HR Software with Fingerprint Biometric Attendance for a Dubai Catering Company

About Akl Baytna Catering and Why Their HR Setup Needed a Specialist Approach

Akl Baytna Catering LLC is a well-established Dubai catering company based at Dubai Investment Park, known for their philosophy of cooking from scratch, from the heart. They serve everything from corporate office cafeterias and factory canteens to hotel dining, school meals, labor camp feeding programs, outdoor events and production shoot catering. Their client base includes major international organisations, and their commitment to quality has earned them long-term catering partnerships with businesses across the UAE.

Running a catering operation of this breadth means the kitchen and service team works around the clock. Unlike a standard office business with fixed hours and predictable patterns, catering staff may be deployed to an early morning factory breakfast service one day and a late-night event the next. Shift timings are not fixed. Weekly days off rotate based on what each week's operational schedule requires. Managing attendance, payroll and leave for 110 employees in this environment using spreadsheets or manual records was not sustainable.

Akl Baytna approached TrueBays for a complete solution: HR and payroll software configured for their catering workforce, and a fingerprint biometric attendance device to replace paper sign-in sheets. Critically, they needed one vendor to handle everything: supply the device, install it on-site at their Dubai Investment Park facility, connect it to the HR system, and train the team on how to use both.

• Client

  Akl Baytna Catering LLC

• Industry

  Food and Catering Services

• Location

  Dubai Investment Park (DIP), Dubai UAE

• Employees

  110

• Operations

  24 Hours, Shift-Based

• Solution

  HR and Payroll + Fingerprint Biometric (Supplied, Installed and Integrated)

• Explore

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The HR Challenges of Running a 24-Hour Catering Operation in Dubai

Catering businesses face HR and payroll challenges that are fundamentally different from office-based employers. When your operation runs through the night to prep for a factory breakfast service, and your team works six days a week with rotating days off, standard HR tools create more problems than they solve. Akl Baytna was dealing with four core challenges:

1. No Fixed Shift Timings Made Standard Attendance Tracking Unreliable: In catering, shift allocations change based on operational requirements. A team member might work a morning kitchen shift one week and support an evening event the next. Paper sign-in sheets could not reliably track actual hours worked, making accurate attendance records for 110 employees practically impossible without a digital solution linked directly to payroll.

2. Rotating Weekly Off Days Did Not Fit a Standard Leave Calendar: Because the operations are continuous, the weekly day off for each employee rotates based on their shift schedule rather than falling on a fixed day of the week. A leave management system that assumes a fixed weekend could not correctly track attendance or leave against a shifting weekly off schedule. This needed a configurable shift master that recognised each employee's weekly off as dynamic, not fixed.

3. Multi-Channel Salary Payment Was Difficult to Manage Manually: Akl Baytna pays employees through three channels: bank transfer, exchange (Ansari) and cash. Managing WPS compliance, generating SIF files and tracking which employees receive payment through which channel required a payroll system that could handle all three simultaneously rather than managing them as separate processes.

4. There Was No Single Vendor for Both the Software and the Biometric Hardware: Finding HR software that could also supply, install and integrate the fingerprint biometric device at the Dubai Investment Park facility was the key requirement. Procuring the device from one supplier and the software from another would have created an integration gap where the two systems did not communicate reliably. Akl Baytna needed one team responsible for the entire solution.