Yes. Admin › QR Biometric Attendance, on the Staff card, has an Out Time rule.
Tick Mark Short Leave on Early Out and set Allow Leaving Up To N minutes before decided time. An employee who clocks out earlier than that allowance has the day recorded as Short Leave instead of Present.
It starts switched off. A school that never opens the screen sees no change at all.
How the allowance works
The comparison is against that employee's own decided out time for that day — there is no school-wide finishing time; it is per employee, per weekday, from their shift.
With a 2:00 PM out time and a 15-minute allowance:
| Clock-out | Recorded as |
|---|---|
| 11:00 AM | Short Leave |
| 1:44 PM | Short Leave |
| 1:45 PM | Present — landing exactly on the allowance is on time |
| 2:00 PM | Present |
| 2:10 PM | Present |
One setting covers every way staff clock out
QR, biometric, face attendance and the teacher app's location (geofence) attendance all follow the same rule. The Geo Location Attendance screen shows the setting read-only and links back here — you do not set it twice.
Only Present and Late convert
A day already marked Leave, Off Day, Absent, Official Duty or any other status is never changed by somebody walking past a reader. Only Present and Late become Short Leave.
The status is decided at the punch and stored
It is worked out when the employee clocks out and saved as it was. Changing the allowance next month never rewrites past days.
The rule is also one-directional: a later, on-time out punch on the same day does not clear a Short Leave already earned.
🔴 What it does to salary
- A Short Leave day counts against the Short Leave allowance on the employee's salary plan. If your school has not configured a short-leave deduction, the deduction is zero.
- It cancels the all-present allowance for that month, regardless of the salary plan. One Short Leave day anywhere in the month means the employee is not "all present", so they lose that month's bonusable allowances. This is the one money effect a school gets without configuring anything, so read it before ticking the box.
- Salaries already generated do not change. A generated salary is a snapshot. To reflect a corrected day you must delete that month's generated salary and generate it again.
It also lowers that teacher's presence percentage on the Teacher Performance Report, because a Short Leave day stays in the total but does not count as present.
It is not the same as Employee Auto Short Leave
The two tick boxes sit close together and read as if they were the same feature. They are opposites:
| Fires when | |
|---|---|
| Out Time / early out | the employee did clock out, but too early |
| Employee Auto Short Leave | the employee never clocked out at all — marked overnight |
They cannot collide, and a school may run both, one, or neither.
If the controls are greyed out
Your school has switched the Short Leave acronym off under Admin › Attendance Acronym Active/Inactive. The rule is unavailable until it is switched back on, and the screen says so — writing a status your reports have no column for would create data nobody can see.
Common confusion
"A teacher scanned twice on arrival and got a Short Leave." A second scan a minute after arriving is recorded as an Out, so with this rule on it becomes a Short Leave. A more generous allowance reduces this; the teacher-app path already ignores a second punch within 5 minutes.
"Last month's attendance did not change when I changed the allowance." That is intended. The status was decided on the day and stored.