MerchantKits Attendance Manager brings simple, powerful attendance tracking and leave management to your WordPress dashboard. Built for small businesses, it covers the full cycle: employees, shifts, clock in/out, leave requests and approvals, reporting, and optional AI-powered insights.

Key features

Employee management — add employees, link them to WordPress users, assign shifts, and track employment type and status.
Clock in / out — via the [mkam_clock_in] shortcode or the REST API. Captures IP and optional geolocation, detects lateness, and calculates worked hours and overtime.
Shifts — flexible shift definitions with grace periods, working days, breaks, and overnight support.
Leave management — leave requests with balances, overlap detection, minimum-notice rules, approval workflow, and email notifications.
Admin dashboard — at-a-glance stats, today’s activity, and one-click leave approvals.
AI Insights (BYOK) — generate smart attendance summaries and detect absence patterns using your own OpenAI API key.
Self-service shortcodes — [mkam_clock_in], [mkam_my_attendance], [mkam_leave_request], and [mkam_my_leaves].
CSV export — employees, attendance, and leave records.
REST API — full mkam/v1 namespace for integrations.

Privacy / External Services

This plugin optionally connects to OpenAI’s API (https://api.openai.com) for AI-powered attendance insights.

Data is sent only when you explicitly click “Generate Summary” or “Detect Patterns”, or when you enable the optional AI weekly digest email
The data sent includes employee names together with aggregated attendance statistics (counts of present/absent/late/on-leave days and overtime hours) for the selected period — this is required so the generated report can reference specific employees
No other personal data (email, phone, IP address, salary, etc.) is sent
Requires you to provide your own OpenAI API key in plugin settings
No data is sent without your direct action (or, for the weekly digest, without you enabling that setting)

OpenAI Privacy Policy: https://openai.com/privacy/
OpenAI Terms of Service: https://openai.com/terms/