Buddy Punch vs Deputy for Contract Instructor Time

Not the session itself, which is usually paid as a flat rate regardless of exact minutes. The disputed hours are setup, grading, and any prep time your contracts promise to pay hourly. Defining those categories in writing, then giving instructors a simple way to log them, removes most of the disagreement before it starts, since the argument moves from memory to a record both sides can see. A vague category like general prep invites padding in a way that a specific one like grading per cohort submission does not.

Both can, but differently. Buddy Punch's strength here is simplicity: an instructor who works for you twice a month needs to log grading hours without a long onboarding process, and Buddy Punch's mobile clock in is fast enough that a low frequency contractor will actually use it correctly. Deputy adds more scheduling structure, which matters more if your certification program runs a large, recurring instructor roster across multiple course tracks and needs to forecast staffing by course rather than by person. Neither tool was built specifically for training delivery, so expect to adapt its scheduling categories to your course structure rather than finding a perfect out of the box fit.

Put the definition of paid time, what counts, what does not, in the instructor agreement itself, not just in the software. A system only enforces what you tell it to; if grading time is capped at a set number of hours per session, configure that cap so an instructor sees it in real time rather than discovering it when the invoice is short. This single change, making the policy visible at the point of entry instead of at the point of payment, resolves most disputes that used to reach a manager. Instructors who see the cap while logging hours adjust their own behavior long before finance has to say anything.

Prevent invoice disputes with these policy steps:

1. Define paid time in the instructor agreement itself, spelling out what counts and what does not, not only in the software.
2. Give instructors a narrow category to log against, such as grading per cohort, instead of an open notes field.
3. Configure a cap on grading time so an instructor sees it in real time and not when the invoice comes up short.
4. Review outliers against the cap as they appear, instead of discovering them at invoice review.

A single course with five instructors can run on either tool comfortably. A certification business running several course tracks with instructors who teach across more than one needs Deputy's scheduling view to see total committed hours per instructor across tracks, so nobody accidentally books the same person into two paid sessions that overlap. That kind of cross track visibility is the actual reason to pay for the more complex tool, not a feature list, and it becomes worth the setup once double booking has actually happened once and cost the program a refund or a scramble.

Some training providers try to pay grading hourly based on an estimate of how long grading should take rather than what an instructor actually logs, on the theory that it prevents padding. In practice this just shifts the dispute from what happened to what should have happened, and it is a harder argument to win since nobody can prove a negative. Pay for logged, capped hours against a written policy instead, and address a pattern of padding directly with the individual instructor rather than penalizing the whole pool with an unrealistic estimate. Programs that make this switch usually find the dispute rate drops within a single billing cycle, simply because the rule is now visible to everyone at the moment they log time rather than buried in a policy document nobody reads.

With paid time categories defined, the choice between Buddy Punch and Deputy comes down to how many instructors you manage and how often their schedules overlap across programs. A certification provider with a handful of regular instructors and simple categories may get more value from a lighter tool than from one with deep planning features. A larger provider running a full calendar of concurrent cohorts, each pulling from a shared instructor pool, will eventually need the scheduling visibility that only Deputy provides, even if it takes longer to configure correctly.