As I mentioned in the last post, businesses are looking for biometric
employee time clock software integration to primarily solve two issues. The first issue is related to security, what we in the time and attendance industry refer to as "buddy punching". Buddy punching occurs when an employee leaves early and has his colleague punch him out at his scheduled end time. Or he's going to be late so he has his fellow worker clock him in when he's supposed to start. Both amount to time theft from the employer and are serious offenses. Now requiring a unique password to punch in and out can certainly help the situation, especially if the assigned worker passwords are something as private as social security numbers. However, you're still going to come across employees that don't care who knows information about them that's supposed to be private and secure if they can leave early and still get paid for a full day of work. The bottom line is, those who want to cheat the system will usually figure out a way, even if it's using silly Putty or Play-Doh to hack the fingerprint scanner. Do you know of any real biometric scanner hacks that have been successful? Drop me a comment and let me know.
The second issue is related to efficiency. Sometimes this is just a matter of trying to force too many objects through a funnel at the same time, it's going to be slow or get clogged. The same is true when you're trying to force too many employees to use the same employee time clock software station at the same time. You're going to create a logjam that's inefficient and frustrates employees, which may feed the buddy punching issue we've already discussed. A biometric time clock software solution may help relieve the problem, but there's still a practical limit to how many employees can access a particular time clock station at any given time. You may be better off going to
network computer time clock software which will give employees various places to punch in and out from. Or better yet, use personal time clocks on all the employee computer workstations.
Although biometric time clock software appears at first glance to completely solve the issues of security and efficiency, it's still best to consider all of your time and attendance needs before committing to a single solution.
Jeff Morrow
Virtual TimeClock Product Specialist
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