Buddy Punching

One person clocking in for another is the headline justification for most attendance technology. It is a real problem and usually a smaller one than the sales material implies.

Size it before designing around it

How many people could plausibly do it? It requires a colleague willing to participate and a supervisor who does not notice.

How much time would it involve? Minutes at the start of a shift, not hours.

What would it cost annually, at your wage rates, on a realistic estimate?

Most organisations find a number far smaller than the deployment, which is worth knowing before committing.

What geofencing does about it

Less than expected.

A geofence proves a phone was near the site, not who was holding it.

A colleague already at work can clock in a friend from inside the boundary, which is exactly the buddy punch the system was bought to prevent.

Which means geofencing addresses clocking in from home, and barely touches the case where someone is already on site.

Vendors rarely make this distinction and it is the first question worth asking.

What does address it

Supervision. In most workplaces someone knows who arrived. This is the strongest control and it costs nothing.

A photograph at clock-in, which several products offer. Effective, and it is a biometric-adjacent collection with its own obligations — worth a decision rather than a default.

A fixed terminal with individual credentials in view of a supervisor.

Shift patterns that make absence obvious, which is most operational work.

Removing the motive: buddy punching is usually about a few minutes of lateness meeting a rigid policy. Slack removes most of it.

The photograph question

Taking a picture of someone's face at every punch is a substantial escalation from checking a position.

Depending on how it is processed, it may be biometric data with a higher legal bar.

If it is simply stored for a human to glance at, that is lighter than matching it against a stored template, which is a different thing entirely.

Ask which the product does, because the marketing calls both "face verification".

The honest summary

If your buddy-punching problem is people clocking in from home, a geofence helps.

If it is people covering for each other on site, it does not, and no amount of radius tuning changes that.

Work out which you have first, because the answer determines whether this technology is the right purchase at all.

Ask which version you have

The distinction that decides whether this technology helps at all.

Clocking in from home: a boundary addresses it.

Covering for a colleague already on site: a boundary does nothing, because the phone is genuinely inside.

Count which you actually have.

If it is mostly the second, you are buying the wrong thing, and no vendor will tell you.

Connect policy to configuration

The practical choices behind this note can be compared with review the sector example. Keep the written purpose in control and enable only the data needed for it.

Independent reference

For an external point of reference, see the CIPD. Its published guidance provides useful context for testing the assumptions in this note.