Biometric Devices

01

Two ways in, because both exist

Some terminals post their punches to a signed address; some have to be asked, over a cloud or a small relay on the site; and a great many sites have no network to the box at all and hand you a spreadsheet once a month. All three arrive through the same door, so a punch behaves identically whichever way it came — including the retry that changes nothing.

02

A punch nobody claimed is somebody's pay

A terminal knows a man as the number an installer typed during commissioning. Until that number is an employee, his hours are real and unusable — so every unknown number opens a row the moment it clocks, is counted on the dashboard, and never quietly disappears. Map it later and the days he already worked are claimed back and posted.

03

The four things that actually happen on a site

Somebody forgets to punch out. Somebody presses the reader eight times. A shift starts at eight at night and ends at four in the morning. A man punches in at the gate and out at the office door. Each of those has a rule, the rules live in one small file with tests, and none of them invents an hour nobody recorded.

04

The punch is never edited

A supervisor can correct a pairing, and should be able to — a man whose finger would not read still worked his day. But the correction is a new row with a name, a time and a reason on it, and the punch underneath still says exactly what the machine said. That difference is what an argument about pay is settled with.

05

Attendance stays one book

Worked days are written into the same attendance record the app check-in and the QR code write to, through the same key, under the same working-day rules. And the terminal never overwrites a person: a day a supervisor has already ruled on, a day somebody clocked on their phone, and a day marked as leave are all held with the reason shown, not silently replaced.

06

A quiet terminal is not a small problem

A reader that dropped off the network on Sunday and is noticed at the pay run on the 28th costs you three weeks of one site's attendance and an argument you cannot win. Every quarter of an hour the watcher checks each terminal, flags the ones that have stopped talking with the reason in words, and says when unmapped punches are piling up.