Glossary
Time Theft
Also known as: Timesheet fraud
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.
Real time theft clusters into a few forms: proxy attendance (someone else punches you in), inflation (rounding 6.5 hours up to 8 on the timesheet), misattribution (personal time logged against a client), and ghost hours (billing for work never done). Each has a different detection surface, and only the first is solved by hardening the clock-in.
The surveillance industry sells screenshots, keyloggers and idle-time scores as the cure. The trade is poor: monitoring tools collect vastly more personal data than any payroll purpose justifies — a serious exposure under the DPDP Act and GDPR — and they measure activity, not work. An engineer thinking through a design scores as idle; a mouse-jiggler scores as productive.
The proportionate control is structural: individual logins, work recorded as sessions against named projects, and manager approval close to the event. Fabricated hours then have to survive review by someone who knows what was actually delivered — which is both a stronger check than surveillance and a smaller data footprint.
How Workclave handles this
Workclave prevents time theft with structure rather than spyware: personal sessions, project attribution and inline approvals. The record is defensible for payroll and billing, and there is nothing covert to erode the team's trust. monitoring without surveillance.
Related terms
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.
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 →Session-based tracking records attendance as discrete work sessions, each with a start, an end, and a project, rather than a single daily clock-in and clock-out. A day can contain several sessions across different projects, breaks, or locations. This produces a far richer and more accurate picture of how time was actually spent.
Read definition →Billable hours are the units of work time that can be charged to a client under a contract or engagement. They exclude internal activities like admin, training, or bench time that the client does not pay for. For services firms, billable hours are the direct link between effort and revenue.
Read definition →