Attendance regularisation is the process of correcting an attendance record after the fact, a missed punch, a forgotten biometric scan, a system glitch, so the day gets marked correctly instead of showing up as an unexplained absence.

How it typically works

An employee submits a regularisation request, usually stating what actually happened that day and providing a reason, and a manager approves or rejects it. Once approved, the record updates from “absent” or “anomaly” to “present,” and payroll calculations that depend on attendance, like loss of pay deductions, adjust accordingly. Most companies cap how many regularisation requests an employee can submit in a given period, since unlimited regularisation defeats the purpose of tracking attendance in the first place.

Frequently asked questions

Why does regularisation need an audit trail?

Because it directly affects pay and leave calculations, an unlogged or undocumented correction is both a compliance risk and a common source of dispute if an employee’s record is questioned later.

Does regularisation apply to biometric systems specifically?

Most commonly, yes, since biometric and card-based systems are the ones most prone to missed punches from a forgotten scan or a system outage, though the same process applies to any attendance-tracking method.

See how attendance ties into overall payroll cost with the Payroll Cost Calculator.