Every operations manager we talk to has a version of the same story. Someone was marked present for a shift they weren't on. It came out weeks later, usually when a client queried an invoice.
The instinct is to treat it as a discipline issue. Send a reminder. Add a line to the handbook. It rarely works, because the behaviour isn't really about dishonesty — it's about a system that made the shortcut easy and the correct path annoying.
Why shared terminals invite it
A tablet mounted by the door has one job: record who arrived. But it can't tell who is standing in front of it. It records whoever types the code.
At shift change, twelve people arrive within four minutes of each other. A queue forms. Someone at the front offers to punch in the two colleagues parking their van. Nobody involved thinks of it as fraud. It's a favour that saves ninety seconds.
The system asked "what code?" when it needed to ask "who are you, and are you here?"
What actually closes the gap
Three things, and you need more than one:
Tie the record to a person, not a code. A PIN is a start. A fingerprint or face check is better, because it can't be passed to a colleague over a van roof.
Tie the record to a place. If a check-in stores coordinates and the distance from the site, punching in from home stops being invisible. It doesn't need to block anyone — it just needs to be recorded, because a number in a column is enough to change behaviour.
Remove the queue. This is the part people skip. If the correct path takes ninety seconds and the shortcut takes five, the shortcut wins. Let people check in with the phone already in their hand and the favour stops being worth doing.
The part that matters months later
The reason to care isn't catching people. It's that when an invoice is disputed in November, you want to answer with a record rather than an argument.
"He says he was there, and the sheet says he was there" is not evidence. "The check-in was logged at 06:58, eleven metres from the gate, with a GPS reading accurate to four metres, confirmed by fingerprint" is a different conversation entirely — and usually a much shorter one.
Most disputes aren't resolved by proving someone wrong. They're resolved by having enough detail that nobody bothers arguing.