Attendance Plans & Shifts
Before Nama can tell whether a punch was "late" or an hour was "overtime," it needs to know what the employee's schedule was supposed to be that day. Two master records carry that schedule: an Attendance Shift (ملف الدوام) is the reusable weekly-hours template — 8 to 4, Sunday to Thursday, say — and an Attendance Plan (خطة الدوام) is the document that hands a shift out to a range of employees for a period of time. Shifts are built once; plans are what assign them.
Attendance Shift — the weekly-hours template
Found at Payroll > Time Attendance > Shift.
A shift is keyed by Code / Group / Arabic Name / English Name like any master file, plus an AttendanceShiftType (نوع دوام الحضور) that decides how its hours are defined:
| Shift type | How it works |
|---|---|
| Normal (عادية) | A single fixed weekly pattern — the Main tab lists Saturday through Friday, each day with a Work day (يوم عمل) or Weekly Rest (راحة إسبوعية) switch and up to three Start/End time pairs (a split shift with a midday break, for example). |
| Automatic (تلقائي) | Instead of one fixed pattern, the Auto Shifts grid lists several candidate windows — each one pointing at an underlying Shift and carrying the arrival window (Start Time, End Time, Checkout From/To Time) that routes a punch to it. Nama reads the employee's actual punch and files it under whichever window it matches, and one row can be flagged as the Default Shift (دوام إفتراضى) to fall back on. Ideal when the same employees might work either a morning or an evening turn, and you want the system to recognise which one they worked instead of docking them (see the worked example below). |
| Rotational (دورية) | The Rotational Shift tab defines a Group Details grid (working hours per rotation group) and a Rotation Details grid (when each group's rotation starts and which rotation line it follows) — for shift patterns that cycle employees through different weeks on a schedule, rather than repeating the same week forever. |
Two more switches apply regardless of type:
| Field (English → Arabic) | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Allow Specifying Times For Weekends (السماح بتحديد مواعيد الحضور و الانصراف للعطلات الاسبوعية) | Lets a weekly-rest day still carry its own start/end times, for cases where staff are occasionally expected in on their day off. |
| Number Of Hours Allowed Before Preventing CheckOut (عدد الساعات المسموح بها قبل منع تسجيل الانصراف من خلال التطبيق) | Caps how early an employee can check out through the mobile/electronic attendance app before the shift's end time — see Time Attendance for how electronic check-ins and check-outs are recorded. |
Like other payroll master data, a shift can be scoped with the standard Dimensions (legal entity, branch, sector, department, analysis set) so different parts of the organization keep their own shift catalogs.
Automatic shift — letting Nama choose day vs. night
An automatic shift solves the classic "the employee might work either the morning or the evening turn, and I don't want the system to guess wrong and dock them" problem. You don't tell Nama which turn each person is on — you list every possible turn, each with the arrival window that identifies it, and Nama reads the actual punch and files it under whichever turn it falls in. Nothing is wrongly counted as late or absent, and the attendance/fingerprint report shows the punch against the turn it actually matched.
Each line of the Auto Shifts grid points at an underlying Shift — usually a Normal shift you built earlier — stamped with the arrival window that should route a punch to it:
| Column (English → Arabic) | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Shift (الدوام) | The already-built shift this window resolves to (the Morning or Night template, say). Required on every line. |
| Start Time / End Time (وقت الحضور من / إلى ساعة) | The check-in window that identifies this turn — a punch whose check-in falls inside it is measured against this shift. |
| Checkout From / To Time (وقت الانصراف من / إلى وقت) | The matching check-out window, for turns that also need the departure time to disambiguate. |
| Default Shift (دوام إفتراضى) | Flag one line as the fallback used when a punch matches no window. |
Worked example — a morning and an evening turn. Say the company runs a morning turn 8 AM–4 PM and an evening turn 4 PM–12 AM, and anyone who shows up within a couple of hours of the start counts as on time:
- Build two Normal shifts first — one "Morning" (8→4) and one "Evening" (4→12), each with its own weekly pattern.
- Build a third shift and set its AttendanceShiftType to Automatic.
- In its Auto Shifts grid add two lines:
- Line 1 → Shift = Morning, Start Time
7:00 AM, End Time9:00 AM. - Line 2 → Shift = Evening, Start Time
2:00 PM, End Time6:00 PM.
- Line 1 → Shift = Morning, Start Time
- Assign this automatic shift to the employees through an Attendance Plan, exactly as you would any other shift.
Now an employee who punches in anywhere between 7 and 9 is measured against the Morning turn; one who punches between 2 and 6 is measured against the Evening turn — with no manual reassignment. Widen or narrow each window to control how much early/late latitude each turn allows.
Attendance Plan — assigning a shift to employees
Found at Payroll > Time Attendance > Attendance Plan.
A plan doesn't define hours itself — it distributes shifts that already exist to whichever employees match a set of criteria, for a date range. Its header covers:
| Field (English → Arabic) | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Value Date / From Date / To Date (التاريخ الفعلي / من تاريخ / إلى تاريخ) | The window this plan is effective for. |
| Priority (الأولوية) | When more than one plan could apply to the same employee on the same day, the higher-priority plan wins. |
| Ignore Holidays (تجاهل الأجازات الرسمية) | Whether the shift's hours still count on days marked as official holidays. |
| Description (ملاحظات) | Free-text notes on the plan. |
The Collect Employees action (تجميع الموظفين) does the matching: fill in an employee range — From/To Employee, Department, Job Position, Organization Position, Branch, Sector, Group, Analysis Set, Employee Workplace, Department Section, Nationality, or Health Insurance Company — and the button pulls every employee who fits into the plan's Attendance Plans grid, where each line then names the actual Shift (الدوام) to apply (plus an optional Added Shift (دوام إضافي) for a second concurrent shift, and its own priority and date range per line).
A plan can also override weekly rest days
A second tab, Weekends, lets the same plan carry a separate set of lines — scoped by employee, department, job position, or department section, over a date range — that override an employee's normal weekly rest days (up to three weekend days per line) without touching their assigned shift. This is handled entirely within the Attendance Plan record; it doesn't require a separate document.
A plan, like a shift, can be scoped with the standard Dimensions (legal entity, branch, sector, department, analysis set).
Workflow
- Build the shift(s) under Shift — pick Normal for a fixed weekly pattern, Automatic when start times vary and Nama should match the closest window, or Rotational for a cycling schedule.
- Raise an Attendance Plan with the date range and priority it should apply for.
- Define the employee range and use Collect Employees to preview and populate the matching employees.
- Assign the shift (and, if needed, an added shift) on each collected line.
- Optionally add Weekends overrides on the same plan for employee groups whose weekly rest days differ from the default.
Related pages
- Time Attendance — where the actual punches recorded against these shifts are captured and turned into salary effects.
- Attendance Machines — how raw punch data reaches Nama in the first place, whether through scheduled machine integration or manual import.