Twelve questions to ask before buying any attendance system
Attendance demos all look identical, and none of them show the part that matters. Everything expensive happens after the punch: in the rules layer, the exception path and the payroll export. Ask every supplier the same twelve questions — including us — and compare the answers instead of the presentations.
Coverage and hardware
- 1
How many entrances does this cover, and what does each additional one cost?
Quotes are per device; sites have several doors. Get the whole-site number.
- 2
What happens on the doors you are not quoting for?
If the loading bay and side gate stay uncovered, the record has a hole in it. Know its size now.
- 3
What percentage of our workforce will this fail on, and why?
For fingerprint on manual-labour sites the answer is not small. A vendor who says “none” is not being straight.
The rules layer
- 4
How are rotating shifts handled, and how is a night shift crossing midnight attributed?
If it lands on two calendar dates, budget for monthly manual corrections.
- 5
Show me where grace period, half-day threshold and overtime bands are configured.
In the product, not in a slide.
- 6
How does a shift swap get recorded?
Real workforces swap constantly. No workflow means a supervisor fixes it by hand every month.
Exceptions and evidence
- 7
What is the exact path for a missed punch?
Who raises it, who approves it, what reason is captured. “The admin edits it” produces next year's disputes.
- 8
If an employee disputes a mark three weeks later, what can you show them?
A timestamp is an assertion. A stored image is evidence.
- 9
What percentage of entries are manual on your typical customer's site?
Ask for a real number. It is the honest measure of how well the system works in the field.
Payroll and data
- 10
Show me an actual payroll export file.
Not the dashboard. The file, with hours already split into regular and overtime.
- 11
Where is biometric data stored, and what happens to it when someone leaves?
Under the DPDP Act, templates should not outlive their purpose. No deletion answer means no compliance thinking.
- 12
What is the total five-year cost — all doors, hardware, software, AMC and replacement?
Not the device price. The number you will actually spend.
Two closing notes. Ask every vendor to name the conditions where their system performs worst; anyone claiming none is describing a product that does not exist. And apply all twelve to us — our answers are on the biometric attendance and face recognition attendance pages, and we will put them in writing on a call.
PGAK Innovations Pvt. Ltd. · Ludhiana, Punjab · +91 62839 93600 · www.pgak.co.in