MerchantKits Attendance Manager

MerchantKits Attendance Manager is a WordPress plugin designed to provide attendance and leave management directly within the WordPress dashboard. Aimed at small teams and organizations that use WordPress, the plugin enables tracking of employee clock-in and clock-out times, management of shifts and leave requests, and generation of AI-powered attendance insights without relying on external HR systems. Employees can clock in using a shortcode widget on any WordPress page or via the REST API, while managers have the ability to approve leave requests with a single click. The plugin captures IP addresses automatically and offers optional geolocation features.

The system allows administrators to define shifts with start and end times, grace periods, breaks, and overnight support. It automatically calculates late minutes, total hours, and overtime for each employee based on their assigned shifts. Employees can request leave through the frontend, with live balance displays, and the plugin manages leave requests with built-in balance calculations, overlap detection, and minimum notice rules. For reporting and oversight, the dashboard displays real-time status of present, late, on-leave, and absent employees, and provides sortable, filterable tables for employees, attendance, and leave records. These tables support one-click CSV export and are accessible via a REST API under mkam/v1.

AI attendance insights are available by connecting the plugin to an OpenAI key, allowing users to generate monthly summaries and detect absence patterns; data is only sent to OpenAI when the user chooses to generate insights. The plugin uses four frontend shortcodes to provide employees with self-service access to attendance and leave dashboards, including a color-coded calendar. All attendance data is stored locally in the WordPress database across five custom tables, with no third-party service involved except for the optional OpenAI integration.

MerchantKits Attendance Manager is available in a free Lite version, which is GPL licensed and provides a complete attendance and leave system, including employees, shifts, clock in/out, late and overtime calculation, leave requests and approvals, a dashboard, CSV export, REST API, and AI insights with a user-supplied OpenAI key. The Pro version, priced at $59 per year for a single site license, adds features such as natural-language AI queries, geofenced clock-in, and an inline leave-policy editor, with additional features planned for future releases.