Missed punch
A missed punch is a scan that should have been recorded and was not, leaving an attendance record incomplete. It can be a missing arrival, a missing departure, or both. The effect is the same. That day cannot resolve into hours until somebody supplies the absent time.
Missed punches are ordinary. A device fails. A phone dies. Somebody walks past the terminal on a call. Any system treating them as rare will handle them badly.
The cost is not the single day. It is what that day does to every figure built on top of it. Hours, attendance rate, on-time rate, department totals.
The handling question is really about trust. Somebody has to add a time nobody observed. The process has to be reviewable afterwards.
Timing changes the quality of the fix. Raised the same morning, it is a fact somebody remembers. Raised at month end, it is a reconstruction. An approver reviewing forty at once is not reviewing anything. Set a short window and the queue stays readable.
Where this shows up in PeopleMuster
In PeopleMuster a missed punch becomes a correction request with an approver and a timestamp, not a silent edit. The attendance module carries its own Manual Punch Requests tab for exactly this.
Questions people ask
How soon should a missed punch be raised?
The same day, while the times are still remembered accurately. A correction raised three weeks later is somebody's best guess, and everybody involved knows it.
Who approves a missed punch correction?
Whoever holds the approval permission, usually a manager or an HR administrator. The point of requiring an approver is that the requester and the reviewer differ.
Does a missed punch count as an absence?
It should not. An absence means somebody was not there. A missed punch means the record is incomplete. Different problem, different fix.