How to Generate Payslip Based on Employee Attendance in Odoo 18: Complete Tutorial

Your HR team is paying employees for 8 hours when they worked 6.5. That's $1,700/month walking out the door because your payroll isn't linked to actual attendance. We've seen D2C brands with 23 employees lose over $18,400 a year on this gap alone. Odoo 18 fixes it by tying payslip generation directly to attendance check-in/check-out records. No guesswork. No manual hour counting in spreadsheets. This complete tutorial walks you through the entire setup.

Step 1: Create the Employee Record

Every payslip starts with a properly configured employee record. Without the Payroll tab filled out, Odoo won't know which tax rules to apply or which language to generate the payslip in. Skip this, and your compute sheet will throw errors.

Step 2: Create a Contract with Attendance-Based Work Entries

This is the *critical* step most people get wrong. The contract's Work Entry Source field must be set to Attendance. If you leave it on "Working Schedule," Odoo generates work entries from the calendar, not from actual check-in/check-out data. Your payslip will show 8 hours even if the employee worked 3.

Understanding Salary Structure Types

Before you generate any payslip, you need to understand what's behind the salary computation. The Salary Structure Type defines the wage type, pay frequency, and the rules used to calculate the final amount.

Step 3: Record Attendance via Kiosk Mode

Now the employee needs to actually clock in. Odoo 18's Kiosk Mode lets employees check in by scanning a badge or selecting their name manually. The system records the exact check-in and check-out timestamps. These timestamps become the work entries that feed into the payslip.

Step 4: Generate and Compute the Payslip

This is where it all comes together. You create the payslip, Odoo pulls the attendance-based work entries, and the salary rules compute the final amounts. The "Worked Days and Input" tab shows you exactly what data Odoo used for the computation.