Dayforce’s attendance management functionality requires a policy that combines the incident types, grades, and violations that you configured in Pay Setup > Attendance to create a customized framework that governs your employees’ attendance. With the appropriate role access, you can configure an attendance policy, an attendance rule policy, or both. You can configure similar attendance management functionality using either of these policy types, but with a few key differences.
Before You Begin: Configure incident types, violations, grades, and grade tracks in Dayforce before setting up an attendance policy or attendance rule policy.
| Policy Type | Description |
|---|---|
| Attendance policy |
An attendance policy groups together incident types, grades, violations, and more to dictate how Dayforce tracks your employees’ attendance. To customize how your attendance policy tracks employee attendance, you must assign it incident types, grades, violations, and more in the sub-tabs of the Attendance Policy tab:
|
| Attendance rule policy |
An attendance rule policy uses ruleset hierarchies of attendance rules and qualifiers to customize how Dayforce tracks employee attendance. There are attendance rules for incident types, grades, violations, and decrements. These attendance rules provide similar functionality to the settings that are available in some of the Attendance Policy tab’s sub-tabs (that is, the Grade, Violation, and Decrement sub-tabs). One exception is that the rule responsible for configuring incident types matches the functionality that’s available in the main Incident Type tab in Pay Setup > Attendance, not the sub-tab of the same name within the Attendance Policy tab. A benefit of configuring an attendance rule policy is that you can associate the Seniority Qualifier with your attendance rules and rulesets so that they qualify only when meeting certain conditions. You configure attendance rule policies in Pay Setup > Attendance, in the Attendance Rule Policy tab. Role feature access: Pay Setup > Pay Setup > Attendance > Attendance Rule Policy If you choose this approach, Dayforce still requires at least one attendance policy. To activate an attendance rule policy, you must take an attendance policy and link it with an attendance rule policy using the Attendance Rule Policy setting. Note that if you link policies, you don’t have to configure any of the attendance policy-specific settings (that is, in the sub-tabs of the Attendance Policy tab). However, depending on your requirements, you can configure Dayforce to leverage both policies, which is described below. |
| Both policies |
If necessary, you can configure Dayforce to process both an attendance policy and an attendance rule policy when calculating attendance. For example, if you associate an attendance rule policy with an active attendance policy, Dayforce examines both the attendance policy-specific settings and then the attendance rule policy-specific settings, in sequence. When tracking attendance using both policies, there are some best practices that you should follow. For example, you must ensure that the effective dates for some of your attendance tools don’t overlap if you configure them in both policies. See Attendance Management Best Practices. |
After you configure attendance policies, attendance rule policies, or both, you need to assign the attendance policies to employees in People. See Assign Attendance Policies to Employees.