A ward sister at the start of a night shift, a store manager on a Saturday morning, a team lead before a client call: they all ask the same few questions about attendance. Who is in? Who is off next week? Whose leave is waiting on me? The answers are in the attendance system, three or four screens deep. An AI assistant connected to that system can answer in a sentence, and approve the leave request in the next one.
This post is about what that looks like in practice with AMS, the attendance and leave tool in Orbiz, connected to Claude or ChatGPT through Orbiz MCP. It covers the questions that work, the ones that do not, and the one thing we deliberately left out: an assistant cannot clock anyone in or out.
What you can ask an assistant about attendance
AMS gives a connected assistant 10 actions: 7 that read and 3 that change something. They fall into three groups, and every one of them works as the person who connected the assistant, with that person’s permissions.
Your own day and your own leave
- “How long have I worked today?” reads your attendance for today.
- “Show my timesheet for last week.” reads your timesheet.
- “How much annual leave do I have left?” reads your leave balance.
- “Request casual leave for next Friday, family event.” creates a leave request, and “cancel my leave request for next Monday” withdraws one.
Your team, if you approve leave
Two more actions are for approvers: list the team’s leave requests, and approve or reject one. The decision is recorded in AMS as the approver’s, because the assistant is acting as them. A member who does not approve leave in AMS is not offered these at all.
A team attendance summary
The last read action is a team attendance summary, for the people who already see their team’s attendance in AMS. It is the question a lead asks before the day starts: who is in, and how the week looks. It is a summary, not a back door into monitoring. Screenshots have no assistant action at all.
What an assistant cannot do with attendance
This is the part worth reading twice, because it is where people expect more than is there. An assistant connected to AMS cannot reach:
- Clocking in or out, and the attendance timer
- Viewing or taking screenshots
- Attendance corrections and shift settings
There is also no action that edits or deletes a timesheet entry. These are not settings an admin has to remember to switch off. The actions do not exist, so a badly worded request has nothing to trigger. You can find the full list, with the read and write split, on the AMS assistant page.
Why an assistant can never clock anyone in or out
An attendance record says that a person was at work. In AMS, clocking in happens in the browser with break types, and idle time is decided on the server, not by whatever is running on the person’s machine; the idle time page explains how the timer pauses. Clinics and stores that use fingerprint devices import those punches instead, mapped to each person by their device PIN, as described in biometric attendance import without spreadsheets.
Each of those routes ties the record to the person. Letting software clock in on someone’s behalf would cut that tie. A request such as “clock me in, I’m running late” would produce a record nobody could trust, and the payroll that is worked out from it would inherit the doubt. So the line is simple: an assistant can tell you what the record says, and it cannot write the record.
Project hours are different. Logging time against client work is a Trackline action, and an assistant can do that: “log three hours on the Acme redesign for yesterday” works. Attendance stays a thing a person does; project time can be dictated.
Two places this helps: a clinic and a shop floor
A clinic with a ward roster
A clinic’s week is a roster of day and night shifts, and leave has to be decided early enough that the roster can be covered. A ward lead with approval rights can ask: “Which leave requests from the ward team are waiting on me for next week?” and then approve or reject each one in the same conversation, without opening the approvals screen. What AMS does underneath, night shifts recorded on the day they start and device punches imported per person, is on the AMS for healthcare page.
A store team on a weekly rota
A store manager wants to know, before the weekend, how the week went and who is off. With the team attendance summary they can ask: “Give me this week’s attendance summary for the store team.” Retail teams get the same leave actions too, so a request for next Saturday can be checked and decided between deliveries. The AMS for retail page covers the rest of the setup.
How to phrase attendance questions that work
- Name the person and the date. “Approve Bilal’s leave request for the 14th” is carried out; “approve that one” starts a conversation about which one.
- Read before you change. Ask what is waiting on you first, then decide. You see what you are approving.
- Say the leave type. AMS has one leave policy for the whole organisation with fixed types, so “casual leave” or “annual leave” maps directly onto a type AMS already knows.
- Keep questions inside what AMS holds. “Who was in on Tuesday?” is a summary question it can answer. “Why was Ayesha late?” is a conversation to have with Ayesha.
More examples, for leave, timesheets and sprints, are in AI prompts for sprints, timesheets and leave, and the full list to copy from is the prompt library.
Connecting an assistant, and who decides
Each member connects their own assistant from Settings → Connected AI apps inside Orbiz, where the steps for Claude, ChatGPT and Claude Code are written out. When the assistant sends you to Orbiz to approve, you tick what it may do tool by tool, with reading and changing as separate ticks. Tick reading for AMS to ask questions; tick changes too if you want it to request or decide leave.
The assistant side has its own rules. Claude’s help pages list custom connectors for the Free, Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise plans, with the Free plan limited to one, and on Team and Enterprise an Owner adds the connector before members can use it. OpenAI lists ChatGPT’s developer mode, which is how ChatGPT connects to a service like Orbiz, for Pro, Plus, Business, Enterprise and Education accounts on the web, and says write actions ask for confirmation by default. Both are worth checking for your own plan before you promise a team they can use it.
An admin can switch assistants off for the whole organisation, see every connection and read the activity log, which lists each action an assistant took, whether it was done, not allowed or failed, and when. If a ward lead’s assistant approves the wrong request, the log shows which action ran and when, so it can be followed up in AMS.
Where an assistant is not the answer
If your attendance problem is that people forget to clock in, an assistant will not fix it; that is a habit, a reminder or a fingerprint device at the door. If it is that the records are wrong, corrections and shift settings have no assistant action and are made in AMS by the people responsible for them. And if you want to watch people work, this is the wrong tool for that by design. We wrote about the alternative in how to track remote attendance without micromanaging.
Where an assistant does help is the dozen small lookups a week that each cost a manager a login and three clicks, and the leave decisions that wait because the approver is on the floor rather than at a desk.
Sources, read 4 October 2026: Claude Help Center, “Get started with custom connectors using remote MCP”; OpenAI, “ChatGPT Developer mode”. What an assistant can do in AMS is taken from the Orbiz MCP catalogue as published on the AMS assistant page.
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