Daily wages and attendance app for workers and contractors

A building contractor in Surat with 40 labourers, a farm owner in Punjab paying pickers per day, a small factory in Sharjah with 25 helpers, a catering business that hires by the event: they all keep the same battered notebook. A page per worker, a tick per day, a rate that changed in March, advances written in the margin, and a Sunday evening spent adding it up while someone argues they worked the Thursday. An attendance and wages app turns the tick into a tap and the Sunday arithmetic into a button.

Payroll software is built for salaried offices with PF numbers and email addresses; it does not know about half days, overtime at 1.5x after 8 hours, ₹500 taken on Tuesday against Saturday's payment, or a worker who is paid weekly but wants a monthly statement for the bank. Describing your actual rules to App Builder Agent gets a React Native app that knows them, stores everything on the phone, and prints a wage sheet the accountant accepts.

What a daily wages and attendance app must handle

• Worker profiles — Name, photo, phone, ID number, trade (mason, helper, driver), daily rate and start date; inactive workers hidden, never deleted.
• One-screen daily attendance — The whole crew as a list with Present, Half day, Absent and overtime hours, marked in under a minute with big tap targets and Present as the default.
• Rates with history — A rate change on 1 March must not rewrite February's totals.
• Advances and deductions — Amount, date and note, subtracted from the next payment, with a running balance per worker.
• Payments — Record what was actually paid and when, cash or bank, so "due" is earned minus advances minus paid.
• Weekly and monthly totals — Per worker and for the whole site, with days present, overtime, gross, advances, net.
• PDF and Excel export — A wage sheet with signature lines for the accountant or labour office, and a CSV for whoever keeps the spreadsheet.
• Offline with backup — Works on site with no signal, with an export of the whole database to a file you can restore on a new phone.

Build it with App Builder Agent, step by step

1. Create a mobile app project. The supervisor marks attendance from a phone at the gate, so this is a phone app. Write down your real rules first: rate types, overtime, half-day pay, week start, payment day.
2. Describe workers, attendance and money in one message.
   Build a daily wages and attendance app for a construction contractor in Surat. Workers with name, photo, phone, trade (Mason ₹900/day, Helper ₹600/day, Carpenter ₹1,000/day), custom rate per worker, and rate history by date. Daily attendance screen: date at the top, all active workers in a list, tap to cycle Present / Half / Absent, plus an overtime hours field paid at 1.5x the hourly rate (day rate divided by 8). Advances screen: amount, date, note per worker. Payments screen: record cash paid on any date. Reports: weekly (Monday to Sunday) and monthly per worker and per site with days, overtime, gross, advances, paid and net due; export as a PDF wage sheet with a signature column and as CSV. Sites: a worker belongs to one site at a time. Store on the device with SQLite, backup and restore to a file. Hindi and English interface with a switch. Orange and dark grey, large buttons for use in sunlight.
3. Mark a week in the preview. Add five workers, mark Monday to Saturday with one half day and two overtime hours, give one worker a ₹1,000 advance, then open the weekly report. Check net due by hand for one worker; if the half day or overtime is wrong, say so in the chat.
4. Add the rules the notebook had in the margin.
   Add a "site closed" day type that pays nothing and is excluded from absence counts, a piece-rate option for some workers (per square foot with quantity entered daily), a Sunday-off rule that pays a full day if the worker was present all six days, and a worker-facing statement I can share on WhatsApp as a PDF for any date range.
5. Install it and run a real pay cycle. Download the test APK from the Preview tab and run one week alongside the notebook. When the totals match, retire the notebook; when they do not, the difference is usually a rule you never wrote down, and one more sentence to the agent fixes it.

Prompts that work well

The same register fits any crew that is paid by the day, the hour or the piece:

Common mistakes (and the fix)

• Rates without dates. Editing a worker's rate and having history recalculated is the most common complaint. Ask for rate history from day one.
• Deleting a worker who left. Their old totals disappear with them. Use an inactive flag and keep the records.
• Attendance as a calendar per worker. Marking 40 people one by one takes ten minutes. The daily list screen with everyone on it is the whole point.
• Wrong week boundaries. Some pay Saturday to Friday, some Monday to Sunday. Say which, and which day is payment day.
• Advances not tied to payments. An advance must reduce the next net due automatically and show on the worker's statement, or the arguments continue.
• No backup. Phones fall into cement mixers. Ask for a one-tap backup to a file and a weekly reminder to do it.

Make it feel finished

• Show today's headcount and today's wage cost at the top of the home screen.
• Let the supervisor attach a photo of the muster at the gate to each day, for disputes.
• Give each worker a statement view with the same numbers the contractor sees, so trust goes both ways.
• Highlight workers with an advance balance above a week's wages.
• Keep the PDF plain: site name, period, one row per worker, totals, signature lines; that is what the accountant and the labour office expect.

Installing, publishing and next steps

The AI app builder page shows the phone preview and the Download APK button; the test APK installs on the supervisor's phone without a store, and a signed store build with your own package id is available on the paid plans if you run several sites. Browse the ready-made inventory & sales apps gallery for the record-keeping patterns this app shares with stock and sales tools.

Contractors usually build two more apps next: the inventory and sales guide for cement, steel and site materials, and the bill and invoice guide for billing the client for the labour these sheets record. Open the builder with your rate list and the last week of the notebook to hand.

Frequently asked