Buddy Punch

Buddy Punch takes its name from the exact fraud it's built to stop, and its answer isn't fancier scheduling, it's a photo on every punch. Turn on Photo on Punch and the app makes each employee snap a selfie when they clock in or out; the shots land on the timecard for you to review. That's the deterrent: nobody clocks in a buddy when the app is putting that buddy's face on your dashboard. Be clear on what it is, though, it's a photo captured for a human to check, not software that auto-matches the face against the employee on file and rejects a mismatch on its own.

There's also a genuinely automatic option, but read the fine print. On iPhone and iPad, Buddy Punch can require Apple's Face ID before a punch registers, and that one does block a failed check in real time. What it's checking is the device's own Face ID enrollment, whoever set up Face ID on that phone, not a face-match against your roster. So it's a real step past a GPS pin on personal iPhones, and a weaker guarantee than the 'facial recognition' label implies on a shared kiosk. Both the photo capture and the Face ID gate live on the Pro plan (around $5.99/user/mo billed annually, plus a $19 base), not the cheapest tier.

It's a leaner product than Homebase or Deputy, less scheduling depth, less multi-location franchise tooling, and that's a fair trade if stopping time theft is the actual priority rather than a nice-to-have bundled with scheduling you needed anyway. For a small business where buddy punching or inflated timesheets are a known, recurring problem, the photo-on-every-punch approach is a real, low-drama fix. Just budget the Pro tier, and if you're in a state with biometric-privacy law, handle consent properly before you switch on anything face-related.