Manual punch
A manual punch is an attendance time entered by a person rather than captured automatically by a device. Manual punches exist because devices fail and people work away from them. Each one carries a claim about a moment no hardware observed.
Every attendance system needs this door, and every attendance system is weakened by having it, which is an awkward pair of facts that no amount of product design makes go away. Both are true at once.
What makes a manual punch acceptable is not the entry. It is what surrounds it. Who asked. Who approved. When. What reason was given. Strip those away and the record is indistinguishable from a made-up number.
The volume is a signal worth watching. A team generating manual punches every week does not have a discipline problem. It probably has a broken device, or one in the wrong place.
Who may enter one should be separated from who may approve it. Where the same person does both, the safeguard is decorative. Any later review has nothing independent to look at. Splitting the roles costs almost nothing.
Where this shows up in PeopleMuster
PeopleMuster routes manual punches through a request queue with an approver. Its activity log keeps field-level before and after values, so a correction can be traced.
Questions people ask
Is a manual punch less reliable than a device punch?
Yes, and that is unavoidable. Somebody is recalling a time rather than a machine capturing one. The approval and the trail are what make it usable anyway.
Should manual punches be limited?
Watching the count is more useful than capping it. A hard cap pushes the problem out of the system, where you cannot see it at all.
What reason should a manual punch give?
Something specific enough to check later. 'Device offline at the side entrance' is useful. 'Forgot' tells the approver nothing they can act on.