Attendance software usually looks simple from the outside.

An employee checks in.

An employee checks out.

Someone requests leave.

A manager approves it.

At the end of the month, HR sends the numbers to payroll.

The difficulty begins when something does not go perfectly.

What happens when somebody forgets to check out?

What if an employee says the recorded time is wrong?

Was that missing time actually zero hours worked—or is the answer simply unknown?

Which leave policy applied to this employee on that particular date?

Did the manager change the record, or was it corrected through an approved process?

Can HR reproduce exactly what was sent to payroll three months ago?

These are the questions that turn a basic attendance tracker into an operational system of record.

InOrOff is built around that distinction.

It is a leave and attendance management platform for teams of roughly 5 to 250 people, designed around a simple principle:

Record what actually happened, preserve what is uncertain, and make every important number traceable to the event and policy that produced it.

Employees check in, check out and request leave. Managers handle approvals from a central inbox. Administrators configure schedules, holidays, leave rules and attendance policies, then close each month into a versioned payroll handoff.

The result is not just another digital attendance register.

It is an attempt to make workforce records explainable.

What Is InOrOff?

InOrOff combines two everyday HR functions:

Attendance management

and

Leave management

inside one system.

But the product deliberately keeps the employee experience small.

Most employees mainly need to do three things:

Check in or check out.

Apply for leave.

Report something that needs correction.

Managers receive a focused approval workflow.

The more complicated policy machinery—schedules, leave accrual, holiday calendars, office-network controls, year-end rules, monthly closure and data retention—stays primarily with administrators.

That separation matters.

Employees should not need to understand the entire HR policy engine merely to tell the company:

“I have started work.”

or:

“I would like Friday off.”

Feature 1: A Simple “Today” Page for Employees

For most employees, attendance begins with the Today view.

The page shows what is expected for that day and what has already been recorded.

Employees can check in and check out directly from their browser. If the organization’s attendance policy requires explicit break recording, they can also start and end breaks. Otherwise, a configured fixed unpaid break can be deducted automatically.

This browser-first model keeps the workflow straightforward:

Start work → Check in

Take required break → Record it

Finish work → Check out

The underlying rules can be sophisticated without forcing the employee interface to become complicated.

Feature 2: The Server Decides the Time

One subtle but important design decision is that InOrOff does not trust the employee’s laptop or phone clock when recording attendance.

The server timestamps the attendance event.

Changing the local clock therefore does not change the official attendance time.

The platform also states that browser-supplied forwarded network headers are ignored when applying office-network controls. Instead, the network decision uses the address observed by the service itself.

The idea is simple:

the attendance record should be created from information the attendance system can trust.

Feature 3: Optional Office-Network Attendance Without GPS Tracking

Organizations sometimes want employees to record attendance only while physically at the workplace.

Many workforce systems approach this through:

GPS tracking, geofencing, photographs, facial recognition, biometrics or continuous device monitoring.

InOrOff takes a much narrower approach.

Administrators can optionally require check-in and check-out to originate from an approved office network.

Before enabling that rule, administrators can test the network through the configuration interface.

At the same time, InOrOff explicitly states that it does not collect GPS location, photographs, biometrics, keystrokes or browsing activity.

The public network address associated with an attendance event can be retained as evidence for the network rule; the current privacy policy states a default retention period of 90 days, configurable by the employer.

That creates an interesting middle ground:

verify the attendance network when required without turning attendance software into employee-surveillance software.

Feature 4: Leave Requests Show the Consequence Before Submission

Leave calculations often become confusing surprisingly quickly.

Suppose an employee requests five calendar days.

One day is Saturday.

One is Sunday.

One is a public holiday.

The employee works a non-standard schedule.

And one requested day is a half day.

How much leave should actually be deducted?

InOrOff calculates the result before the employee submits the request.

The preview can show which dates count, which are holidays or rest days, how many minutes will be deducted and what the employee’s remaining balance will be.

Importantly, the preview is not merely an approximation.

The site states that the same calculation shown during preview is used when the request is actually committed.

That removes an irritating class of HR problem:

“The form told me it would deduct three days, but after approval it deducted four.”

Feature 5: Half Days Come From the Real Work Schedule

A half day sounds obvious until different employees work different schedules.

If one person’s expected workday is eight hours and another’s is six, hard-coding:

Half day = four hours

can produce incorrect records.

InOrOff derives half-day duration from the employee’s actual work schedule rather than assuming a universal duration.

Schedules can include weekday-specific hours, unpaid breaks, overnight work and named time zones.

That makes the leave calculation follow the employee’s expected working time rather than an arbitrary company-wide number.

Feature 6: Leave Balances Explain Themselves

A single number labeled:

Annual Leave: 12

can hide a lot of information.

Does that mean 12 days remain right now?

Are approved future holidays already deducted?

Is another request awaiting approval?

Will some balance expire soon?

InOrOff separates these states.

Employees can see information such as available leave, already-used leave, approved upcoming leave, requests awaiting approval and balances approaching expiry.

This makes the balance more useful because employees can understand why it has its current value.

Feature 7: Leave Can Be Withdrawn, Cancelled or Returned for Change

Real leave requests are not immutable.

Plans change.

An employee submits the wrong dates.

A manager wants additional information.

A previously approved holiday is cancelled.

InOrOff supports these lifecycle states rather than treating every request as simply:

Approved or Rejected.

Pending requests can be withdrawn.

Approved requests can be cancelled and their balance credited back.

A manager can return a request for changes, allowing the employee to revise and resubmit it.

That is closer to how leave actually works inside organizations.

Feature 8: One Approval Inbox for Managers

Managers receive a centralized approval inbox containing leave requests and attendance corrections from the people who report to them.

The manager can see information such as dates, affected working days and balance impact, then approve, reject or return the item for changes. Multiple items can also be decided together.

There is an important safeguard:

Nobody can approve their own request.

If a user holds several roles, the system still prevents self-approval and routes the request to the next appropriate reviewer.

That rule sounds obvious.

But enforcing it in the workflow is much stronger than relying on organizational etiquette.

Feature 9: Managers Know Someone Is Away Without Knowing Why

Leave management contains information that should not necessarily be exposed to every manager.

An employee may provide a personal reason for leave.

They may upload medical evidence.

That does not mean every person who needs scheduling visibility should also receive access to private health information.

InOrOff separates those concerns.

Managers can see that an employee supplied a reason, but the reason itself—and any medical evidence—is restricted to designated HR reviewers.

Similarly, the team absence calendar shows who is away, but not why they are away.

That is a small design choice with important privacy consequences.

A scheduling tool needs availability.

It does not necessarily need somebody’s medical history.

Feature 10: Missing Punches Become Reviewed Corrections

Forgotten check-ins and check-outs happen.

Traditional systems often solve the problem by allowing somebody to directly edit the attendance row.

That may fix the visible number—but it destroys the history.

InOrOff uses a different model.

An employee can report:

a missing check-in, missing checkout, incorrect session or missed break.

They provide a reason, and the correction goes through review. Nothing changes in the official record until the correction is approved.

More importantly:

approved corrections supersede the original event rather than overwriting it.

The original remains in history, and the replacement event points back to what it corrected.

That means an auditor—or simply HR six months later—can distinguish:

what was originally recorded

from

what was subsequently corrected.

Feature 11: A Forgotten Checkout Is Not Invented

This is one of InOrOff’s most distinctive rules.

Suppose an employee checks in at 9:00 AM and forgets to check out.

At some configured deadline, the system needs to stop treating that attendance session as indefinitely open.

A simplistic attendance system might automatically create:

Checkout: 7:00 PM

That makes the timesheet look complete.

But the employee did not actually record a 7:00 PM departure.

InOrOff instead creates an administrative closure.

It records that the session was closed administratively and keeps that different from a genuine employee checkout. It does not invent a departure time or worked total simply to make the record look tidy.

That embodies much of the product’s philosophy:

a neat-looking record should not be created by pretending something happened when it did not.

Feature 12: Unknown Means UNKNOWN

The same idea applies when attendance cannot be calculated reliably.

If the end of a working session is genuinely unknown, InOrOff does not automatically turn it into:

0 minutes

or:

the employee’s scheduled finish time.

It exports the value as:

UNKNOWN

until the issue is resolved.

That distinction can be extremely important for payroll.

Zero means:

“We know this employee worked zero minutes.”

Unknown means:

“We do not currently have enough trustworthy information to determine the total.”

Those are completely different statements.

A payroll process should investigate the second—not silently treat it as the first.

Feature 13: Attendance Is More Than Present or Absent

InOrOff keeps several dimensions of a working day separate.

Its current model distinguishes concepts including:

scheduled time, observed attendance, reviewed information, leave, timeliness and unresolved state.

This allows reporting to explain what kind of information a number represents rather than collapsing every event into one attendance status.

The system also flags attendance occurring during approved leave as an exception for review rather than silently deleting either the attendance or leave record.

Again, conflicting facts are surfaced rather than hidden.

Feature 14: Overnight Shifts and Daylight Saving Are Handled Deliberately

Time arithmetic becomes difficult around:

overnight shifts, time zones and daylight-saving transitions.

InOrOff schedules support overnight work and named time zones. Durations are calculated using actual time instants rather than simply subtracting displayed clock values.

A shift beginning at 22:00 and ending at 06:00 belongs to the day on which it began, and overnight shifts can have their own administrative-close deadline.

That matters for organizations where working days do not fit neatly inside midnight-to-midnight boundaries.

Feature 15: Administrators Define the Work Schedule Once

Administrators can configure working schedules with weekday hours, breaks, time zones and overnight shifts.

The system publishes schedules alongside a worked calculation showing values such as:

office span, unpaid break, expected working time and half-day duration.

This makes the policy easier to inspect.

Rather than storing:

Monday schedule: “Standard Schedule A”

the system can explain the actual arithmetic that Schedule A creates.

Feature 16: Holiday Calendars Can Vary by Location

Organizations operating in several cities, regions or countries do not necessarily share the same public holidays.

InOrOff supports holiday calendars at the location level.

Administrators can preview country and regional calendars and adopt individual dates. Calendars are published per year, and the system warns administrators if the following year’s calendar has not yet been prepared.

Before changing a calendar, administrators can also see the potential impact.

That is useful because changing a public holiday after people have already submitted leave can alter balances and historical calculations.

Feature 17: Flexible Leave Rules

Leave policies rarely consist of:

Everyone receives 20 days every January.

InOrOff supports a broader set of policy controls including annual grants, monthly accrual, joining-year proration, carry-forward, expiry, probation and notice-period rules, maximum consecutive leave, paid versus unpaid leave and authorized overrides.

Leave types can also be archived when they are no longer used.

The platform provides country-oriented starting sets for statutory and commonly used leave types and displays a stated legal basis with those lines.

However, InOrOff explicitly states that it is not a legal-compliance service. Employers remain responsible for configuring policies appropriately for their jurisdiction and for having a lawful basis to record employee attendance and leave.

That distinction matters.

Templates can help administrators configure the system.

They do not replace local employment-law advice.

Feature 18: Ask “Why Does This Policy Apply?”

One particularly useful administrative feature is the ability to inspect why a particular policy applies to a particular person on a particular date.

InOrOff can identify which:

schedule, holiday calendar, attendance policy and approver

apply, along with where that configuration came from—for example, a direct assignment, location default or organization-level setting.

That solves a surprisingly common HR problem:

“Why did the system calculate this employee differently from everyone else?”

Instead of forcing an administrator to reconstruct a chain of configuration manually, the system is designed to expose that chain.

Feature 19: See the Impact Before Changing Policy

Administrative changes can have consequences.

Moving somebody to a different schedule, for example, may affect:

existing attendance days, leave records or previously finalized periods.

InOrOff performs an impact preview before certain changes are committed and refuses changes that would improperly reach back into finalized periods.

This treats HR configuration more like controlled operational data than a collection of editable form fields.

Feature 20: Year-End Readiness Instead of January Surprises

Year boundaries are another source of leave-management problems.

New holiday calendars need to exist.

Carry-forward rules need to run.

Schedules must still be valid.

Old drafts should not accidentally affect the new year.

InOrOff provides a new-year readiness checklist and a rehearsal that runs the actual rollover logic and then rolls it back.

The idea is similar to a production dry run:

test what January will do before January arrives.

Feature 21: Monthly Close Before Payroll

Attendance records eventually need to leave the attendance system and reach payroll.

InOrOff deliberately stops short of becoming payroll software.

Instead, it creates a structured payroll handoff containing information such as expected and worked minutes together with paid and unpaid leave. Tax calculations, wages and overtime rules remain the responsibility of the payroll system.

Before a month is finalized, InOrOff runs a readiness check.

It identifies unresolved items such as:

pending corrections, unresolved attendance days and open reviews.

The administrator can therefore resolve problems before freezing the period.

Feature 22: Finalized Months Are Versioned

Once a month is finalized, InOrOff creates a numbered snapshot with a content hash.

The generated CSV and PDF belong to that specific version.

If a legitimate correction needs to be made later, the old month is not silently rewritten.

Instead, the adjustment produces a new version while the previous one remains available.

That means an organization can answer:

“What exactly did we send payroll at the end of June?”

even after a July correction affects June.

This is very different from an ordinary spreadsheet where somebody may simply edit a cell and save the file again.

Feature 23: Payroll Exports Preserve Uncertainty and Provenance

The payroll CSV uses integer minutes and includes provenance information. Where a value is genuinely unresolved, it can contain UNKNOWN instead of inventing a numeric answer. The export is also designed to be safe against spreadsheet-formula injection.

The corresponding PDF is generated from the persisted CSV belonging to that finalization version—not recalculated later from whatever happens to be in the live database.

This gives both representations the same historical source.

Feature 24: Reports for Attendance, Leave and Exceptions

Administrators can generate reports covering areas such as:

daily team attendance, monthly employee attendance, leave balances, leave transactions, upcoming leave, missing-punch exceptions and approved corrections.

Download authorization is re-evaluated when a file is requested.

Someone who previously had permission but no longer holds the appropriate role should therefore not retain access simply because the report was generated earlier.

Feature 25: Multi-Organisation and Multi-Location Workspaces

InOrOff can hold several organizations and locations inside one workspace.

Its paid plans include unlimited organizations and locations, with pricing instead based primarily on the number of active employees.

This can be useful for companies operating:

multiple offices, branches, legal entities or country locations

where schedules, holidays and policies may differ but administrators still want one management environment.

Feature 26: CSV Employee Import With a Dry Run

Migrating employee data should not require entering everyone manually.

InOrOff supports CSV import with a dry run before changes are applied.

The import is also designed to be idempotent: running the same file again should not create duplicate changes.

That is particularly useful during initial setup when organizations may iterate on the import file several times.

Feature 27: Database-Enforced Tenant Isolation

In a multi-tenant HR system, one of the most important security questions is:

“Can Company A ever access Company B’s records?”

InOrOff says tenant isolation is enforced directly in PostgreSQL using row-level security on every tenant table.

The application database role cannot bypass those policies and does not own the protected tables. Tenant context is set per transaction, reducing the risk of pooled database connections leaking one employer’s information into another employer’s request.

The product also states that requesting another employer’s record should produce the same response as requesting a record that does not exist.

That prevents the interface from even leaking whether another tenant’s identifier is valid.

Feature 28: Two-Factor Authentication and Step-Up for Sensitive Actions

Users can enable authenticator-app two-factor authentication.

But InOrOff goes beyond simply requiring 2FA at initial sign-in.

Sensitive actions—such as publishing policy, finalizing a month, granting support access or downloading an organizational export—can require the administrator to prove their identity again during the current session.

This reduces the risk that an unattended authenticated browser session can be used to perform a high-impact administrative action.

Feature 29: Medical Evidence Is Treated as Private Data

Employees can attach evidence to leave requests where the employer enables that capability.

Current supported uploads are PDF, JPEG and PNG, up to 5 MB each and up to three attachments.

Files are stored using generated names, kept outside the public web root and quarantined until a malware scan succeeds.

Medical evidence is accessible only to the person concerned and authorized HR reviewers—not ordinary managers and not team calendars or reports.

This is a sensible separation between:

managing someone’s absence

and

accessing sensitive evidence explaining that absence.

Feature 30: Support Cannot Quietly Browse Customer Records

Many SaaS privacy policies say staff access customer data “when necessary.”

InOrOff uses a more explicit support-access model.

If support needs to inspect an employer’s records, the employer’s administrator must grant a named support operator read-only access for a limited period of up to 72 hours.

The grant can be revoked, and every access is recorded in the customer’s audit history.

That means support access is intended to be:

explicit, temporary, limited and visible.

Feature 31: Full Data Export and Configurable Retention

InOrOff allows administrators to export the information their organization entered together with records the service computed for it.

Retention can also be configured for several classes of information.

The current defaults documented by InOrOff include:

network-address evidence for 90 days, monthly export files for 400 days and audit history for seven years. A legal hold can suspend automatic deletion.

When an organization requests workspace deletion, there is a 30-day grace period during which the request can be cancelled before removal occurs.

Feature 32: No Advertising or Analytics Tracking

According to the current privacy policy, InOrOff does not use employee information for advertising, does not sell data and does not set advertising or analytics cookies.

Its stated cookies are limited to the authenticated session and a preference indicating the last workspace opened.

That fits the broader product philosophy:

an attendance tool needs enough information to operate reliably.

It does not need to become an employee-behavior analytics platform.

Feature 33: Straightforward Pricing

InOrOff currently offers a 14-day free trial with no card required.

Its paid pricing is intentionally simple.

The Team plan is currently $29 per month for up to 50 active employees with 2 GB for evidence and exports.

The Business plan is currently $79 per month for up to 250 active employees with 10 GB of storage.

Both plans include all product features and security controls, as well as unlimited organizations and locations.

In other words, InOrOff does not currently use feature gating to make capabilities such as audit history, data export or security available only on the higher-priced plan.

Active-employee limits are also handled conservatively: hitting the limit stops additional employee activations rather than disabling attendance for people already using the system.

What InOrOff Is Not

Understanding the boundaries of the product is important.

It Is Not Payroll

InOrOff prepares reviewed time and leave information for payroll.

It does not calculate salaries, taxes or payroll-specific overtime rules.

It Is Not Legal-Compliance Software

The platform can help model leave and attendance policies, but the employer remains responsible for ensuring those policies and data-processing practices comply with local law.

It Is Not Employee-Surveillance Software

InOrOff states that it does not collect GPS location, photos, biometrics, keystrokes or browsing activity. Its strongest workplace-presence control is the optional office-network rule.

These boundaries actually make the product easier to understand.

Its job is:

leave + attendance + reviewed records + payroll handoff.

What Is Still Being Built?

One commendable part of the current InOrOff feature page is that it explicitly lists capabilities that are not yet available instead of quietly implying that everything is finished.

As of this review, payments are activated through invoices rather than a hosted card-checkout flow.

The security page also states that verified database checkpoints are taken before releases and restores are rehearsed, but off-host backup copies are still on the roadmap.

Independent external uptime monitoring is likewise listed as work in progress, and the terms state that InOrOff does not currently provide a service-level agreement at launch.

These are meaningful limitations for organizations evaluating the product, particularly for business-critical deployments.

Publishing them openly is better than hiding them in a sales conversation.

Who Is InOrOff For?

The current product is most naturally suited to small and mid-sized organizations that need more control than a spreadsheet but do not necessarily need a massive enterprise HR suite.

That can include professional-services companies, technology companies, agencies, training organizations, smaller manufacturers, distributed office teams and multi-location businesses.

It is especially relevant where an organization needs to answer questions such as:

Was this attendance event actually recorded or later corrected?

Which policy applied?

Who approved the change?

Why was this leave balance calculated this way?

What exactly did we send to payroll?

Can we reproduce that answer six months later?

If those questions matter, the product’s traceability model becomes more important than flashy HR dashboards.

The Bigger Idea: HR Records Should Tell the Truth, Including When the Truth Is Unknown

Many business applications optimize for completeness.

Every field should contain something.

Every report should have a number.

Every timesheet should balance.

But sometimes forcing completeness creates false information.

A forgotten checkout is not a 7 PM checkout.

An unresolved working day is not zero hours.

A corrected attendance record should not erase the thing that was corrected.

A revised payroll period should not silently rewrite the file that payroll previously received.

InOrOff takes a more accounting-like approach:

preserve the original event, record the correction, retain the reason, identify the policy, and version the final output.

That principle appears repeatedly throughout the product.

It is arguably more important than any individual attendance feature.

Final Thoughts

Leave and attendance management looks like a solved problem until somebody needs to explain a historical record.

Then the questions begin.

When did this person actually check in?

Was that a real checkout or an automatic closure?

Why did their leave request consume this many hours?

Which holiday calendar applied?

Who changed the record?

What did the record look like before the correction?

What version did payroll receive?

InOrOff is built around being able to answer those questions.

Employees get a deliberately small experience for attendance and leave.

Managers get approvals and team availability without unnecessary exposure to sensitive reasons.

Administrators get schedules, calendars, policy rules, impact previews, corrections, audit history and a controlled monthly close.

And payroll receives a versioned handoff where an unknown value is allowed to remain UNKNOWN instead of being silently converted into a convenient fiction.

That makes InOrOff’s positioning unusually clear:

It is not trying to monitor employees more aggressively.

It is trying to make attendance and leave records more trustworthy.

For organizations moving beyond spreadsheets—or frustrated by HR systems that show a number but cannot explain where it came from—that is a compelling place to start.

InOrOff: leave and attendance, with records you can explain.

Rajesh Kumar

I’m Rajesh Kumar, a DevOps, SRE, DevSecOps, Cloud, and Platform Engineering expert passionate about sharing practical knowledge, real-world experiences, and industry best practices. I have worked at Cotocus and regularly write about technology, travel, investing, health, product reviews, and digital marketing through my various platforms.

I publish technical articles at DevOps School, travel stories at Holiday Landmark, stock market insights at Stocks Mantra, health and fitness guidance at My Medic Plus, product reviews at TrueReviewNow, and SEO and digital marketing strategies at Wizbrand.