Time and attendance payroll integration means transferring days worked, overtime, night work, leave, sick days and absences from the attendance system into payroll without anyone retyping them. Done properly, month-end timesheet preparation gets shorter, rekeying errors are largely avoided and every payroll line can be traced back to the door record it came from.
What happens on the HR desk at month end
In many organisations attendance and payroll live in separate worlds. An Excel file is exported from the time clock or access system, and HR merges it with the shift plan, leave forms and overtime lists sent in by managers. Then each employee's days worked, overtime and leave are entered into the payroll package one by one. Even at a company of a hundred people, that means checking hundreds of rows by hand every month. With shift work the burden grows further; we explain how records should follow the shift in shift attendance tracking.
Every link in that chain is a chance for error. An employee whose ID is typed differently shows up in payroll as "days missing"; someone whose leave form arrives late is marked absent; a night shift crossing midnight is split across two days. Errors usually surface after payday, when an employee queries their payslip. We explain how the timesheet itself is calculated under Turkish labour law in our overtime and timesheet calculation guide; this article focuses on moving that timesheet into payroll safely.
The cost of a broken timesheet-to-payroll chain
The cost of manually transferred data is hard to measure, but expert estimates are striking:
Data quality expert Thomas C. Redman, writing in MIT Sloan Management Review in 2017, estimates the cost of bad data at 15% to 25% of revenue for most companies.
That is an estimate, not a measured statistic, but the mechanism it points to is very concrete in payroll. Every overtime hour transferred wrongly means either an overpayment or a query followed by a correction run. Business software is still far from universal in Türkiye: according to TurkStat's 2025 survey on ICT usage in enterprises, only 28.3% of enterprises with 10 or more employees use ERP software, falling to 23.6% among those with 10 to 49 staff.
Payroll data is also a target for fraudsters. According to the APWG Phishing Activity Trends Report for Q2 2026, 10% of business email compromise (BEC) attacks were payroll diversion attempts. A payroll process where a salary bank account can be changed by a single email, with no approval or record, is wide open to this; we explain how such attacks are built in bank detail change email fraud.
What data moves from attendance to payroll?
The first job of an integration is to make both systems speak the same language. The table below lists the typical data items and the most common errors.
| Data item | Source in attendance system | Payroll equivalent | Common error |
|---|---|---|---|
| Employee identity | Card or user record | Employee/payroll ID | Different IDs in each system, duplicates |
| Days worked | Clock-ins + shift plan | Insured days, paid days | Night shift split across two days |
| Overtime | Time above 45 hours a week (the average, where hours are averaged) | Premium pay line | Calculated daily, ignoring the weekly basis |
| Rest day and public holiday work | Calendar + records | Relevant pay lines | Holiday calendar not updated |
| Leave and sick days | Leave record, medical report | Paid/unpaid leave, sick days | Form entered late |
| Absence, lateness | Missing record, shift deviation | Deduction for unworked time | Unapproved exception becoming a deduction |
| Meal or travel entitlement | Canteen/shuttle record | Allowance line | Entitlement given regardless of shift |
In Türkiye, overtime is calculated on a 45-hour weekly basis under Articles 41 and 63 of Labour Law No. 4857, with an annual cap of 270 hours. The calculation differs where working time is averaged over a longer period or the contract sets fewer than 45 hours a week, so these rules should be configured together with HR and your accountant. The integration should not recalculate these rules; it should carry the result the attendance system produced into payroll under the right code. Our data quality and duplicate records guide shows how to keep employee data clean in both systems.
How to set up time and attendance payroll integration in 7 steps
- Settle on one employee identity. Where is the employee ID created, and how does it reach the other system? Starters and leavers should be entered in one place only, with the other system following.
- Map your pay codes. Every status in the attendance system (normal time, overtime, night work, paid leave, sick leave, absence) must correspond to a payroll code. The mapping table should be written down and signed off by the owners on both sides.
- Choose the transfer method. Depending on what your payroll package supports, use a file import, a direct API connection or a staging table. We explain the differences in API integration explained.
- Build the approval flow. Overtime and exceptions should be approved by the line manager before they reach payroll. An unapproved record should not travel to payroll even with a "pending" flag.
- Lock the period. After the timesheet period closes, retrospective changes should only be possible for an authorised role, with a reason recorded. Otherwise payroll and timesheet drift apart.
- Run in parallel. For the first one or two months, run the new transfer alongside the old method and trace every difference to its source. More often than not, the differences expose errors in the old process rather than the integration.
- Keep the audit trail. Every payroll line should be traceable to the door record and the approval it came from. When a query comes in, the answer should be found without searching across spreadsheets.
If your payroll package only accepts files and the transfer is repeated by hand every month in the same steps, robotic process automation can take it over; see RPA explained for which tasks suit it. If the whole process still runs on spreadsheets, outgrowing spreadsheets shows when it is time to move to software.
Keeping both systems in sync for starters and leavers
Integrations most often break mid-period, when people join or leave. If an employee starts on the 12th but their card is only set up on the 14th, two days of work never reach the timesheet; if a leaver's card is not cancelled on the 20th, door entries appear for someone whose payroll is already closed. That is why starters and leavers must originate in one place, with card issue and cancellation part of the same workflow. The leaver's email and file access should close the same day too; our checklist is in offboarding email access.
How we deliver payroll integration at Digital Bridge
We treat integration not as a file-format question but as a process running from the door to payroll. Because the same team builds our software and hardware, you have one contact from the door terminal through to the payroll transfer.
- Discovery and requirements. We review your current timesheet flow, the transfer methods your payroll package supports, your employee ID structure and your leave and sick-note processes. We set out in writing what needs to change on the HR, payroll and personnel management side.
- Code mapping and design. Together with your HR and finance teams we tabulate the payroll equivalents of each timesheet code and define approval and period-close rules.
- Integration. Where your payroll package allows it we build an API integration; where it does not, a controlled file transfer. If several applications need linking, we turn them into a single flow through system integrations, and where payroll runs inside an ERP we bring that into scope as well.
- Pilot and parallel run. We recommend starting with one department and running one or two periods in parallel; we then close the gaps with you before rolling out across the business.
SmartPass: the timesheet starts at the door and leaves ready for payroll
Our own product, SmartPass, combines card access control, time and attendance and canteen meal counting in a single system. That solves the hardest part of any integration, the source data, from the outset: when an employee taps their card, the door opens and an attendance record is created, with no separate time clock and so no second record to reconcile. How the door read itself works is explained in what a card access control system is. Integration shrinks from reconciling two sources to carrying one source into payroll.
Timesheets follow the shift plan; late-arrival and early-leave tolerances, breaks, overtime thresholds and rounding are applied by rule, and the same input always produces the same result. Missing reads are not guessed: the day is flagged as "missing read" and waits for a justified correction, which is kept as a separate record and never deletes the original read. When the month is closed it is locked, and the export file is produced only from that locked month: a per-person monthly summary with employee number, department, cost centre and durations in minutes, downloaded as CSV from the panel or retrieved as JSON through the API. Every download appears in the export history with its time, period, headcount and the user who ran it, and the staff list itself is updated from an Excel or CSV file taken from the ERP. Because the same card read is used in the canteen, a meal is deducted if the employee is entitled to it; we explain how meal entitlement ties to shifts in canteen meal counting automation. As the timesheet is produced directly from the door reads, there is no second record system to check when a query comes in.
Auditing is built into the core: every change is logged with its previous and new value, and reopening a locked month requires a reason that is logged too. With 43 separate panel permissions, a payroll specialist can, for example, be given timesheet viewing only. Card numbers are not stored, only a one-way hash and the last four digits, and once the retention period ends, fields that identify the person are deleted automatically. Several sites can each be opened as a separate SmartPass organisation with its own database. Because SmartPass is part of the Smart360 product family, HR and payroll staff sign in with their Smart360 identity (SmartID), with no separate SmartPass password. If you are still choosing attendance software, the ten questions in choosing time and attendance software will protect the integration from the start.
Next step
To get started, gather the last three months of timesheet files, the name of your payroll package and a rough count of payroll corrections made at month end. Then contact us through our contact page; we will draw up the code mapping with you and show how SmartPass timesheets can flow into your payroll. For more guides on attendance and card access, visit our Access Control & Attendance hub or start with the time and attendance system guide.