Lightweight software to track employee attendance (time clock)

Question

I'm searching for a software, most likely web-based, that fits to this use case.

• Employee comes to work: logs into software, presses a button "Start", logs out (gets automatically logged out).
• Employee makes lunch-break: logs in, presses "Pause", comes back -> "Start"
• Employee leaves: logs in, presses "Stop"
• HR (admin account) sees all the times for all employees
• Only HR can change times
• HR can export the times to Excel/CSV
• suitable for different locations/offices and a central HR; this is why I think web-based is the best.
• language: English and Italian or easy possibility to create translation

Some features that would be good but are not a must-have:

• It is possible for HR to enter attendance time frames for employees and the software alerts if an employee checks in late.
• It is possible to enter absence reasons like vacation, illness
• Employees can see their (and only their) times

Before asking here I did a lot of research and tested some applications but nothing was satisfying. The one that came closest is http://www.kimai.org/ but there every user can change the times on their own and all the extra project-related information is not needed and makes it unnecessarily complicated.

Tracking Windows login times does not work as employees do also manual work and share workstations.

As it is not for private use it does not need to be free. Unfortunately the applications for companies are integrated HR solutions with tons of features not needed and notable license fees.

Answer 1

We used web-based software provided by Mitrefinch for this at my previous employer. It allowed employees to clock in/out at various times of the day, and handled absences for holidays/illness/etc.

It seems that it would do everything that you need it to, though I'm not sure about Italian language support - it's not something that we ever needed, so I don't know if it's available.

Answer 2

I found out that other users of kimai.org faced already similar requirements. So with little changes in the source code it is possible to prohibit later time-changing by users. You can find the "hack" here: http://forum.kimai.org/index.php?topic=1183.5

To also show the username in the timesheet overview you can change the display in the timesheet templates (extensions/ki_timesheets/templates/zef.tpl and main.tpl). Additionally you need to change the CSS by adding a width to the new column classes.

To make the software more lightweight you can just delete the folders in the extension directory that are not needed like ki_invoice, ki_expenses so the tabs are not displayed.

I hope my findings also help other users with related questions.