Employees
The employee record is the central record for each staff member. Everything from their pay rate to their facial recognition data lives here.
Adding employees
Go to MBS Attendance → Employees → Add New Employee. Required fields are marked with an asterisk. Employee numbers are auto-generated if left blank — or you can enter your own (e.g. IT0001, FARM003).
Employee numbers are stored as text so you can use prefixes like IT0001 or FARM003. Leading zeros are preserved. Do not use purely numeric IDs if you want leading zeros to show on badges and payslips.
Pay structure
Choose the employee's pay type from the dropdown:
- Hourly — paid per hour clocked. Set separate rates for weekdays, Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays.
- Daily — flat rate per day present. The system counts days clocked in during the pay period.
- Weekly — fixed amount per completed work week.
- Bi-weekly — fixed amount per completed two-week period.
- Monthly — flat monthly salary regardless of days or hours worked.
See Pay types for a detailed explanation of how each type affects payslip generation.
Photos and facial recognition
Upload up to three photos for the best facial recognition accuracy:
- Photo 1 — front-on, looking directly at the camera
- Photo 2 — slight left turn of the head
- Photo 3 — slight right turn of the head
After uploading photos, tick the POPIA Consent checkbox to confirm the employee has consented to their biometric data being stored. Without this tick, facial recognition will not work for this employee even if photos are uploaded.
The iOS app caches face data locally. After adding or changing employee photos, open the app, go to the Face Recognition clock-in screen and tap Rebuild to update the local cache. The app will download the new photos and regenerate the face embeddings.
Payroll components
After saving an employee, a payroll components table appears at the bottom of the edit page. Activate any components that apply to this specific employee — such as a pension fund contribution, medical aid or car allowance. Leave the value blank to use the component's default value, or enter a custom value to override it.
Department-level components are applied automatically and do not need to be set per employee unless you want to change or disable them for a specific person.
POPIA data rights
At the bottom of the employee edit page, two POPIA options are available:
- Export employee data — downloads all stored data for this employee as a file. Required if an employee requests a copy of their data under POPIA.
- Remove biometric data — deletes the stored photos and facial recognition data for this employee while keeping all other records intact. Use this if an employee withdraws their consent.