It is common for employees to form friendships at work. It may be great from a personal point of view, but it becomes a big disadvantage for promoters who need their employees to clock in full working hours. 

Buddy punching or one employee clocking in for a friend when they are late may be happening right under your nose. You may be paying employees for hours they did not clock in. You might even be deducting money from their salary despite putting in extra hours when there shouldn’t have been any deductions. 

Luckily, the attendance punching machine solves such issues instantly.

What Is An Attendance Punching Machine?

An attendance punching machine is a technology that captures employee information when they clock in to work using their biometrics. Companies can use fingerprints, face recognition, or retina recognition.

The advantage is since fingerprints, faces, and retinas are unique to each person, an employee cannot punch in for another employee. 

Companies, this way, pay only for the hours a certain employee worked. Also, the attendance punching machine keeps records on your behalf. You know the number of hours lost due to employees coming in late and hours used as sick leave, annual leave, or emergencies. You can also track an employee’s overtime.

Types of Attendance Punching Machines

Card Punching

A card-punching machine uses cards to clock employees in and out of work. Each employee has a different card with a unique serial number which they must scan or swipe using the attendance punching machine while showing up at work or leaving the office. The machine automatically captures their hours as soon as they use the card.

Biometric Attendance Machines

These machines use employees’ biometrics to punch them in and out of work. Their sophisticated technology ensures employees cannot buddy punch for each other, making them the best option in the market. 

There are three types of biometric attendance machines. These are:

• Face recognition biometric attendance system:These biometric machines scan employee faces when they clock in and out of work.
• Fingerprint biometric attendance machine:The attendance machine uses one’s fingerprint and matches it with what the employee provided during joining in, clocking them in and out of work.
• Retina recognition biometric attendance machine:The biometric machine recognizes a person’s retina to punch them in and out of work.

How Attendance Punching Machines Work?

Once you introduce an attendance punching machine at your workplace, all employees must first “enroll” to have their biometrics taken. If you use a face recognition biometric attendance system, you must input all employee’s faces into the system.

Whenever an employee arrives or leaves work, the machine will take their biometrics and send a digital timestamp to the system’s backend. The digital timestamp will include the date and time the employee clocked in and out of time. This information is then merged with the HR department’s payroll to help them determine how many hours you need to pay each month.

Preventing fake punching, even if it happens for just a few minutes, saves your company billions of dollars each year. While it may seem like a minute or two, time speeds up quickly when you have dozens of employees. Biometric attendance machines also make clocking in and out of time easy and efficient, saving time.