Employee access tracking

1. What I walked into

Paper attendance sheets, typed in by hand every week for payroll. Keys and a gatekeeper at the gates, and queues at every shift change.

• wrong entries surfaced at the end of the month
• nobody could say who was in the building at any moment

2. What I changed or built

Card access on four gates, and an app that turns the entries into working time automatically, matched to the shift pattern. Shift leads see their team on their phones.

• card readers on the existing gates
• the server side in C#, the mobile side in React Native
• an export straight into the payroll software

3. The numbers

320 employees, four gates, no paper. Payroll saves six hours of admin a week, and month-end corrections have all but disappeared.

4. The tools, and why these

Built in-house because the boxed products did not understand the plant’s three-shift pattern or its existing gates. C# and MSSQL fitted the company’s Windows estate, so running it needed no new skills.

5. What it meant for the business

Working time became a fact rather than an argument. At a fire drill the roll call is ready in seconds, and shift planning works from real attendance.