Not Doing It At All

The proportionality test asks what less intrusive method was considered. For a fixed workplace, the honest list is long.

A terminal at the entrance

A tablet or a fixed clock, individual codes or cards.

Works for everyone, needs no personal phone, handles shift-change volume.

Collects no location data at all — presence at the terminal is inherent.

For a single-site operation this is frequently the better answer, and it is the one most often skipped because an app looks modern.

Supervisor-marked attendance

Someone marks who is present at the start of the shift.

Which is what most workplaces did until recently and what many still do.

Accurate, because a person is verifying a person.

Costs a few minutes of a supervisor's time, and removes every problem in this collection.

Viable up to a surprising size.

Scheduled hours with exception reporting

Assume people worked their rostered hours; record only the exceptions.

Suits salaried and stable-shift workforces.

Massively less administration than punching, and the exceptions are what anyone actually cares about.

Not suitable where pay varies minute by minute, which is the honest limit.

A code, a tag or a beacon

Covered in their own note. They verify presence at a place without satellite position and without a boundary.

Three of the four collect no location data, which removes most of the legal analysis.

Doing nothing

Some operations do not have an attendance problem.

If disputes are rare, buddy punching is not occurring, and payroll is accurate, a clock-in system solves nothing and introduces the failure modes in these notes.

Size the problem before buying the solution, which is the first note in this collection and the one most often skipped.

Using this in the assessment

Name each alternative and why it was rejected, in terms of the purpose.

"Staff are distributed across client sites with no fixed terminal" is a reason.

"We wanted an app" is not, and writing it down forces the question.

For a single fixed site, the terminal is hard to argue against, and an assessment that does not mention it has not been done properly.

The terminal is hard to argue against

For a single fixed site, specifically.

It works for everyone, needs no personal phone, handles shift-change volume, and collects no location data.

Which makes it the comparison your assessment has to address.

"We wanted an app" is not a reason, and an assessment that does not mention the terminal has not examined proportionality at all.

An implementation prompt

During configuration, this booking example can prompt questions about fields, ownership and output. Confirm current capabilities and document each plan, integration or policy assumption.