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Buddy punching, in plain English.
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Buddy punching is when one employee clocks in or out on behalf of a coworker who is not present, inflating recorded hours.
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It is a common source of time theft in hourly workforces, particularly where clocks accept a card, PIN, or shared login instead of verifying the person clocking in. Biometric or device-bound clocking closes that gap.
How Buddy punching works.
The exposure sits in the clocking method, not the clocked-in hours themselves. A wall terminal that accepts a swipe card or a PIN badge cannot tell who's holding it. A shared web link or kiosk login has the same gap. Closing it means tying the punch to something that can't be handed off: a fingerprint, a face scan, or a mobile device with location and enforced possession. Supervisor approval of the timesheet still matters afterward, because biometric clocking stops the false punch, not a pattern of covering for a habitual absence.
Where Buddy punching goes wrong.
- Treating buddy punching as a discipline problem misses the point when the clock itself makes it trivial to pull off.
- Punch data can't reveal its own fraud either, since a covered punch records as a normal, on-time clock-in with nothing to flag. And swapping in a biometric terminal without also tightening the supervisor approval step leaves the underlying pattern of covering for a coworker's absence untouched, even after the technical loophole closes.
- 2000 Running payroll since Workzoom has run Canadian payroll for 25+ years.
- Canadian data residency AWS Canada (ca-central-1). Canadian customer data stays in Canada.
- SOC 2-aligned controls Encrypted at rest, role-based access, immutable audit logs.
- Trusted in production County of Renfrew, Silvera for Seniors, and Cable Bahamas. Built for 50 to 5,000 employees.
In the product
How Buddy punching runs on Workzoom.
Buddy punching is part of the Workzoom Workforce Suite. Workzoom runs HR, workforce, and talent on a single employee record across ten countries: Canada, the United States, the Bahamas, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, Antigua and Barbuda, Anguilla, the Cayman Islands, and the United Kingdom. Full gross-to-net payroll runs live in Canada, the United States, and the Bahamas. Pricing starts at $4 per employee per suite per month.
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$4 per employee per suite. 50 to 5,000 employees. Sprint-based, client-paced go-live.