Time & attendance software
Know who's here, who's late, and who's out, with accurate hours feeding payroll.
Start free
Live Who's-In Board
See who's clocked in, on break, or out in real time, across locations.
Attendance + Absences
Track attendance against the schedule and approved time off automatically, once you add scheduling and PTO on Pro.
Accurate Hours
Punches total into payroll-ready hours with overtime and breaks handled.
Free
Time and attendance for unlimited employees, free to start.
Frequently asked questions
What is time and attendance software?
It records when employees start and stop work (attendance) and totals their hours for payroll, Kloqk does both, free.
Can I see who's working right now?
Yes, the live who's-in board shows current status for everyone.
Explore more
What time and attendance software is
It is the system that records when people work, applies your break and overtime rules to those records, and produces the hours payroll pays. That is a narrower job than it sounds, and the narrowness is the point: it is not scheduling, which records what you intended, and it is not workforce management, which is the broader category that wraps both plus forecasting and labour costing.
The reason it exists as a category is evidentiary. Federal law requires employers to keep the records used to calculate pay, and where those records are missing or unreliable, the employee's reasonable recollection is generally accepted and the employer carries the burden of disproving it. A system that records the punch when it happens produces a contemporaneous record; a spreadsheet filled in on Friday produces a recollection with better formatting.
What to evaluate, in order
Most comparisons of attendance software list features. The four things that actually decide whether it survives contact with your payroll are narrower than that.
Does it export what your payroll accepts. Not "does it integrate", which can mean anything, but does the file carry regular and overtime hours split out and a stable employee identifier. Matching on names breaks the first time two people share a surname.
Does it apply your state's rules. Overtime past 40 is universal; daily overtime, meal-break premiums and paid rest breaks are not. Overtime laws by state covers where the differences are.
Can you correct a missed punch and see the correction. People forget to clock out. An audit trail showing who changed what and when is the difference between a defensible edit and an unexplained one.
Does the price hold as you hire. Per-seat pricing means the cost rises exactly as the business grows, which is why a product that looks cheap at five people often is not at twenty-five.
Free time and attendance software, and what free usually means
Products described as free usually cap the headcount, withhold the payroll export, or run as a trial. Any of those is defensible; what matters is knowing which one applies before you migrate a team onto it. Kloqk's core time and attendance is free for unlimited employees at one location, including kiosk punching, photo verification, overtime and break calculation, and payroll-ready exports. Scheduling, PTO and multi-location are Pro at $29 per location; GPS, SMS, hiring and onboarding are Premium at $59 per location.
If you are replacing something, the comparison pages set out where each product starts charging, and the time card calculator lets you check a week's totals against whatever you use now before you switch anything.
Questions people ask about this
What is a time and attendance system?
It is the system that records when people work, applies your break and overtime rules to those records, and produces the hours payroll pays. It differs from a scheduling tool, which records what you intended, and from workforce management, which is the broader category that includes both plus forecasting and labour costing.
What does workforce management software do?
It covers forecasting demand, building schedules against it, recording actual hours, and reporting the gap between planned and actual labour cost. Most small businesses need the recording and the reporting, and buy the forecasting long before they have enough history for it to be worth anything.
How do small businesses track attendance?
The three common approaches are a paper sheet, a spreadsheet, and a time clock app. The first two rely on somebody reconstructing the week, which is both error-prone and weak evidence in a dispute. A clock records the punch when it happens, which is the whole point: the record is contemporaneous rather than remembered.
How many hours is full time?
There is no single federal definition for general purposes. The Affordable Care Act uses 30 hours a week for employer coverage obligations, most employers use 35 to 40 for benefits eligibility, and overtime is a separate question entirely, owed past 40 regardless of whether you call the role full time. Define it in your handbook so nothing rides on the assumption.
Still deciding? Try the free calculators or read the wage-and-hour guides for your state.