Time & Attendance Device Integration

A factory with four hundred operators does not have a time problem, it has a data problem. Punches land in a biometric terminal on the shop floor, in a spreadsheet the supervisor keeps for the night shift, and in WhatsApp messages from the field crew. Somebody re-keys all of it before payroll, and every month a handful of hours are wrong in a way nobody can reconstruct. Meanwhile the production and project modules in Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management are perfectly capable of costing labour, and they never see the real hours.

The Time and attendance module already does the hard part. It holds registration workers, profiles and pay agreements, applies tolerance and rounding, derives overtime and premiums, handles absence codes, and runs the Calculate, Approve and Transfer sequence that pushes approved hours to production jobs, project timesheets and payroll. What it does not do is talk to your clock hardware, work when the network drops, or handle a mobile punch from a technician standing on a customer site. That is the gap.

What ECOSIRE builds

We build a licensed extension for Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management, written in X++ as extension models only, plus the integration surface your devices need. No overlayering, so your one-version service updates stay clean. The design principle throughout is that we feed the standard Time and attendance engine rather than replacing it. Your pay agreements, profiles and absence rules stay where your HR and payroll teams can see and change them.

Getting punches in

We build a device ingestion endpoint that accepts punches from your clock terminals: biometric readers, RFID and proximity badge readers, or any device that can post a payload or drop a file. Punches land first in a staging table with the raw device payload preserved, so a disputed hour can always be traced back to what the device actually sent.

Badge and device identifiers are mapped to registration workers and through them to Human resources workers, with effective dating so a reissued badge or a transferred employee does not corrupt history. Where a terminal loses its network, buffered punches are replayed on reconnect and de-duplicated on arrival, because a replayed batch that double-counts a shift is worse than a missing one.

We do not sell or certify the hardware. You buy the terminals that suit your sites, and we integrate with what they can actually emit. If a device can only produce a nightly file on an SFTP share, we build to that and say so up front.

Mobile and field punches

For field crews, drivers and site supervisors we build mobile punch through a Power Apps canvas app on Dataverse, with dual-write carrying the registration into F&O. Optional geofence validation and a photo capture on clock-in give you the evidence trail that a site-based workforce usually needs. The same validation, tolerance and exception rules apply, so a mobile punch is not a second-class registration with its own quirks.

Turning punches into hours

Staged punches are validated before they become registrations. Missing clock-outs, duplicated scans, out-of-sequence events, punches against a worker with no active position, and punches outside any recognised profile all go to a typed exception queue with a supervisor assignment, rather than being silently dropped or silently accepted.

Accepted punches are written as standard time and attendance registrations, so the standard Calculate step applies your profile matching, tolerance windows, rounding, break deductions, overtime thresholds and premium rules. Approval runs through workflow with supervisor and department routing, and Transfer moves approved hours onward. Import, calculate and transfer all run as scheduled batch framework jobs with monitoring, so the sequence completes overnight and the exceptions are waiting for supervisors when they arrive.

Labour cost where it belongs

Approved hours can be posted against production jobs so the cost of a manufactured item reflects the labour actually spent on it, or against project timesheets where work is billable or capitalised. Ledger and financial dimensions default from the worker, position, department and cost centre, so labour cost lands in the right place in the ledger without a journal correction cycle. For payroll we expose data entities and OData endpoints carrying approved hours, overtime and absence by pay code, in the layout your payroll provider expects.

Visibility while the shift is running

Business events are raised for missed punches, no-shows, unusual overtime accumulation and late clock-ins, so a supervisor is notified during the shift rather than at the end of the pay period. Who is on site right now, by site and department, is available as a screen and as an entity for your own reporting or Power BI model.

Who it is for

Manufacturers running shift patterns with production job costing. Field service, construction and facilities operations where the workforce is rarely at a fixed location. Multi-site organisations that need one attendance standard across legal entities with different local rules. Any F&O customer currently re-keying clock data into a spreadsheet before payroll runs.

How delivery works

We begin with a scoping call covering your clock hardware and what it can emit, your shift and overtime rules, your legal entity and position structure, whether hours must reach production jobs or project timesheets, and which payroll system consumes the output. You receive a written scope and a fixed quote before any code is written.

On acceptance we build against your version in our own development environment, then deliver a deployable package with source in your Azure DevOps repository if you want it. Installation goes into your Tier-2 or higher sandbox through your LCS pipeline, where we connect at least one real device, configure profiles and pay agreements with your team, and run parallel against your current process for a pay period so the numbers are proven before anyone depends on them. Production deployment follows on your change window. Typical lead time from signed quote to sandbox install is two to four weeks, with device connectivity often the longest pole.

What this is not

Nothing here is pre-built or downloadable, and there is no free trial. Every build is made for your devices, rules and environment after a quotation. It is not a Business Central app. It is not a payroll engine: it produces approved hours and pay codes and hands them to your payroll system. It does not replace the Time and attendance module, and if your requirement is met by the standard registration terminal alone we will say so in the scoping call.

After go-live

The build ships with a support window covering defect fixes and compatibility with service updates released inside it. Ongoing support, additional sites and additional device types are quoted separately, and you keep the package and, where included, the source.