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Does a QR code stop buddy punching?

What a rotating code, a geofence and device recognition each genuinely do about one person clocking in for another — and what none of them do.

Buddy punching is one person recording attendance for another — clocking in a colleague who is late, or not there at all. It is the oldest problem in attendance and it is the thing every product in this category claims to solve.

A rotating code plus device recognition kills the easy version of it, which in practice is nearly all of it. A code that changes every thirty seconds cannot be photographed and reused from the car park. One phone checking in two different people shows up as a pattern an administrator can see, on the day it happens.

Buddy punching is a habit rather than a heist. Habits stop when somebody might notice, and the point of these controls is that somebody does.

What each control actually does

A code that changes every thirty seconds stops the easy version: a photographed or shared code. It does not stop somebody standing at the screen scanning twice.

Device recognition notices when one phone checks in two different people. It never blocks anybody — a shared tablet in a warehouse is a normal thing — but the pattern appears in your reports, and repeated pairs of names on one device are the clearest evidence of buddy punching there is.

A geofence confirms the phone was near the location. It stops somebody checking in from home. It does nothing about somebody standing next to the screen with a colleague’s phone.

Office Wi-Fi verification is the same idea by a different route: the check-in came from the building’s network. Same strength, same blind spot.

Photographs or facial recognition are what other products add here. We do not do this, deliberately — it turns an attendance record into biometric data, which brings consent requirements, storage obligations and a category of risk out of all proportion to knowing who was at work.

What we say, and what we will not say

We say catches, records and flags. We do not say prevents or eliminates, because they are not true.

The honest version: with rotating codes and device recognition switched on, casual buddy punching is difficult to do repeatedly without leaving a pattern an administrator can see. A determined pair of colleagues with two phones can still do it, and no product on the market changes that.

What to do about the pattern when you see it

The Review queue collects shared-device flags, and the attendance report shows them per day. LiteEntry records that somebody noticed — it does not record a judgement, and it never decides anybody was cheating. Two people sharing a phone is often a flat battery.

The usual outcome of switching this on is not catching anybody. It is that everyone knows the record exists, and the habit quietly stops.

Still stuck? Try the demo — most questions here are quicker to answer by pressing the thing than by reading about it.