StaffDesk, Workforce & Attendance Platform

The problem

Attendance in hospitality and retail businesses commonly runs on paper, basic PIN terminals, or trust. That creates familiar gaps for an operator running shift-based staff:

• Manual timesheets. Hours worked get re-entered into payroll by hand, and errors are routine.
• Buddy clock-ins. A shared PIN or card is easy to hand to someone else, and there is no way to prove it happened.
• No exception visibility. A shift that runs outside the roster, or a break that never gets logged, is invisible until payroll reconciliation.
• Rostering and attendance living in separate places. Managers build the roster in one tool and check who actually showed up in another.

Our approach

StaffDesk was built as a single platform covering the full attendance loop, starting from one operator's real day-to-day counter and kiosk.

• Attendance. Staff clock in and out on an authorised kiosk device with a PIN, or from their own phone, with tracked breaks and a scheduled auto-checkout job. Sessions outside the published roster are flagged for a manager to review.
• Rostering. Managers build shifts across day, week and calendar views, and staff record their own availability against them.
• Teams and people. Staff are organised into teams, with employee records, profiles and a guided onboarding wizard for new starters.
• Reporting. Timesheets and payroll sheets are generated from attendance data and delivered as PDF or by email, alongside exception statements for shifts that need a manager's sign-off.
• Devices and admin. Kiosk devices are registered in an admin device registry, with a separate admin area covering settings, working hours, alerts and an audit log.

Custom delivery options

StaffDesk's current product surface should not be mistaken for a fixed limit on what ELASYN can deliver. For customers with a defined operational requirement, we can take a clock-in method or payroll connection from discovery and data-flow design through implementation, deployment, monitoring and support. These are separately scoped custom solutions, not standard features switched on for every StaffDesk deployment.

• Face-verified clock-in. The legacy Kebab HQ deployment includes face verification. For a new deployment, a rebuilt face-verification workflow can remove reliance on shared PINs or cards and make buddy clock-ins materially harder, but it is not a standard enabled StaffDesk feature. Before any biometric deployment, we require an equivalent non-biometric option, explicit employee-controlled consent, an approved retention and deletion window, a documented answer for where templates are processed and stored and who can access them, liveness protection, and privacy, legal and security approval.
• NFC and other attendance methods. NFC tags or cards and other fit-for-purpose device workflows can be designed around the venue, workforce and fallback requirements instead of forcing every customer into one clock-in method.
• Xero, MYOB and payroll connections. Xero and MYOB are separate integrations. We scope which connector comes first, whether approved hours move one way from StaffDesk or synchronise two ways, the source of truth, approval rules, failure handling and reconciliation. Neither connector is part of the current Kebab HQ deployment or a standard day-one StaffDesk capability.

Where it stands

StaffDesk runs today as business-specific software for a single Australian operator. Since then, the codebase has been consolidated and hardened with a tenant-aware foundation, ahead of a possible wider commercial release. The external-customer release gate is not open yet: multi-tenancy, subscription billing and broader authentication hardening are still in progress, so this is a platform we are actively building and operating, not a standard SaaS product available to every new customer today. ELASYN can still scope and deliver business-specific clock-in methods, integrations and operational extensions as custom engineering engagements, with the release boundary made explicit.

Technologies used