Can I fix a missed punch myself?
An employee can raise the request but cannot write the record. Manual punch requests are submitted by the person who noticed the gap and applied by somebody holding approval rights. The split between asking and approving is deliberate, and removing it would remove the only thing that makes a hand-entered time trustworthy.
Every attendance system needs a door for corrections, because devices fail and people walk past terminals on a call. Every attendance system is also weakened by having one.
What makes a hand-entered time acceptable is never the entry itself. It is the surroundings. Who asked, who agreed, when, and for what stated reason.
Strip those away and the entry is indistinguishable from a number somebody typed. Not because anybody is dishonest, but because nothing afterwards can tell the difference.
The request queue also turns individual corrections into a pattern somebody can read. Ten from one person is a question about a person. Ten from one floor is a question about a device.
Timing changes how good the fix is. Raised the same morning, the time supplied is something a person still holds in mind. Raised three weeks later, it is a reconstruction built from a calendar. Both look identical once applied, which is the argument for raising them early.
Capping the number is a worse idea than watching it. A hard limit pushes the problem out of the record, where nobody can see it at all. Then the day simply goes missing and the totals quietly run low.
Where the same individual both requests and approves, the safeguard is decorative. Separating the two roles costs almost nothing and is worth doing before the volume grows.
Write a reason specific enough to check later. A note naming the side entrance and a dead terminal is useful. The word forgot gives a reviewer nothing to act on.
Related questions
Where do I raise the request?
The attendance module carries its own Manual Punch Requests tab, on both the employee view and the administrator view, so the queue and the request live in one place.
Is a hand-entered time less reliable?
Yes, unavoidably. Somebody is recalling a moment rather than hardware capturing one. The review and the trail are what make it usable regardless.
Does a correction leave a trace?
The activity log keeps field-level before and after values, so a changed record shows what it held previously and what replaced it.