ZKTeco Attendance Machine Software: Connect Any Biometric Machine Without Extra Software

Published: July 2026 • 8 Min Read

You bought a fingerprint attendance machine — a ZKTeco F22, a K40, an eSSL X990, maybe a Hikvision terminal — and the shop owner handed you a CD or a download link for the desktop software. Then the real work started: a Windows PC that must stay switched on, a licence key, a database to configure, and at the end of every month somebody still exports an Excel file and types the hours into payroll by hand.

Here is the part almost nobody tells you: the machine does not need that software at all. Every modern biometric terminal already knows how to push its punches to a server on its own. If you point it at software that already runs your billing and payroll, the punches land where the money is calculated — and the second system disappears.

1. What attendance machine software actually has to do

Strip away the marketing and there are only three jobs:

• Collect the punches. Every finger, face or card read, with an exact timestamp, without losing any.
• Turn punches into hours. First punch of the day is time in, the last one is time out — and the awkward cases in between (double taps, a mid-shift check, a night shift crossing midnight) must be handled sensibly.
• Pay people correctly. Those hours have to reach payroll, commission and leave without a human retyping them.

The bundled desktop tools do the first job well, the second one adequately, and the third one not at all. That last gap is where the month-end pain lives.

2. Why the classic setup is so heavy

The traditional route puts a Windows machine in the middle of everything:

• The PC has to be on whenever a staff member punches, or the sync waits.
• The terminal and the PC usually have to sit on the same local network, so a second branch means a second setup.
• The attendance database lives on that one computer — if it dies, the history goes with it.
• The payroll system is somewhere else entirely, so an export file becomes the bridge, and the bridge is manual.

None of that is a hardware limitation. It is simply how the desktop software was designed, back when "the server" meant a tower under a desk.

3. The modern route: the machine talks to your software directly

ZKTeco terminals (and the eSSL / Realtime family built on the same platform) ship with a push protocol usually labelled ADMS or Cloud Server in the menu. Give the machine an address, and it becomes the one doing the work: it connects out over your WiFi, registers itself, and pushes every punch the moment it happens.

That single change removes the whole middle layer. No PC in the corner, no local network requirement, no licence for a second system, no export file. The terminal is simply another device on the internet — like a phone — reporting to the software you already pay for.

4. Connecting a ZKTeco machine, step by step

On the terminal itself there are only two things to set. This takes about two minutes.

• Step 1 — WiFi. Menu → Comm. → Wireless Network: turn WiFi on, choose your network, enter the password. A WiFi icon appears on the screen when it connects.
• Step 2 — Server address. Menu → Comm. → Cloud Server Setting (older firmware calls this WebServer or ADMS): set Enable Domain Name = ON, enter your software's server address, set the port, and leave the proxy off. Save and press ESC.

That is the entire hardware side. Everything after that happens in the software: the new machine is detected automatically, and you confirm it belongs to your branch. No SN to type, no driver to install, no port to open on your router — the machine dials out, so nothing needs to be exposed inbound.

5. Which machines this works with

• Direct push (easiest): ZKTeco F22, K40, K50, MB460, uFace 800, SpeedFace, iClock series; eSSL X990 and similar; Realtime T5 — plus most of the clones sold under other brand names.
• Older ZKTeco firmware: iFace, F18, U160, TX628 — same idea, the menu simply calls it WebServer instead of Cloud Server.
• Hikvision & Dahua: DS-K1T341, DS-K1T804, MinMoe, ASI1212, ASI7213 — these send events to a private HTTP link (their "HTTP Listening" or event-notification setting).
• Anything else: if the terminal can export a log file (CSV, TAB or .dat), that file can be imported and becomes attendance the same way.

The point is not brand loyalty — it is that you should not have to replace a working machine to modernise the software behind it.

6. What happens after the first punch

Collecting punches is easy. Turning them into attendance that a salon owner will trust is the harder part, and it is where most systems quietly go wrong:

• Matching a finger to a person. Every enrolled person has a User ID on the machine. The software links that ID to the staff member once — and the punches that arrived before the link was made are filed too, so nothing has to be re-entered.
• Double taps. A finger read twice within a couple of minutes is one arrival, not two.
• Mid-shift checks. Staff often re-scan out of habit at 11 a.m. That must not be recorded as "left for the day" — a shift-aware rule closes the day only near the end of the shift, or after a long gap.
• Night shifts. A salon closing at 1 a.m. still belongs to the previous business day, and the pair must stay together.
• Machine clock drift. Terminals lose minutes over time; the punch record should carry the real time, not whatever the device believes.

7. Attendance is only useful when it reaches payroll

The reason to connect the machine to your POS rather than to a standalone attendance tool is simple: the hours are already sitting next to the salary, the commission and the advances. Present, late, half day and absent flow into the payslip; overtime and deductions calculate from the same timestamps; and the owner can see who is actually in the salon right now instead of asking.

If you want the wider picture of how those hours become money, our salon payroll guide walks through the full cycle, and commission structures covers the part staff care about most.

8. A short checklist before you buy anything

• Does the terminal support WiFi and a Cloud Server / ADMS address? (Almost all do — check the Comm menu.)
• Will the software accept punches without a PC acting as a server?
• Do the hours reach payroll automatically, or through an export file?
• What happens to punches while the internet is down?
• Is there any per-device or per-employee licence on top of what you already pay?

If the answer to the last one is yes, that is a recurring cost for something the hardware already does for free.

Frequently asked questions