Buddy Punch review:
What 24 real conversations revealed

Buddy Punch offers a 14-day free trial with no credit card required. You can create your account with your Apple or Google account, or by entering your name and email address and assigning a password.

Buddy Punch asks whether you want to create a new organization for your business or join an account made by your employer. After that you fill out an online form with your company name, time zone, and number of employees.

The next step is setting up pay periods. Choose a frequency from the dropdown (weekly, bi-weekly, semi-monthly, or monthly), then set the pay period start date. Once set, the pay schedule appears on the right side of the screen.

Then you select how employees punch in and on which devices: username and password, 4-digit PIN, or QR code, on desktop, mobile, or tablet. You can pick more than one. If you're unsure, click 'I'm not sure yet' and change it later.

Next you add employee names and email addresses. You can tick a box to assign their email as username and send a welcome email, or skip and do it later.

You can also hand this step to Buddy Punch. A chat box appears with instructions to send the completed Employee Upload template, and they email your employees their login credentials.

Last, you pick the features you want: punch time clock, scheduling, time off, job codes and project tracking, GPS on punches, GPS tracking during shifts, alerts, punch restrictions, payroll, time card approvals, manual timesheet entry, and single sign-on with API.

You can select more than one and change them anytime.

Before you reach the dashboard there are short tutorial videos on the core features and a welcome message you can reply to. We liked the quick, straightforward five-step process, and having Buddy Punch send employee credentials off the back of the upload template is a nice touch.

The web dashboard is straightforward. It is easy to follow, with the main time tracking data in the center and the other features discoverable from the menu tabs.

For a product whose whole pitch is simplicity, this is where that pays off. There is very little to configure before the thing is usable.

We noticed some minor lagging when scrolling or switching to new tabs. On the whole though the mobile dashboard has a clean, organized, minimalist look. The dashboard itself only displays today's schedule and which employees are in and out.

The mobile app also lets you view and approve time cards and time off, and build your team's schedules. It is a narrower version of the web app rather than a full match, which is a theme that recurs in the customer reviews we read.

The app offers several ways to log in. Employees can use Google or Apple credentials, Face ID, a QR code, a PIN, or facial recognition.

Administrators enable the setting for a specific login method. For QR code login you send each employee their own unique code, which they save on their device.

Whichever method the team uses, they log in at the start of the shift and out when it is over, then submit their time report to a manager for approval.

Buddy Punch's standout feature is facial recognition for clock-ins, which makes it harder to bypass access controls. It is designed to help eliminate buddy punching, the kind of time fraud where one worker clocks in on behalf of another.

Workers scan their faces to punch in or out from the web or mobile app.

Using Face ID on an iPhone or iPad Pro, employees sign into Buddy Punch securely. This helps confirm the person clocking in is the person who is meant to be.

It removes the need for passwords or codes that get forgotten. The same goes for fingerprint scans, which do not always work for workers whose hands are dirty or wet, a real consideration in construction and kitchen work.

Worth knowing before you rely on it: across the 812 customer reviews we read, camera and photo requirements came up 12 times as a friction point, with workers describing permission prompts on every login and the photo step slowing down the punch.

Drag-and-drop functionality lets you build a staff schedule in minutes, on web or mobile. Once it is done you can push notifications to employees about upcoming shifts, and adjustments take a few clicks.

Two things to check against your own operation. Scheduling is a paid add-on at $1 per user per month, included from the Pro tier up rather than in the base plan.

And in our conversations, scheduling depth was where contractors pushed back hardest. One specialty contractor said flatly that "the schedule sucked completely."

Payroll is easier when it is wired into the time tracker. Buddy Punch offers automatic payroll tax filings and payments, which saves time on complex deposits and calculations.

You review employees' hours and time off from the payroll dashboard, then sync employee time and submit it with a quick import.

Buddy Punch Payroll is a separate module at $8 per user per month plus a $49 base fee, on top of your plan. If you would rather keep your existing payroll provider, the integration route is covered below.

Buddy Punch connects with Zapier, QuickBooks timesheets, ADP, Gusto, Paychex, Paylocity, PayPlus Software, SurePayroll, and Workday. Through Zapier it can be configured to reach a much wider set of apps.

The list is genuinely broad for a tool at this price, and it covers the payroll systems most small contractors already run. Their integrations page also lists Deltek and ViewPoint on the construction side. What is missing is Sage, Foundation, and Procore, so if your job costing lives in one of those, the data has to leave the system another way.

One reliability note from our conversations. An engineering contractor reported a defect where the QuickBooks sync corrupted vacation balances, was told to correct it by hand each cycle, and ended their evaluation over it.