Bulk Add Employees in Attendo (formerly Petpooja Payroll)

Managing employee records manually can slow your entire payroll process. Whether you’re onboarding new staff or restructuring teams, entering employee data one by one is not just tedious, it’s a recipe for delays and data errors.

With Attendo, Bulk Staff Import lets you add a whole joining batch from one spreadsheet instead of typing each record in. This guide walks you through the complete process, from accessing the dashboard to confirming a successful import.

Step 1: Open the Attendo Dashboard

Once you log in to Attendo, you’ll land on the Dashboard, the control centre for your organisation’s HR and attendance activities.

Here you can instantly view:

• Total employees
• Attendance summaries
• Department-wise insights
• Pending biometric setups

This screen is the same data the rest of Attendo works from, so anything added here shows up in attendance and payroll straight away.

Step 2: Open the Employees Section

From the left navigation menu, open Employees, then click Employees in the list that expands. Everything to do with staff records lives here: adding, importing, editing and exporting. The same menu holds Departments, Designations, Attendance Permission and Manage Branch, which matters for the next step, because a department or designation has to exist here before an imported row can point at it. This is also the employee master, so each record carries far more than the sheet supplies. Attendance method, mobile and geofencing toggles, KYC status, salary structure, leave balances and settlements history all hang off it once the person exists.

Step 3: Download the Employee Import Template

Before importing your staff list, it’s important to use the correct format.
Click on Actions → Download Sample to get a preformatted Excel/CSV template.

Why This Step Matters

The sample file defines the structure Attendo expects. Each row is one employee, and these are the columns it asks for:

Fill in the sheet carefully and save it in .xlsx or .csv format.

Step 4: Upload Your Employee List

Once your file is ready, go back to the Employees screen, click Actions → Import, and upload your completed sheet.

Attendo checks the sheet against the expected fields and flags anything missing before it writes a single record.

Key Highlights of Import

• Upload a batch of employees from a single sheet
• Missing or invalid entries are flagged before anything is saved
• The template names the fields Attendo expects, so a sheet either matches or tells you where it does not
• Records land in attendance, payroll and compliance together, not one module at a time

Step 5: Confirm the Employees Imported

Once the sheet is processed, a green Imported successfully confirmation appears in the top right, and the employee count at the top of the page goes up by the number of rows you uploaded. That count is the thing worth checking. If it has not moved, the import did not write anything, whatever the message said.

The employees are now in the system, and they appear across attendance, payroll and compliance without being entered again. Adding a single joiner later follows the one-employee flow instead.

What an Imported Employee Still Needs

The import creates the records. It does not finish the setup, and this is where a bulk import most often stalls: twenty employees exist in the system but cannot punch, or they punch and the payroll run ignores them. Four things decide that.

Biometrics, registered at the device

Every employee record carries a Biometrics Registered flag, and a spreadsheet cannot set it. A fingerprint or a face has to be captured at the device itself, on whichever of the three attendance devices the branch runs. This is what the Pending biometric setups count on the dashboard is telling you, and it is worth clearing in one session rather than discovering it on someone’s first shift.

Attendance permission, set per employee

Under Employees → Attendance Permission, each person has their own toggles for Mobile Attendance and Geo Fencing, plus a No. of Attempts setting that controls how many failed punches are allowed before the device locks them out. The default is seven. Employees in the same branch can be set up differently, so a field executive and a shop-floor worker do not have to share a method.

The right Payroll Group

Payroll is processed per group, not per employee. A Payroll Group holds the rules a set of employees share: the same attendance mode, the same overtime logic, the same compliance settings and the same pay frequency. Three groups ship configured out of the box, so a new business can run payroll on day one, but an imported batch still has to sit in the group that matches how those people are actually paid. The attendance-to-salary walkthrough covers how those rules turn a punch into a payable day.

Salary structure and KYC

The salary structure lives on the employee record and decides what the payslip is built from, alongside the rest of what Attendo runs. Aadhaar verification is separate: the masked PDF is uploaded, or the card’s QR code is scanned through the Admin App, and an admin then verifies or rejects it with a reason. Neither blocks attendance, but both need doing before a first payroll run.

How to Avoid a Failed Employee Import

A few checks keep an import clean:

• Keep your file format exactly like the sample template.
• Avoid special characters or empty columns.
• Use the same department and designation names already defined in Attendo. Departments and designations are managed as separate lists, so a typo creates a new one rather than matching the existing entry.
• Double-check branch codes before upload to prevent mismatched assignments.

Most failed imports come down to one of these four, and all four are quicker to check than to undo.

Why Bulk Employee Import Saves HR Time

Bulk import earns its keep at the moments when headcount moves in a block: a school taking on twenty teachers before the new term, a hotel staffing up for the wedding season, a fabrication unit adding a contract crew for a large order.

What that saves:

• Time: a joining batch goes in as one upload, not one record at a time.
• Accuracy: fewer typos, and no half-finished records.
• Reach: the records are live in attendance, payroll and compliance at once.
• Focus: the admin spends the morning on the joiners, not on the form.

Conclusion

Adding staff to payroll no longer needs to be a repetitive, error-filled process. Bulk Staff Import turns it into one file and one upload. The records land clean, they land once, and they are available to attendance and payroll the moment they land. Talk to the Attendo team if you are moving a whole workforce across rather than adding a batch.

Frequently Asked Questions