Straight answer: the problem with multi-site attendance is almost never the sites. It is the merge — three exports arriving in different shapes on different days, reconciled in a spreadsheet by one person who becomes a single point of failure for payroll.
If your head office spends the first week of every month consolidating attendance, the system count is the problem, not the site count.
What actually goes wrong
Employee records diverge. The same person exists as three records with three IDs. When they transfer between sites, they become a fourth.
Rules drift locally. Each site's admin interprets grace periods, half-day thresholds and overtime slightly differently. All three are defensible; none of them match.
State rules differ and get ignored. Holiday calendars and weekly-off patterns are not uniform across Indian states. A global rule set is wrong somewhere by definition.
The merge is manual. Different export formats, different dates, different definitions of "present". Reconciled by hand, monthly, forever.
Nobody has the live picture. Head office learns about an absenteeism pattern at one site four weeks after it starts.
What a real multi-site setup requires
One employee master. A person exists once and is assigned to a site. Transfers move the assignment, not the identity, and history follows them.
Per-site rule sets. Shift patterns, holiday calendars, weekly offs and overtime rules configured per location, applied automatically. This is what makes state differences a configuration item rather than a monthly correction.
Scoped access. A site manager sees and manages their own site. Head office sees everything. Neither has to ask the other for a file.
One consolidated export. Payroll receives a single file covering all sites, already computed. If payroll is still merging, nothing above has been solved.
Live cross-site view. Absenteeism, overtime concentration and late-mark patterns visible per site as they happen, not in a month-end report.
The practical advantage of camera-based attendance across sites
One point specific to multi-location: because attendance runs on cameras rather than per-door hardware, adding a site is a software and configuration exercise rather than a hardware procurement and installation project per entrance.
That changes the economics of covering smaller locations — the branch with eleven staff that was never worth instrumenting with three readers gets covered by the cameras it already has. In practice that is what closes the last gaps in a multi-site record, because the uncovered small sites are usually where the merge problems originate.
We build this; the structural requirements listed above apply whichever system you choose.
The diagnostic
Ask whoever compiles head-office attendance how long it takes each month, and what they do when two sites disagree about the same transferred employee.
The length of that answer is the size of the problem.