How should HR handle missed punches and attendance corrections?
HR should handle a missed punch as a request, never as a quiet edit. The employee supplies the real time and a reason, somebody with approval rights reviews it, and the change stays on record. PeopleMuster runs that flow as Manual Punch Requests, and its activity log keeps the before and after values of every change.
Missed punches have ordinary causes. A terminal didn't read a finger, someone walked in on a call, or a browser check-in window closed before they reached it. None of that is misconduct. What turns it into a problem is fixing it by overwriting the record, because afterwards nobody can tell a correction from a number somebody typed.
Write your missed-punch policy before the first case lands. Four questions cover it. How soon must the employee raise it, with what reason, who approves it, and what happens to a day nobody corrects? Keep the answers short enough to fit on one screen of your attendance policy.
In PeopleMuster the queue is already built into attendance. Manual Punch Requests is a tab on both the employee and admin screens. Every request and its review sit right beside your attendance table. When someone misses the browser check-in window, the card sends them into that same request flow instead of leaving a silent gap.
Keep asking and approving in different hands. Approval comes from roles built on 64 permissions, so you decide whether line managers or HR sign off. Give that right to a role the requester doesn't hold, and every hand-entered time has two people behind it.
Watch the pattern as closely as the case. Ten corrections from one person is a conversation. Ten from everyone on one floor in the same week points at the terminal. Check the Unmapped Users count on the device mapping screen too. A new starter never linked to their terminal ID misses a punch every single day.
Ask for corrections the same day wherever you can. A time recalled that morning is a memory; one recalled three weeks later is a guess rebuilt from a calendar. Once applied, the two look identical, which is exactly why the deadline belongs in the policy.
Related questions
How long should employees have to correct a missed punch?
One or two working days suits most teams. Write the deadline into your attendance policy, so a request raised on time is routine and a late one is the exception a reviewer questions.
Should a missed punch count as an absence?
Treat the day as open until the request is decided. A day with no recorded start or finish produces no working-hours figure, so the fix is the approved correction rather than a change of status.
Is every attendance correction recorded?
Yes. PeopleMuster's activity log keeps field-level before-and-after values, so a corrected record shows what it held, what replaced it and who made the change.
What causes the same employee to miss punches every day?
Usually a mapping gap. The terminal knows people by their enrolment ID, so a person with no link to a device user has nowhere for punches to land. Fix the mapping once and the daily requests stop.