Working Out How Much You Have

Every product in this area quotes a percentage of payroll lost. The number is not from your organisation and does not describe it.

Where the vendor figure comes from

An industry survey, or a study of a different sector, scaled by your headcount.

Frequently it assumes every worker takes a few minutes daily, which multiplied across a year produces an impressive figure.

It rarely distinguishes the six categories, so system failures and rounding are counted as theft.

Treat it as a starting hypothesis, not a finding.

What you can measure

Buddy punching: instances actually identified, over the last two years. Most organisations can count them on one hand, and that count is the honest basis.

Punch-to-shift gaps: the distribution of how long before a shift people clock in, and how long after it ends they clock out. A cluster of early punches is either a policy question or an artefact of when the terminal is reachable.

Break overruns: where breaks are recorded, the distribution rather than the average.

Corrections and overrides: how many, and what caused them. This is where system failures hide.

Doing the arithmetic

Minutes, times people affected, times frequency, times wage rate.

Per category, not as one number.

Then the same for the controls: licence, hardware, administration, and the time lost to failed punches and corrections.

Comparing the two is the whole decision, and it is frequently uncomfortable for the proposal.

The comparison people skip

Unpaid minutes running the other way.

Rounding, if you round: compute the aggregate difference between raw and rounded time over a quarter. It should be near zero and frequently is not.

Pre-shift activity: booting systems, changing, briefings, queueing at a terminal.

Work after clocking out.

Do this arithmetic too. In most operations that measure both, the second figure is larger, and it is the one with legal consequences.

What the numbers are for

Deciding whether to act at all.

Choosing which of the six categories to address, because they need different responses.

And setting an honest expectation. A control that eliminates half of a small problem is not a business case, and saying so early is cheaper than discovering it at renewal.

The check worth running first

Take one team and one month.

Reconstruct the paid hours from the raw records.

Count the minutes in each direction.

An afternoon, and it will tell you more than any industry statistic.

Count what you can name

The most honest starting number in this subject.

Instances of buddy punching you actually identified, over two years.

Not estimated. Identified.

In most organisations the answer is a handful, and that handful is the basis for any proportionality argument you will later need to make.

If the answer is none, the project is addressing something read about rather than something observed.

A practical configuration prompt

During configuration, use workforce optimisation tools to prompt questions about identifiers, ownership and output. Treat the page as a starting point and document each assumption.