Coding a Biometric DTR & Payroll Dashboard (My HRMO Project)

Author: Marcial Rey (In Between Bamboos Farm)

While my passion lies in off-grid farming and agriculture, my day job is an Administrative Officer handling Human Resource Management. Managing Daily Time Records (DTRs), tracking leaves, and calculating daily wages for employees (or farm hands!) can be an absolute logistical nightmare if done manually.

To solve this, I used my web development journey to code a custom HRMO Command Center. This web app automates time-tracking and payroll, and most importantly, it uses AI facial recognition to prevent "buddy punching."

1. Biometric Face Scanning with AI

The centerpiece of this application is the Biometric Employee Registration feature. Instead of using expensive, proprietary fingerprint scanners, I built the app to use a standard web camera.

By integrating face-api.js into my frontend logic, the application scans the employee's facial geometry in real-time. When they look at the lens and click "Scan," their unique facial descriptors are tied to their Employee ID, Shift Schedule, and Daily Wage Rate. This ensures that only the actual employee can clock in and out.

2. Building for the Real World: Manual Overrides

Living and working in areas where power outages and internet drops are common, relying 100% on a digital kiosk is dangerous. I coded two crucial fail-safes into the dashboard:

• Manual DTR Override: If the kiosk fails or there is a power outage, administrators can manually input the AM/PM and Overtime Time-In/Out data for any specific date.
• Database Maintenance (Merge Records): Typographical errors happen. I wrote a dedicated backend function to select a misspelled name, merge it with the correct employee profile, and migrate all time logs without losing data.

3. Automated Payroll & Exporting

The ultimate goal of tracking time is paying people accurately. I built a reporting module that pulls from the database to:

• Generate a Batch Print Master Report of monthly DTRs.
• Automatically calculate and Generate Official Payroll based on the employee's specific daily wage rate and logged hours.
• Export the Master Employee Directory and DTRs directly to Excel/CSV for external auditing.

Developer Note: Whether you are managing office personnel as an HRMO or tracking the hours of laborers on a large commercial farm, building a custom, local-first web dashboard gives you complete ownership over your data without paying high monthly subscription fees to third-party software companies.