Attendance

Three ways to record attendance, all under Settings → Attendance, and you can use all three at once. Every punch records which one it came from, because a punch a manager typed and a punch a finger produced are both attendance records and are not the same kind of evidence.

A QR code by the door — no hardware

Turn on QR check-in and BaseBlock shows a code on any screen you leave by the entrance: an old phone, a tablet, a laptop. Staff scan it with their phone's own camera app — nothing to install — and land on a page with one button. Separate codes for arriving and leaving.

The code changes every minute. That is the difference between this and a printed sticker: a photograph of the code is worth nothing sixty seconds later, so nobody checks in from home with a screenshot. You can stretch the window to ten minutes for a busy door, and rotating the code invalidates every screen instantly — what you want the day somebody leaves.

Be honest with yourself about what it proves: a QR shows that somebody's phone was at the door, not that they were. Where that distinction matters, a fingerprint clock is still the right answer.

By hand

An owner or admin can type a punch straight in — the register, for a shop with no clock and for the morning the clock was unplugged. It records who typed it and asks why. That sentence takes four seconds now and settles an argument six months from now.

A fingerprint or face clock — optional

The strongest evidence, because nobody clocks in for a colleague with a finger. Connect one and every punch arrives in BaseBlock as it happens — nothing to install on the device, and no USB stick to carry across the shop at month end. Optional, not required: everything above works without one.

Which devices work

ZKTeco machines and the many clocks built on the same firmware — the ones with a Cloud Server or ADMS entry in their menu. If your device has that setting, it will work.

Setting one up

• Register the device in BaseBlock first, using the serial number from the sticker on the back (also under System → Device Info on the device itself).
• On the clock, go to Menu → Comm. → Cloud Server Setting and enter the address and port shown on the settings card.
• Within a minute the device should show as connected, with a "last seen" time. If it does not, the two causes below are almost always why.

Two things worth knowing before you buy

• Older devices cannot use HTTPS. BaseBlock is served over HTTPS only. A clock with no HTTPS or SSL option in its Cloud Server menu cannot connect at all — check this before relying on a machine you already own.
• The device proves who it is with its serial number and nothing else. That is all the protocol offers, not a shortcut BaseBlock took. Punches are only accepted from a serial you registered, every one records the address it came from, and a serial can belong to one workspace at a time — whoever registers it first keeps it.

If the clock stops talking

A clock fails quietly by nature: it sends punches to an address, and if that stops working — the internet drops, the power goes, somebody unplugs it — the device shows nothing and people keep punching. So BaseBlock watches the silence instead. Under a quarter of an hour it says nothing, because these machines check in about once a minute and a brief gap is normal. Past two hours the device is marked in red on the settings page, and it says plainly that punches since then have not arrived.

Those punches are not lost. They sit in the clock's own memory and arrive as soon as it reconnects, so the fix is almost always power and internet rather than anything in BaseBlock. A device you have paused on purpose is never reported as broken.

Who is who

The clock knows people by a number, not a name. Numbers appear in BaseBlock the first time each person punches, and you put a name — and optionally a BaseBlock account — against each one. This can wait: punches collected before you do it attach retroactively, so you can enrol fingers first and sort out names later.

Arrivals and departures

Most clocks are left on their default setting and do not record whether a punch is someone arriving or leaving. Where BaseBlock shows unknown, that is what the device sent — it is deliberately not guessed, because a guessed direction becomes a wrong shift and then a wrong wage.

Hours worked

Punches are paired into shifts — first punch in, second out — and the week's hours per person appear on the same settings page. A few things it does on purpose:

• Two taps in a few seconds count once. People press again when they miss the beep, and a second punch treated as a departure would invert every shift after it that day.
• A forgotten punch-out shows as unresolved, not as zero hours. Zero is a real number that would quietly add itself to a payroll total; unresolved asks you to settle it.
• A night shift across midnight stays one shift, rather than becoming two short days.
• An impossible span is flagged, not paid. If a pair works out at thirty hours, far more likely somebody forgot to punch out and the next morning's arrival is being read as a departure — so it is marked for you instead of totalled.

The total you see is only the shifts that closed cleanly. Anything uncertain is counted beside it rather than folded in, because a total with unresolved days behind it is not the same number as a clean one.