This can take precious and valuable time away from what you need to do to operate a successful business during the day.

First, you can do it the old-fashioned way and stand by the punch clock and document precisely who is clocking in and who is not. There are a few options that prevent buddy punching. Now, you find yourself hanging on to every dollar possible because you are worried and concerned about your company's financial future. This whole time you thought you had all hands on deck and everyone was on the clock working while you were accomplishing your side of the company’s tasks. You may not realize that your system was effective and worked great until your employees started buddy punching. Payroll and time card tracking is all a big part of accounting, and when it is done incorrectly, your business could suffer. You may think about hiring additional personnel, laying off some employees if you can’t afford them, or investing more money into labor hours to develop a new game plan.Īccording to an article written by Forbes, the number one reason for a small business to lose money is terrible accounting. You start thinking about ideas to improve this, although you were optimistic that the system you implemented was working to meet your goals. So you’re going through your company's finances and notice that your projections are off for production and your revenue isn’t as high as you thought it would be. How Buddy Punching Could Be Affecting Your Business What is the difference between this and reaching your hand into an employer’s register and taking your daily pays’ worth? To us, we look at it as being equivalent and unethical. A person is getting paid for time they are not working or aren’t even at work. Those who do this may not look at it as stealing from the company, but we disagree here at OnTheClock. Some employers are so busy and may not realize that Johnny is absent all day, but on paper, he was present the whole day thanks to his friend. Now, all of us can agree that it is not fun sitting down with your boss to talk about why you were late, but if this is not a consistent problem, why risk losing your job by having another person clock you in.Īnother apparent reason is when an employee may simply want the day off and request a buddy to punch them in and punch them out. Instead of being honest and contacting their superior, they call or text a co-worker and ask that they punch them in, so they avoid getting into trouble. We will first start with the simple reasoning of an individual that is running late to work. However, some reasons are obvious why people practice such lousy work ethics. To some of us, it will remain a mystery why employees choose to buddy punch and steal from the company they work for. Fortunately, there are ways to prevent this type of time theft from occurring, and it could just help improve your company’s bottom line. Buddy punching is when another employee punches in a co-worker that is not present or running late to work. Many employers may not even know that it is going on or who is doing it. employers more than $373 million every year.

In fact, according to, buddy punching is estimated to cost U.S. Buddy punching is a widespread form of theft in the workplace.

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