What Is Buddy Punching and How to Prevent It

Like many business owners, we were frustrated when we realized that some of our employees were buddy punching. We were paying for work that wasn’t actually done, and it created a culture of dishonesty.  So the question became, how do we stop buddy punching at our business once and for all?

We looked into and tested a variety of solutions to increase accountability, but they all fell short. And we realized that the best means to solve this problem was to build our own product. So we did. We called it Buddy Punch, and it worked out so well that we decided to offer it to other business owners, too.

In this article, we’ll explain why we think our own product is the best possible way to prevent buddy punching. But before we get to that, we’ll go over what buddy punching is, how it’s typically accomplished, what consequences it has on businesses, and some strategies you can implement to prevent it.

Note: Learn from our experience! We created Buddy Punch for our own business not only to prevent buddy punching and increase accountability but also to simplify payroll and scheduling. We realized other companies could benefit as well. Find out more here and sign up for a free trial.

What is buddy punching?

Buddy punching is when one employee punches another employee in or out of a shift at work when the person isn’t actually present. Although some employees might view this as a friendly way to help a coworker avoid the consequences of arriving late or leaving early, this type of timesheet falsification is a form of fraud, and it negatively impacts your business’s bottom line.

How is buddy punching typically accomplished?

The practice of buddy punching originated with paper timesheets. An employee could simply grab a co-worker’s time card and clock them in before they actually arrived at the workplace. Similarly, if one employee left before the end of a shift, another employee could clock them out later.

As technology to prevent buddy punching has evolved, so have ways to get around it. Employers who have implemented time tracking systems that use QR codes, usernames, and passwords to “punch in” have found that employees can simply share this information to log each other in and out of the system.

Although the techniques have changed, the consequences are the same.

What impact does buddy punching have on businesses?

It’s relatively easy to see why buddy punching is so harmful to your business and team. This form of time theft has a number of unfortunate effects.

It hurts your bottom line

The first and the most obvious negative consequence of buddy punching is its impact on your company’s bottom line. Buddy punching costs you money. When your employees buddy punch, you’re paying for work that wasn’t done.

Even though 15 minutes here or a half an hour there might not seem like a big deal, that time significantly adds up when it’s compounded by multiple employees over months or years.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics determined that buddy punching costs employers $373 million a year — with 16% of U.S. employees admitting to doing it.

It creates a culture of dishonesty

Another consequence — and we think this is possibly the most dangerous consequence for a business — is that it creates a bad company culture: a culture of dishonesty. Employees who buddy punch know they’re lying, and when they lie for others or ask others to lie for them, they contribute to a company culture where dishonesty is tolerated and even inadvertently rewarded.

It’s a slippery slope: if cheating is allowed at the time clock, employees might wonder if dishonesty could be permissible in other situations, too.

It degrades the customer experience

Finally, buddy punching can result in a diminished customer experience. For instance, one of our clients first came to us because a customer had called him to complain that one of his stores wasn’t open during posted business hours.

He discovered that the clerk had simply closed the store early and left without requesting time off or noting the incident in his emailed timesheet. The business owner was frustrated because, in essence, he had paid an employee to disappoint a customer.

That’s often the case when it comes to employee time theft. It can result in a compounding loss: when your employees buddy punch, you’re paying for work that simply didn’t happen. Cheating is rewarded, your customers are frustrated, and your business suffers.

So how can you stop buddy punching and its cascading negative impacts?

Downsides of the typical strategies companies use to prevent buddy punching

Buddy punching is a long-standing problem, and a variety of preventative strategies have cropped up over the years. However, as we cover below, they’re not without their weaknesses.

Biometric time clocks

Biometric time clocks that include facial recognition technology, fingerprint scanners, and retina scanning devices are commonly used by businesses to track employee time, but they present a few problems.

First, employees can simply say they forgot to scan in. Second, specifically with fingerprint scanners, employees can say the system didn’t work or didn’t recognize them, and it would be difficult for an employer to dispute that claim. Studies have shown that these systems can be unreliable, with as low as 40% to 60% accuracy.

Installing a camera 

A seemingly simple solution is to install a camera to verify employees’ presence at the time and place where they clock in and out. However, maintaining a visual monitoring system is easier said than done.

We actually tried this system, but we found it had a number of shortfalls. Our main problem was that it was time-consuming to monitor a camera: we wanted to spend our time growing our business, not logging in to camera feeds and trying to figure out who was where at what time.

We also found that the camera and other equipment constantly needed to be maintained. The system only worked when everything worked, and we were back to where we started every time one component broke down.

Creating a buddy punching policy 

In an ideal world, a written employee attendance policy with stern disciplinary actions against buddy punching would eradicate the problem. But while it may add an extra layer of friction and make employees think twice about buddy punching, it’s not a fool-proof way to be sure employees adhere to the rules.

How to prevent buddy punching with software

Prior to building Buddy Punch, we tried many strategies to increase accountability in our own small business. But we ended up with an inefficient patchwork of different solutions, and it seemed like we were spending more time trying to prevent buddy punching than we had been losing to the practice. After a lot of hard work, we created Buddy Punch to solve this problem.

Buddy Punch is an employee time tracking app that lets employees clock in and out using smartphones, computers, tablets, or a kiosk. Our photos on punch feature helps you not only prevent buddy punching but also catch employees in the act of doing it. It requires employees to take a selfie when they clock in and out. These photos are added to employees’ timesheets and can be reviewed at any time.

In addition to photos on punch, we also have other features to help you prevent time theft. You can log employees’ locations when they clock in and out to make sure they were on site when logging time, or you can use geofence time tracking or IP address locks to prevent them from clocking in/out offsite. For field workers, you can also set up real-time GPS tracking to track their movements throughout the workday.

All of this ensures you’re only paying employees for the time they actually work. But it also makes time tracking easier, simplifies and speeds up the process of running payroll, and gives you access to other valuable workforce management features like attendance tracking, scheduling, and PTO tracking. See all of Buddy Punch’s features here, or use the links below to learn more and try it out for yourself.