Straight answer: attendance demos all look identical and none of them show you the part that matters. Everything expensive happens after the punch — in the rules layer, the exception path and the payroll export. Ask every vendor the same twelve questions, including us, and compare the answers instead of the presentations.
Print this. Use it on every supplier you talk to.
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 and you should know the size of the hole now.
3. What percentage of our workforce will this fail on, and why? Any honest vendor can answer this. For fingerprint on manual-labour sites, the answer is not small. A vendor who says "none" is either inexperienced or not being straight with you.
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, walk away or 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. If there is no workflow, 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" is the answer that 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. This single question separates systems that end arguments from systems that host them.
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. If it is a list of raw punch times, you are buying a sensor and keeping the spreadsheet.
11. Where is biometric data stored, and what happens to it when someone leaves? Under the DPDP Act, templates should not outlive the purpose. A vendor without a clear deletion answer has not thought about compliance.
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. The willingness to answer tells you more than any feature list; anyone claiming no weak conditions is describing a product that does not exist.
And apply all twelve to us. We would rather lose to a well-informed comparison than win a deal that unravels in month three — our answers are on the biometric attendance and face recognition attendance pages, and we will put them in writing on a call.