Buddy punching
Buddy punching is when someone clocks in or out for a colleague who is not there. The hours then say a person worked when they did not. Shiftbrook’s clock checks the phone against the site pin. It does not take a photo and it does not scan a face.
What the pin can catch
Clock-in reads the phone at that moment and compares it with the pin on the location. The default radius is 100 metres, and it can be set from 25 to 1000. Clock-out checks again. The phone is not followed between the two punches. If the pin is not set, clock-in stays closed. A reading coarser than 100 metres is ignored.
Someone who is nowhere near the site cannot use their own phone to punch, unless the organisation is set to record a reason and flag an outside punch instead of refusing it. A flagged punch stays visible on the timesheet. A manager can also add a manual time, and that needs a note and is stored as flagged. Those are the controls. They are not a guarantee that the person holding the phone is the person named on the shift.
What it does not prove
If two people are both inside the radius, one of them can clock in on the other’s phone. The pin cannot see faces. Shiftbrook does not have a photo punch or a face unlock, and this page does not pretend that a geofence replaces them. The honest limit is: the punch was made on that account, at that time, and the phone was or was not inside the circle.
The timesheet is where a manager looks before approving. Hours come from the clock or from the rota. An approved sheet locks. The CSV is the download. Nothing in the clock sends those hours to a payroll product, and sending them to Xero Payroll UK is not available until that connection works end to end.