Use Biometric Time Clocks

The bar-coded time clocks described in the preceding best practice represent an excellent improvement in the speed and accuracy with which employee time data can be collected. However, it suffers from an integrity flaw: Employees can use each other's badges to enter and exit from the payroll system, called "buddy punching." This means that some employees could be paid for hours when they were not on-site at all.

A division of Ingersoll-Rand called Recognition Systems has surmounted this problem with the use of biometric time clocks (which can be seen at www.handreader.com). This reader requires an employee to place his or her hand on a sensor, which matches its size and shape to the dimensions already recorded for that person in a central database. The time entered into the terminal will then be recorded against the payroll file of the person whose hand was just measured. Thus, only employees who are on-site can have payroll hours credited to them. The company sells a variation on the same machine, called the HandKey, which is used to control access to secure areas. These systems have a secondary benefit, which is that no one needs an employee badge or pass key, which tend to be lost or damaged over time, and so represent a minor headache for the accounting or human resources staffs, who must track them. In a biometric monitoring environment, all an employee needs is his or her hand.

These biometric monitoring devices are expensive, however, and require significant evidence of buddy punching to justify their cost. If these clocks are intended to replace bar-coded time clocks, then there is no projected labor savings from reducing the manual labor of the payroll personnel (since this advantage was already covered by the bar-coded clocks), leaving only the savings from buddy punching to justify their purchase.

For this system, too, you will have to address the lack of time-punched data as noted for the bar-coded time clock. Again, it can be resolved by meeting with the hourly personnel to show them how their time data is collected, stored, and summarized, and how to access this information on the time clock if the device has such data available.

Cost: