Managing staff attendance and salary on a computer (Windows, Mac, Linux)

A phone is perfect for marking haziri at the shop door. But if you have fifteen or twenty-five people, do salaries at a desk, or want to see the whole month at once, a computer is simply easier: a bigger screen, a keyboard, and a printer next to it. Here is when a computer makes sense for your staff register, what to look for, and how to move between phone and PC without losing anything.

When a computer is the better tool

• More staff. With twenty names, scrolling a phone screen every morning gets slow. A table shows everyone at once.
• Month-end. Checking a full month of attendance, recording payments and making slips for everyone is far quicker with a mouse and keyboard.
• Printing. If you keep a printed register or hand out paper slips, the printer is attached to the computer.
• Someone else does the accounts. A munim or family member who works on the office PC can handle salaries while you run the floor.

If you have three staff and no office, a phone app is all you need. If you are somewhere in between, one routine that works well is to mark attendance on the phone each morning and do month-end on the computer.

Why not just use Excel?

Plenty of businesses keep the register in Excel or Google Sheets, and it works up to a point. A spreadsheet register is easy to start. The trouble comes later:

• You need a new sheet every month, and the formulas have to be copied correctly each time.
• One wrong entry, such as a “p” instead of “P”, or a number typed over a formula, silently changes a salary.
• Different pay types (monthly, daily, hourly), mid-month joiners, week offs, overtime and advances each need their own formulas.
• Salary slips have to be made separately, one by one.

An attendance and salary app does the same job without formulas: you mark the day, and the totals, the salary and the slip follow from it.

What to look for in attendance software for a PC

1. A month-at-a-glance register: staff down the side, days across the top, like a paper muster roll.
2. Keyboard marking, so you can fill or correct a month quickly without a click for every box.
3. Automatic salary for each pay type, with advances and payments subtracted.
4. PDF slips and registers you can save, print or send.
5. Works offline, with your data stored on your own computer.
6. A way to move data to and from your phone, if you also use one.
7. Windows, Mac and Linux, if you have more than one kind of computer.

The Hisab Pagar desktop app

Hisab Pagar, the free staff attendance and salary app for Android, is also available for Windows, macOS and Linux. It uses the same salary rules as the phone app, laid out for a big screen. It is free and needs no sign-up.

Dashboard

Opens on today: every active staff member with one click to mark present, absent, half day or paid leave, and buttons to mark everyone present or declare a holiday. Tiles across the top show present, absent and pending counts for today, the total salary due this month, and your cashbook balance.

Attendance register

The whole month for everyone in one grid. Click any box to mark it, or to add late, overtime and a note. Or select a box and use the keyboard:

Arrow keys move between boxes, so you can type a whole row: P → P → A. Click a day’s heading to mark that day for everyone. Totals for present, absent, half days, leave and overtime sit at the end of each row. Days in the future and days before someone’s joining date cannot be marked.

Staff, salary and cashbook

• Staff: a table of everyone, with a side panel for each person’s details, payments and salary slip. Add staff by typing the name and number.
• Salary: one table for the month with earned, advances, paid and balance for each person, totals at the bottom, and a button for the monthly register PDF. The AI monthly summary is here too, if you are online.
• Cashbook: income and expenses by category, with a breakdown of spending by category.

Slips, registers and WhatsApp

Salary slips and the monthly register are saved as PDF files on your computer, ready to print or attach. Choose WhatsApp on a slip and Hisab Pagar saves the PDF, then opens that staff member’s WhatsApp chat so you can drop the file in.

Reminders

Turn on the daily reminder and choose a time; a desktop notification reminds you to mark attendance, as long as Hisab Pagar is open on the computer.

Moving data between your phone and computer

The phone app and the desktop app each keep their own copy of your records on that device. They do not sync live; you move data with a backup file:

1. On the Android phone, open Settings → Backup & restore → Backup Data. This makes a backup file.
2. Send the file to the computer, for example by WhatsApp (WhatsApp Web or desktop) or email.
3. In the desktop app, open Settings and choose Restore Data, then pick the file.

It works the other way too: save a backup on the computer and restore it on the phone. Restoring replaces everything on that device with the backup, so decide where the latest records are before you restore. The simplest routine is to use one device as the main one and move the file only when you switch, for example phone during the month, computer at month-end.

Installing it

Download the installer for your computer from the Hisab Pagar download section of our home page:

• Windows: the .exe installer (64-bit).
• Mac: the .dmg, for both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs.
• Linux: an AppImage that runs on most distributions (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora and others).

Open it, add your business, add your staff, and mark today. The app is in the same 10 languages as the phone app; a few screens that only exist on the desktop are in English and Hindi for now.