Attendance without cards or fobs that walk away.

What does a drawer of spare badges cost?

Two costs, both invisible on any invoice: replacing cards for people who lose them or leave, and the queue at a single reader every morning.

The credential is already on their face.

A worker walks up to the shared tablet at the entrance and looks at it. Under a second later the record is made and they walk on — nothing taken out of a pocket, nothing touched, nothing handed over. A new starter is enrolled from one photograph taken on the same tablet by a supervisor, which takes about as long as explaining where the canteen is. When somebody leaves, you remove them in the admin client; there is no badge to chase, deactivate or find in a locker three weeks later. The drawer of spare fobs stops existing, and so does the habit it enables.

What it does not do: it does not replace a physical pass where one is required for other reasons — a visitor badge, a contractor permit, or a card your door system needs for a lift lobby.

What cards, fobs and PINs cost a high-turnover site.

The sticker price of a blank card is the smallest part of it. Every reissue is a short admin task performed by someone whose time is not free: find the person in the system, print or encode a card, hand it over, record that you did. At forty per cent turnover on a hundred and fifty staff that is sixty of those tasks a year before anybody loses one.

Then there is the queue. One reader at one door is a serial device: fifty people arriving within ten minutes of each other means someone waits, and the people at the back are being paid to stand still. Sites usually solve this by relaxing the rule — one person swipes for the group, or the supervisor records arrivals on paper and enters them later — which quietly undoes the reason for having a reader.

And a card proves only that a card was present. On a site with high turnover and a lot of agency labour, that is a weak claim to be building payroll on, which is the argument the buddy punching page makes at length.

What it does not do: switching to face check-in does not fix a process where supervisors are recording arrivals on paper for other reasons. It removes the excuse, not the habit.

Attendance without cards: the shared station.

A shared station is any device running the NCheck Admin app at a fixed point — a tablet on a bracket by the back-of-house door, a Windows machine with a webcam at reception, an IP camera over a turnstile. It holds the templates it needs locally, so a check-in does not wait on a network round trip, and it keeps working and recording if the connection drops.

Throughput is the question people actually care about, and the answer is that it is limited by how fast people walk rather than how fast the device matches. Verification is sub-second and nobody touches anything, so a line moves at walking pace. Where a shift change delivers two hundred people at once, the answer is more than one station on the same account rather than a faster one — which is cheap, because a station is a tablet.

Group check-in handles the case where a crew arrives together: several enrolled people are recognised from one photograph, so a van-load does not become a queue. That is covered in more detail on the shift-change page.

What it does not do: a shared station records who was at that station. If you need to prove somebody was at a particular site rather than at that door, that is GPS and geofencing on a personal device.

Do we need a biometric attendance machine?

No. This is the question that stalls most attendance projects, and the honest answer is that the hardware you already own is enough. The Attend app is free with unlimited installs on Windows, Android and iOS, so a personal phone or an existing PC becomes a check-in point at no cost. For a shared entrance, the Admin app turns a tablet, a Windows machine with a webcam or an IP camera into a station for a one-time €95 licence per device. There is no proprietary terminal to specify, quote, wire or wait for, and nothing to replace in three years when the supplier changes range. If an entrance genuinely has no device at all, the purchase is a consumer tablet. See biometric attendance machines and supported devices for what works.

Keeping RFID where it still makes sense.

Removing cards everywhere is not always the right answer, and a product that insisted on it would be selling you a position rather than a tool. RFID, barcode and PIN are all supported on the Standard plan and can run alongside face check-in on the same site, even at the same door.

The cases where cards keep earning their place are fairly consistent: visitors and contractors who are on site for an afternoon and should not be enrolled; a lift lobby or car park already wired to an existing card system you are not about to replace; and individual employees who decline biometrics, who need an alternative as a matter of basic fairness and, in several jurisdictions, of law.

The useful framing is that the credential should match the relationship. Permanent staff who come through the same door every day are the case where a face is better than a card. A delivery driver who comes once is not.

What it does not do: a PIN or a card check-in is not verified in the way a face check-in is. Mixing them means accepting that some of your records are weaker — which is usually the right trade for visitors, and the wrong one for payroll.

Three ways to identify someone at a door.

Who this is for — and who it is not.

What to check before you commit.

Before you ask us.

Keep reading.

Last reviewed: October 2026. Templates, not photos; deleted on request; on-premises keeps everything inside your network. Details on the security and compliance page.