Flexible attendance helps businesses accommodate various working models while ensuring control over employee time and effort. However, for companies applying core-time and make-up hour mechanisms, manually consolidating and reconciling attendance data can become a heavy burden during every payroll period.
ONE FLEXIBLE WORKING DAY | CORE-TIME, attendance required |
Hours short or over at either end are offset across days under internal rules |
| INDUSTRY | Energy |
| HEADCOUNT | 50 to 200 employees |
| SERVICE | terra HR System |
| CHALLENGE | Flexible attendance |
The company runs a flexible working policy for its office staff: employees must be present during core-time, the remaining hours are flexible, and hours short or over are offset across days. The policy is good for employees, but it made attendance impossible to handle cleanly by hand. Every cycle, HR exported clock records from the attendance device into Excel, then reconciled and confirmed each person’s working time against the company’s own rules. terra built a flexible attendance configuration on terra HR System instead of asking the company to simplify its policy to fit the software. Attendance now runs automatically and reflects the policy in force, while HR moved from processing data to reviewing and approving results. |
Background
Flexible working is becoming standard among FDI companies in Vietnam, particularly Japanese ones, because it preserves operational discipline while giving employees control over their hours. This company applied it in full: mandatory core-time, flexible hours around it, and hours short or over offset under internal rules.
The policy was not the problem. The problem was that attendance data was still processed by hand. The device only records when someone arrives and leaves. All of the interpretation, turning those timestamps into a conclusion about whether an employee met their hours, whether core-time was respected, and where a shortfall was offset from, was done by HR in Excel.
Why flexible attendance is not simple arithmetic
Under fixed shifts, attendance is close to a comparison: late or not, early or not. Under a flexible policy, every clock record has to be read through a set of rules, and this is where manual handling becomes expensive.
FIXED SHIFTS One layer of checking | Compare clock records against a set shift |
The verdict depends on a single time marker, so one formula covers the whole company and anyone preparing it gets the same result. |
| | FLEXIBLE WORKING Four layers of checking | Check the core-time window |
| Calculate hours short in the day |
| Calculate hours over in the day |
| Apply offsetting across days |
Own rules per working pattern, varying by person |
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| Every person has a different pattern No single spreadsheet formula covers the team, because each employee arranges their hours differently. |
| Core-time needs a separate check Someone can meet their daily hours and still breach the mandatory presence window, so total hours say nothing about it. |
| Offsetting ties the days together No cell in the spreadsheet stands alone. One small correction can force a review of several other days. |
| Exceptions rely on judgement Business travel, half-day leave and missed scans are all handled by judgement, so the outcome depends on who is doing it. |
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What it costs in practice: every cycle, HR spends most of its time reconciling and confirming attendance data instead of higher value work. It is also a consistency risk, because attendance feeds payroll, and Vietnamese labour regulations require employers to track working time and overtime. |
Why few attendance products solve this
Most mainstream attendance products are designed around the assumption of fixed shifts. They compare clock records against a predefined shift very well, but when a company needs its own rule set, for example checking core-time independently of total hours, or allowing offsetting across an internal cycle, there is often nowhere in the product to declare it.
That leaves two options, and both are compromises. Reshaping the HR policy to fit the software means giving up part of a benefit employees already have. Going back to Excel means keeping the manual workload the company wanted to remove in the first place.
How terra approached it
terra took a third path: keep the policy and digitise it as it stands. Clarifying the policy is the step most often skipped and the most decisive, because a rule misunderstood here produces errors in every payroll cycle that follows.
| Clarify the policy Core-time, how hours short and over are determined, offsetting rules, exceptions. |
| Agree the reading Confirm how each rule is interpreted with the company before configuring. |
| Configure the rules Translate the policy into rules that can be declared in terra HR System. |
| The system takes over Clock data is interpreted automatically and HR only reviews and approves. |
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Before and after
Before terra | Attendance exported into Excel each cycle |
| HR reconciled and confirmed hours by hand |
| Core-time checked manually, person by person |
| Offsetting tracked and balanced manually across days |
| HR spent its time processing data |
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| | After implementation | Data enters the system and is processed automatically |
| The system applies the declared rules |
| Core-time is checked automatically by rule |
| Offsetting follows the configured logic |
| HR reviews and approves the results |
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From a governance perspective, the most important change is where the rules live. Previously they existed in the knowledge of one person and in the spreadsheet formulas that person had built. Once digitised, the rules live in the system, so the outcome no longer depends on who happens to prepare attendance this cycle. The flexibility offered to employees stayed intact, with no part of it trimmed to suit a tool.
Results after implementing terra HR System
Rather than simply replacing Excel with another tool, terra HR System connects the entire process, from shift scheduling and work schedule management to attendance tracking and working-hour calculation, in one system.
- Work schedules and attendance records are managed centrally in one system instead of being spread across multiple Excel files
- Working hours are calculated automatically based on the assigned shifts, eliminating the need to manually filter attendance data
- Multiple shift patterns can be managed flexibly, supporting the factory’s team-based and weekly scheduling needs
- Attendance data is captured directly through cameras, reducing the need for manual consolidation and cross-checking
- When schedules or shifts change, the related data is updated accordingly without having to reprocess the entire attendance sheet
- HR teams can shift from manually creating and processing data to reviewing, checking, and approving results, significantly reducing manual workload
- Employee and attendance data are managed on a platform secured in accordance with ISO/IEC 27001:2022 information security standards
Facing a similar attendance problem terra helps companies in Vietnam standardise and automate attendance, including flexible working policies that mainstream software cannot handle, and connects approved attendance data directly to payroll. |
