Best Practice: Tracking Employee Working Hours – HR vs. Payroll vs. Time & Expense

[Kanat Mergenbayev]

Hi Community,

I am setting up a process for tracking and storing employee working hours and would like to get your advice on the recommended best practice within iDempiere.

Specifically, I am looking for the most efficient way to:

1. Store raw attendance/working hours (Daily clock-in/out).

2. Process this data for Payroll (Transforming hours into earnings/deductions).

I see three potential paths and would love to know which is considered the "standard" approach or if a hybrid is preferred:

• HR Module: Using HR_Attendance to track daily presence.

• Payroll Module: Directly entering hours into Payroll Concepts/Entries.

• Time & Expense: Using S_TimeExpense (especially if hours need to be linked to Projects).

Questions for the community:

• Which module do you find more robust for storing the primary record of hours?

• Are there existing processes or "Localizations" that you recommend for seamlessly moving hour totals from HR Attendance into Payroll?

• How do you handle the validation of hours before they hit the Payroll module?

Any insights on how you have implemented this for your clients or your own organizations would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

[Joseph]

AFAIK ， about Time & Expense 

Can :

• sell goods to customers ( create from  S_TimeExpense to Sale order and AR invoice)
• reimburse expense from employee ( create from  S_TimeExpense to AP invoice  )
• collect time sheet for daily tasks (for your Scenario of hours need to be linked to projects, but not generate an AP invoice or Payroll Entries to  employee   )

Can not

• record attendance   
• process  S_TimeExpense data to HR Module and Payroll Module

In short ，S_TimeExpense is good at some projects for sell goods and reimburse expense , not from HR Attendance into Payroll.