Attendance & Leave Management Software for Project Teams (2026)

TL;DR

• What it is: attendance and leave management inside Orangescrum, next to your projects. People clock in and out, apply for leave, and managers approve, all in the tool your team already uses.
• Attendance: clock in from the office, from home, from a client site or in the field. Each entry keeps its work location, and IP and geo-fence rules can block or flag the rest.
• Leave: six leave types to start, half days, and approval workflows with as many levels as you need, auto-approval, reminders and escalation.
• Team view: the Team Grid shows every person and every day of the month, by status or by hours, with filters by project, team and work location. The Org Tree shows who reports to whom.
• Planning: approved leave flows into Resource Availability, and holidays reduce sprint capacity, so plans match who is really there.
• For client reporting: filter to the people on a client’s project, export the approved record, and send it. Your client never needs access to your HR system.

Orangescrum Attendance & Leave is attendance and leave management software that lives inside your project tool. Your people clock in and out from wherever they work, apply for leave in one form, and get approval through the chain you set up. Managers see the whole team’s month on one grid. Approved leave and holidays flow into resource planning, so a project plan never counts on someone who is away. It is available on Orangescrum Cloud (Enterprise plan) and as a plugin for Orangescrum Self-Hosted.

We built it for one problem that service companies know well. You deploy your people on client projects, often at the client’s own site. The client wants proof that the people it pays for were there, and that their leave was approved. However, that record lives in your HR portal, next to salaries and personal data for every employee. You cannot give a client access to that. Attendance & Leave keeps the attendance and leave record, with its approvals, in the same place as the project. So you can filter it to the right people and share exactly what the contract asks for.

What is new, at a glance

Attendance

Feature	What it does
Clock in and out	A live clock on the dashboard, with the work location, an optional project and notes. Several sessions a day are fine.
Work locations	Office, Work From Home, Remote Office, Client Site, Field Work and Custom. Clock-in and clock-out each keep their own location.
IP and geo-fence rules	Allow listed IP ranges and a geo-fence around each office. Outside them, block the clock-in, or allow it and flag the entry.
Day status	Present, Half Day, Late, Absent, Overtime and Partial, worked out from the hours and your rules.
Corrections and import	HR can enter attendance for several people at once, edit entries, or import a CSV file. Every import goes into the audit log.
Monthly attendance approval	Submit each person’s month for approval through its own levels. Once approved, the month is locked.

Leave, team and planning

Feature	What it does
Leave types and balances	Casual, Sick, Earned, Compensatory Off, Bereavement and Loss of Pay to start, each with a yearly quota. Add your own.
Leave approval workflow	Named workflows with levels. Each level is the reporting manager, a role, or a named person, with auto-approval and escalation after a set number of hours.
Team Grid	Every person and every day of the month, by status or by hours, with filters, saved views and an Excel export grouped by work location.
Org Tree	Reporting lines as a tree. A person’s manager approves their leave and sees their attendance.
Holidays	Public, optional and restricted holidays, half-day holidays and second and fourth Saturdays, synced with your company holidays.
Resource planning link	Approved leave is copied into Resource Availability. Holidays reduce sprint capacity.
Reports and audit log	Attendance summary, leave summary, late arrivals, leave balance and clock in and out reports, plus an audit log of rule changes and imports.

Why attendance belongs next to the project

Many IT services, consulting and BPO firms bill clients for named people. Their contracts often say how those people are tracked. For example, US federal time-and-materials contracts ask the contractor to keep daily timekeeping records for each person (FAR 52.232-7). Outsourcing agreements often name key personnel and limit when the provider can replace them, as in this county IT outsourcing agreement. So the client asks a fair question: were our people here, and was their time off agreed?

The law asks for the same record. In the EU, the Court of Justice ruled in 2019 that employers must have an objective, reliable and accessible system to measure each worker’s daily working time (case C-55/18). In the US, the Fair Labor Standards Act asks employers to record hours worked each day and each week (DOL fact sheet 21). In India, the Code on Wages asks employers to keep a register of the people they employ (section 50), and the new Labour Codes came into force on 21 November 2025.

But the system that holds this record is usually an HR portal. It also holds salaries, bank details, reviews and the personal data of everyone in the company. You cannot open it to a client, and you should not copy it into a spreadsheet each month by hand. In addition, work no longer happens in one place. In May 2026, Gallup found that 52% of remote-capable US employees work hybrid, 26% fully remote and only 22% on-site (Gallup). So “present” is not enough. The client also wants to know where.

Attendance & Leave puts that record in Orangescrum, next to the project the client pays for. Each clock-in keeps its work location. Each leave keeps its approval chain. Each month can be approved and locked. Then you filter the Team Grid or a report to the people on that project and export it. As a result, the client gets a clean, approved record of its own team, and nothing else.

Clock in from the office, from home or from the client’s site

People clock in from the dashboard or the Clock In/Out page. They choose a work location and, if they want, the project they are working on. Orangescrum only lists projects the person belongs to. If the browser shares its position, Orangescrum picks the matching work location for them. A live timer then shows the current session and the total for the day.

Clock-in and clock-out each keep their own location. So a consultant who starts the day at your office and ends it at the client’s site has both on the record. Today’s entries and the weekly history show every session with its hours, location, status and flags, such as On-Site or HR manual entry.

Onsite, work from home and other attendance

You set up the places your people work in Settings. Each work location has a type:

• Office, with an address and a map pin, and an optional geo-fence.
• Work From Home, for remote days.
• Remote Office, for a co-working space or a small branch.
• Client Site, for people deployed at a customer’s premises.
• Field Work, for site visits, installs and audits.
• Custom, for anything else.

One location can be the default. Because the location is part of each entry, you can later filter the Team Grid by it, or export the month grouped by work location.

Clock in only from trusted places

Two rules protect the record. First, an IP allowlist accepts single addresses or CIDR ranges, in IPv4 and IPv6. Second, a geo-fence around each office accepts a clock-in only within the radius you set. For each rule, you choose what happens outside it: block the clock-in, or allow it and flag the entry. A flagged entry shows in the clock in and out report, so HR can check it later.

Day status, corrections and import

Orangescrum works out a status for each day from the hours and your rules: Present, Half Day, Late, Absent, Overtime or Partial. You set the working hours per day, the late threshold, the half-day threshold and your weekend days in General Settings. Forgotten clock-outs close on their own, either when the working hours run out or at the office end time.

Mistakes happen. HR can add a manual entry for several people at once, and edit or delete an entry. People can also fill in their own past days in the weekly attendance log. To move from another system, import a CSV file of up to 5,000 rows. Orangescrum shows a preview first, and the import goes into the audit log.

A leave approval workflow you set up

To apply for leave, a person picks the leave type, the dates, and a full or half day (first or second half), and writes a reason. Before they submit, the form shows the approval chain the request will follow. Orangescrum counts the days without weekends and holidays. It also blocks a request that overlaps another one, or that is larger than the balance.

Levels, approvers and timing

An approval workflow has as many levels as you need. Each level names one approver type:

• Reporting Manager: the person’s own manager, from the Org Tree.
• Role: anyone who holds a role, such as HR.
• Custom User: one named person.

For each level, you can set an auto-approve time and an escalation time in hours. Approvers get reminders while a request waits, and one final notice goes to the next level and to the applicant. You can keep one company-wide workflow, or give a different workflow to each person. For example, a small team may need one level, while a company of more than about 50 people often adds HR as a second level (KollabHR).

A request moves through Pending, In Approval and Approved, or Rejected. An approver must write a comment to approve or reject. The applicant can cancel a request until the last level approves it, and the balance comes back. Emails go out when a request is applied for, waits for approval, passes a level, is approved or is rejected. You can turn each of these on or off.

Leave types, balances and back-dated leave

You start with six leave types: Casual Leave (12 days), Sick Leave (10), Earned Leave (15), Compensatory Off, Bereavement Leave (5) and Loss of Pay. Change the quotas, add your own types, and set leave policies per type. Each person sees their balance as quota, used, pending and available. HR can adjust a balance by hand, for example to credit a compensatory day off.

Sometimes a person forgets to apply before a sick day. You can allow back-dated leave within a window, for example up to seven days back. Outside that window, the form does not accept the date.

Approve and lock each month

For client billing and payroll, a month must stop changing at some point. Monthly attendance approval does that. From the Team Grid, you submit each person’s month for approval. It then goes through its own levels, with a reporting manager, a role or a named person at each level, and its own auto-approve and escalation times. Once the month is approved, it is locked against further edits.

The Team Grid: the whole team’s month on one screen

The Team Attendance Grid shows one row per person and one column per day. Each cell shows the day’s status: Present, Overtime, Half Day, Partial, Late, Absent, Holiday, On Leave or Weekend. Click a status in the legend to show only those days. Switch to Hours to see the hours each person worked on each day instead.

Above the grid, cards show the total employees, working days, average attendance, total leave days, clock-in hours and working hours for the period. Filter by role, project, employee type, work location, team, business unit or a custom group, for a range of up to 92 days. Save the filters you use often as a view. Then export to Excel, with a sheet for status, a sheet for hours and a summary, and group the export by work location if you need it.

Managers see their own team. A person with direct reports gets the team view, team leaves and the right to approve or reject their leave, without any extra set-up. Admins and anyone you allow see the whole company.

Share a client’s attendance without your HR system

Here is how to send a client the attendance of the people you deploy for them:

1. Open the Team Grid and choose the month.
2. Filter by the client’s project, or by the Client Site work location, or by a custom group you keep for that client.
3. If you use monthly approval, check that each person’s month shows as approved.
4. Export to Excel. The file has status, hours and a summary for those people only.
5. For session-level detail, export the clock in and out report. It lists every clock-in and clock-out with its location and flags.

Your client gets the facts it needs, already approved, without a login to your HR portal and without anyone else’s data. By default, the Client and Guest roles in Orangescrum have no access to attendance or leave at all.

Team hierarchy with the Org Tree

Each employee profile has a “reporting to” field, along with the employee code, designation, department, joining date and employee type. The Employees page shows everyone as a table or as an Org Tree. The tree is more than a picture: the reporting manager is the first approver in most leave workflows, and a manager automatically sees the attendance and leave of their direct reports.

Holidays and leave in your resource plan

The holiday calendar takes public, optional and restricted holidays, and half-day holidays such as Christmas Eve. It also respects second and fourth Saturdays if your company takes them off. Holidays sync both ways with the company holidays that Orangescrum already uses, so you keep one calendar.

This is where attendance meets the work. A simple capacity formula is the total time, minus planned time off, minus the work already planned (Toggl). Orangescrum fills in the time off for you:

• Approved leave goes into Resource Availability. When the last level approves a leave, or it is auto-approved, Orangescrum copies it into the leave that Resource Availability reads. Resource planning and the resource booking checks then see the person as away on those days.
• Holidays reduce sprint capacity. Scrum counts the working days in a sprint without your holidays.
• Leave days skip holidays. A five-day leave over a public holiday counts as four days.

On Orangescrum Self-Hosted, the link also works the other way. Leave entered on the Resource Availability screen is checked against existing leave requests and copied into Attendance & Leave.

Reports, exports and the audit log

The Reports page has five reports, each with a CSV export:

• Attendance Summary: working days, present days and attendance for each person.
• Leave Summary: leave taken by type for the period.
• Late Arrivals: who clocked in after the late threshold.
• Leave Balance: quota, used, pending and available for each person.
• Clock In / Out: every session with its clock-in and clock-out location and flags, also as an Excel file with a detail sheet and a summary sheet.

Access is set per role, with 32 permissions, such as clock in, view own attendance, view team attendance, apply leave and approve leave. Every approval keeps its history. The audit log records sensitive admin actions, such as each CSV import and each change to the clock restrictions, with the person, the time and the IP address.

Availability

	Orangescrum Cloud	Orangescrum Self-Hosted
Where it is available	Enterprise plan, and during the free trial	Plugin, added to your licence
How it is turned on	Our team turns it on for your company	You add the plugin to your licence and run its setup
Where it shows	Tracking section of the left sidebar	Tracking section of the left sidebar
Clock in and out, work locations, IP and geo-fence rules	Yes	Yes
Leave, approval workflows, monthly approval	Yes	Yes
Team Grid, Org Tree, reports, audit log	Yes	Yes
Approved leave in Resource Availability	Yes	Yes
Leave entered in Resource Availability copied back	No	Yes

Attendance & Leave runs in the browser, on a computer or a phone. Location detection uses the browser’s own location service. Reminders, auto-approval, auto clock-out and the daily status run from scheduled jobs. On Self-Hosted, you schedule them on your server.

How to get started

On Orangescrum Cloud

1. Start a free trial, or talk to our sales team about the Enterprise plan.
2. Open Attendance & Leave from the Tracking section of the left sidebar.
3. In Settings, set your leave types, holidays, work locations and approval workflow. Then fill in “reporting to” for each employee, so manager approvals work from day one.

On Orangescrum Self-Hosted

1. Talk to our sales team to add the Attendance & Leave plugin to your licence.
2. Run the plugin setup. It creates the tables, the permissions and the default leave types and settings.
3. Schedule the plugin’s jobs on your server, then set up your rules in Settings as above. If you have attendance in another system, import it as a CSV file.

What is attendance and leave management software?

Attendance management records when each person works: the clock-in, the clock-out, the hours and, today, the place. Leave management handles time off: the request, the approval, the balance and the record. A leave management system automates leave requests, approvals and tracking (Apps365), and most tools now do both jobs in one place.

Absence is a real cost to plan for. In 2025, full-time wage and salary workers in the US had an absence rate of 3.2% (BLS). On a team of 30, that is about one person away on an average day, before holidays and planned leave.

Key terms in one place

Term	Meaning
Clock in and out	The start and end of a work session, with the time and, often, the place.
Work location	Where a session was worked: office, home, client site or field.
Geo-fence	A circle around a place. A clock-in inside it counts as on site.
Leave balance	The days a person has left for each leave type in the year.
Approval chain	The levels a leave request passes, for example manager then HR.
Escalation	A notice to the next level when a request waits too long.
Resource availability	The hours each person can work on projects, after leave and holidays.

Attendance in your project tool vs your HR portal: which do you need?

	HR portal	Attendance & Leave in Orangescrum
Main job	Payroll, contracts, reviews and personal records	Daily attendance and leave for the people doing project work
Next to the work	No. Project managers check a second system	Yes. Leave and holidays reach resource planning and sprint capacity
Filter by client project	Rarely	Yes, in the Team Grid
Safe to share with a client	No. It holds everyone’s personal data	Export only the people and the month the client needs
Payroll	Yes	No. Export the data to your payroll

Many companies keep both. The HR portal stays the system for pay and personal records. Orangescrum becomes the place where people clock in, apply for leave and see their team, because they already work there every day.

Top 6 attendance and leave management software in 2026

These six tools cover the main kinds of buyer, from HR suites to resource planners. They are not ranked, because each one suits a different team. Orangescrum publishes this blog and is on the list, so we describe it with the same kind of facts as the others. Ratings are from Capterra, read on 6 October 2026.

Software	Best for	Capterra rating
Orangescrum	Project and services teams that want attendance, leave and resource planning in the project tool, on Cloud or Self-Hosted	Not shown, as we publish this blog
Zoho People	HR teams that want leave types per location and IP or location-based attendance	4.4
BambooHR	Small and mid-sized HR teams that want a “Who’s Out” calendar. Time tracking is a separate module	4.6
Keka	Indian companies that want work from home and on-duty requests through an approval chain	4.4
Float	Resource planners. Time off and holidays reduce capacity, but there is no attendance	4.5
Teamwork.com	Agencies. Unavailable time reduces hours in the workload planner	4.5

How do you choose attendance and leave management software?

If you want one HR suite for every people process, look at Zoho People, BambooHR or Keka. If you only plan capacity and do not track attendance, Float or Teamwork.com may be enough. However, if your people do project work, often for clients and from many places, choose a tool that keeps attendance and leave next to that work. That is what Orangescrum does. Whatever you pick, check five things:

• Each clock-in keeps where it happened.
• The leave approval chain matches your company, with more than one level.
• Approved leave reaches your resource plan without anyone copying it.
• You can filter and export by project, team and location.
• Every approval and rule change is recorded.

Attendance and leave management use cases by industry

The examples below use real Orangescrum features. The people and companies are illustrations.

IT services and staff augmentation

The need: developers work at a client’s site or on a client’s project, and the client pays for named people.

Example. An IT services firm deploys four engineers to a bank. Each one clocks in with the Client Site location. Leave goes to the delivery manager first, then to HR. At month end, HR submits the four months for approval and the delivery manager approves them. Then HR filters the Team Grid to the bank’s project and exports the file for the client’s vendor manager.

IT-enabled services and BPO

The need: agents must work from the delivery centre, on time, and the client’s audit asks for proof.

Example. A BPO allows clock-ins only from its delivery centre’s IP range and blocks the rest. The late arrivals report shows who came in after the threshold. The audit log shows when the IP rule was set and by whom, which answers the client’s auditor in one screen.

Consulting and professional services

The need: consultants split their week between the office, the client and travel, and staffing depends on who is free.

Example. A consulting firm’s consultants clock in at the office, at the client’s site or as Field Work. When a consultant’s two-week leave is approved, it shows in Resource Availability at once. So the staffing manager does not book them on a new engagement for those weeks.

Software and product companies

The need: hybrid teams, sprints that must match real capacity, and an office in more than one city.

Example. A product company has offices in Bengaluru and Pune, each with a geo-fence, and many people work from home two days a week. Diwali falls inside the next sprint, so Scrum counts one working day less. The engineering manager sees their direct reports’ leave in the Team Grid before sprint planning.

Marketing and creative agencies

The need: small teams, many clients, and no time for a separate HR tool.

Example. An agency uses one approval level: the account director approves leave, and anything not decided in 48 hours is approved on its own. Contractors have their own employee type, so the founder can filter them out of the Team Grid. The leave balance report answers “how many days do I have left” without an email to HR.

Engineering and field services

The need: engineers work at sites and in the field, and the office needs to know who was where.

Example. An engineering firm’s site engineers clock in with the Field Work location, and the site office has its own geo-fence. A clock-in outside the fence is allowed but flagged. Each week, the project manager checks the clock in and out report for flagged entries, and HR corrects any wrong ones with a manual entry.

Attendance and leave management best practices

Set it up well

• Fill in the reporting lines first. Manager approvals and team views depend on them.
• Start with flags, not blocks. Turn on IP and geo-fence rules in “allow but flag” mode for a month, then block once the flags are rare.
• Write down your leave rules once. Quotas, half days and the back-dated window should be the same in the tool as in the handbook.
• Keep one holiday calendar. Sync it with company holidays, so leave counts and sprint capacity use the same days.

Keep it running

• Use two approval levels when you grow. The manager knows the work, and HR knows the policy.
• Set escalation times. A request should never wait for a week because one approver is away.
• Approve and lock each month. It gives payroll and your clients a record that does not change.
• Share less, not more. Send a client the people and the month it pays for, never your full staff list.