Every inspector has seen it. A month of attendance in identical handwriting, in the same ink, with entries too regular to be a real month — filled in on Friday from memory, or on the morning of the visit.
It satisfies nobody. Not the employee disputing a day's absence, not the inspector reading it, and not the payroll that was computed from it.
Contemporaneous is the whole property
The value of a register is not its contents. It is that it was made at the time, before anybody had a reason to want it to say something particular.
A record built as events occur has that property. One assembled afterwards does not, however accurate it happens to be — and the accuracy is not the point being tested.
This is why it matters that late-mark minutes are stamped at the punch rather than recomputed later, and why the register should seal once payroll for that month is approved. A record that can be revised after payment is not evidence of anything.
What the inspection actually looks for
Agreement. The muster roll, the wage register, the overtime register and the payslips should tell one consistent story.
Discrepancies between those documents are far more damaging than an untidy entry within one of them. Two records that disagree about who was present on the 14th is a finding; a crossed-out entry is not.
This is also the argument against keeping contract labour in a separate notebook maintained by the contractor's supervisor. When the question is who was on site, two books that disagree is a worse answer than one book that is imperfect.
You do not need new hardware
The obstacle is usually assumed to be a device. It is not. The biometric at your gate already captures punches; the problem is that turning those punches into a register is done by hand, once a month, under time pressure.
And for the people who never pass the gate — drivers, site staff, field employees — a phone punch bounded by location puts them in the same register rather than in a second system.
The test
Open last month's register. If you can tell, at a glance, that it was written across the month rather than at the end of it, you are in good shape. If you cannot, neither can anybody else.