Now imagine that your employee is late for work on one or both of the days for which you estimated hours. You would need to send your payroll hours in for processing on the 13 th, with estimated hours for the 14th and 15th. You would need to estimate their time worked for the last few days of the period because your payroll company requires 2 days for processing. For example, suppose you wanted to pay employees on the 15 th of the month for the pay period of the 1 st through the 15 th. Many companies estimate work time in order to close the payroll period before the period ends. It’s an easy way for employees to falsify records. When time stamps are handwritten you lose accountability. One of the easiest ways to fall prey is by allowing employees to manually fill in their time sheets instead of punching the clock. Here are a few of them: Capture punches in real-time Most of which are low or zero-budget items that can be started right away. There are many things you can do to stop buddy punching. If you had 10 employees, you’d be looking at an extra annual expense of $6500 or so before payroll taxes. $15/hr x 43 extra hours each year= $645.Now let’s assume that this employee makes $15/hour. 50 minutes x 52 weeks = 2600 minutes, or more than 43 hours a year.10 minutes x 5 days = 50 extra minutes of time each week.Imagine an employee adding an average of 10 extra minutes each day for an entire year. Conducting surveys, they found that employees were stealing an average of 4.5 hours each week, equivalent to an extra six-weeks of paid vacation per year. According to the American Payroll Association (APA), time theft costs businesses 1.5 to 5 percent of gross payroll, amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars every year. Your employees may not realize that adding fake time to their timesheets will make a big difference to your profitability, but depending on the size of your company, it could make payroll much more expensive than expected. Buddy punching is something that will have a negative effect on your business, and not just on your bottom line. For example, an employee might send a short text message to another employee (their “buddy” who is already at work) asking to be clocked in because he does not want to be marked tardy. This typically happens when the employee is running late or when an employee wants to accrue extra hours for overtime. With 3 out of 4 companies experiencing time theft from buddy punching, the practice is a serious problem facing most businesses at one time or another leading to poor productivity and lost profits.īuddy punching is the process of an employee recording a timestamp for another worker who is not present. Most managers agree that dealing with attendance problems is hard enough but can be even harder with dishonest employees.
One of the most common types of time theft, called “buddy punching,” occurs when one worker punches the clock on behalf of a late or missing co-worker. Time theft is common among employees in the workplace and comes in many forms, most of which can be difficult to catch.