In this paper we present the development and implementation of a speech biometric based attendance system. The users access the system by making a call from few pre-decided mobile phones. An interactive voice response (IVR) system guides a new user in the enrollment and an enrolled user in the verification processes. The system uses text independent speaker verification with MFCC features and i-vector based speaker modeling for authenticating the user. Linear discriminant analysis and within class covariance normalization are used for normalizing the effects due to session/environment variations. A simple cosine distance scoring along with score normalization is used as the classifier and a fixed threshold is used for making the decision. The developed system has been used by a group of 110 students for about two months on a regular basis. The system performance in terms of recognition rate is found to be 94.2 % and the average response time of the system for a test data of duration 50 seconds is noted to be 26 seconds. © 2014 IEEE.