Glossary
Buddy Punching
Also known as: Proxy attendance
Buddy punching is one employee recording attendance on behalf of another — punching a colleague's card, tapping their badge, or logging them in — so the absent person appears present. It is the oldest form of attendance fraud, and in India it is often called proxy attendance.
The damage is payroll paid for time not worked, and it scales with weak verification: swipe cards and shared logins invite it, and studies of US employers have repeatedly attributed a measurable share of gross payroll to it. In billing businesses the harm doubles, because phantom presence can flow into client invoices.
The reflex fix is biometrics — fingerprints or face recognition make proxy punching physically hard. But biometric attendance imports its own problem: under India's DPDP Act and rules, and regimes like Illinois' BIPA, biometric identifiers are sensitive personal data demanding consent, minimisation and hard retention discipline. Solving a fraud problem by building a biometric database is a trade many privacy-conscious firms now decline.
Session-based models attack the incentive instead of the finger. When attendance is a series of project-linked sessions that a manager reviews and approves, a proxy punch has to survive human review of what work was supposedly done — a much harder forgery than a 9:02 timestamp, and one that needs no biometric data at all.
India context
Muster rolls and attendance registers under Indian labour law must reflect actual presence, so proxy attendance is a compliance defect as well as a payroll leak. DPDP consent and minimisation duties apply to biometric fixes — accuracy achieved through approvals rather than biometrics keeps the register clean without the sensitive-data liability.
How Workclave handles this
Workclave sessions are personal logins tied to projects and reviewed by a manager — proxy attendance has to fool a person who knows what work happened, not a card reader. No fingerprints, no face templates, no DPDP-sensitive biometric store. monitoring without surveillance.
Related terms
Time theft is receiving pay for time not actually worked: attendance marked by a colleague, padded timesheet entries, long unrecorded breaks, or hours billed to a client that nobody worked. The term is broad, and its breadth is part of the problem — it is routinely stretched to cover any minute an employer cannot account for.
Read definition →Biometric attendance uses a physical identifier such as a fingerprint or facial scan to confirm that a specific person was present when they marked attendance. It reduces buddy punching, where one employee marks another as present. The verified event is then recorded as the attendance entry.
Read definition →An attendance register is the ongoing record of which employees were present, absent, or on leave each working day, along with their hours. It is used for payroll, compliance, and workforce planning. In India it also supports statutory record-keeping obligations.
Read definition →A manager approval workflow is the defined path by which attendance, leave, or time entries are reviewed and approved by the right manager before they become official. It turns self-reported data into an authoritative record. Approvals create accountability and an audit trail for payroll and billing.
Read definition →