Confirm

Registering adopts the unclaimed record for that serial: the device becomes yours, and its punches start resolving against your employees.

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Verifying a serial

Verify checks the serial against every device that has ever contacted the connector:
“Not seen yet” does not block registration. It is normal to register a machine before it is plugged in — the usual install order is to set it up in OnTime, then power the unit on site. Verify is there to catch a mistyped serial, not to gate you.
OnTime cannot ping a terminal to check it. Devices dial out to the connector; nothing can dial in. So the only honest answer to “is this serial real?” is whether the connector has heard from it — which is exactly what Verify reports.
Only register serials you recognise. The connector is shared, so a serial appearing in your unclaimed list is a device that reached the connector — registering it claims its punches into your organization. Check the physical unit.

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Device details

Each registered device carries:

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Fleet health

The Devices page carries KPIs across the fleet — total, online, offline, punches today — and the admin dashboard raises an alert for offline devices.

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How Online and Offline are decided

Terminals report liveness with a keepalive message, and nothing else. A biometric device that has been silent for 5 minutes is marked Offline. The next keepalive flips it back automatically.Kiosk-kind devices are exempt from this watchdog.
Offline means “has not spoken recently”, not “is broken”. A terminal on a network that drops overnight will show offline every night and recover every morning — and, crucially, will not have lost any punches, because they sit in its flash until it can deliver them.Investigate an offline device that stays offline, not one that flickers.

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Removing a machine

Remove is in the ⋯ menu on a machine’s row. What it does depends on whether the machine has any history:
  • No punches at all — it is deleted outright, and its serial is freed to register again. This is the escape hatch for a typo’d serial.
  • Any punch history — it is decommissioned, not deleted. It disappears from the fleet list and the KPIs, but every punch it ever recorded stays exactly where it is, and the serial stays claimed.
The confirmation dialog tells you which will happen before you commit, and the confirmation message afterwards tells you which actually did.
Attendance history is never deleted with a machine. Punches are attendance records in their own right — a payroll cycle that has already used them must keep reading the same numbers. Decommissioning is how a machine leaves the fleet without disturbing them.
Decommissioned machines are visible behind Show retired on the Devices toolbar, and Restore in the same ⋯ menu puts one back in service.

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When a device is replaced

Register the new serial, then remove the old machine — it will be decommissioned rather than deleted, so its historical punches stay attached to it as part of the attendance history.
Terminal user mappings are keyed on the terminal’s user ID, so replacing hardware usually means re-checking mappings against the new device’s enrolment numbering. See Map terminal users.