Buddy Punch vs Deputy for Government Contract Timekeeping

Plenty of time-tracking software is built for restaurants and retail, where a manager fixing an employee's clock-in without a trace is a convenience feature, not a problem. On a government contract, particularly cost-reimbursable or time-and-materials work, that same silent edit is exactly what an auditor is trained to look for. Before assuming either tool works, check specifically whether every correction to a submitted time entry is logged with who made it, when and why, and whether that log is visible to someone other than the person who made the change.

A core expectation in government contract timekeeping is that the employee who did the work enters their own time, not a supervisor entering it for them after the fact from a schedule or an estimate. Confirm the tool you choose actually enforces employee self-entry as the default workflow, and that any exception, like a supervisor correcting a missed entry, requires the employee's acknowledgment and leaves its own record rather than simply overwriting the original.

Weekly or batch time entry is common in commercial software and is exactly the habit government contract timekeeping is built to prevent, since time recorded well after the fact is far easier to misremember or misstate than time recorded the same day. Configure whichever tool you choose to prompt or require daily entry, and treat a pattern of late or batched entries from any employee as something to correct immediately, not a minor administrative lag.

Contractors working multiple contracts, or splitting time between direct contract work and indirect overhead, need hours attributable to the correct charge code, since misallocated labor is a real finding in a contract audit, not just an internal accounting inconvenience. Deputy's more structured job and cost-code hierarchy handles multi-contract allocation with less manual splitting than Buddy Punch's simpler model; a contractor working a single contract with one charge code has less need for that added structure.

Don't take a vendor's compliance claims at face value. Ask specifically to see the audit log for a corrected time entry, confirm daily entry is enforced rather than optional, and confirm the employee, not just a supervisor, is the one entering and certifying their own hours. Bring your contracts or compliance lead into that review rather than treating it as a purely technical decision, since they are the ones who will answer for the system's behavior if a contracting officer or auditor asks about it later.

Before rolling either tool out, verify each of these points directly with the vendor:

• Ask to see the audit log for a corrected time entry, showing exactly who changed what and when.
• Confirm daily time entry is enforced by the system rather than left optional for employees to skip.
• Confirm the employee, not just a supervisor, enters and certifies their own time.
• Check that hours can be attributed to the correct contract or charge code, including indirect overhead.
• Review the correction workflow itself, since a short pilot only tests whether people can use the tool, not whether it is compliant.

Running a short pilot with a handful of friendly employees and declaring the tool compliant because nobody hit an obvious problem is not the same as a real review of its audit trail and correction workflow. A pilot tests whether people can use the tool; it doesn't test whether a correction three weeks later leaves the record an auditor would expect to see. Do the documented compliance review separately, ideally before the pilot, not as an afterthought once the rollout is already underway.

Employees moving from a weekly or batch habit to daily entry often experience it as an added chore unless someone explains the reason behind it. Frame the change specifically: daily entry protects the employee's own record as much as it protects the contract, since a dispute over hours worked is far easier to resolve with same-day records than with a reconstructed memory of a week that has already passed. A workforce that understands the reason tends to comply with daily entry more consistently than one that's simply told the rule changed.

A finding during a contract audit is far more manageable when the contractor can show a documented, self-corrected process than when the record simply looks wrong with no explanation. If a gap turns up, whether a missed daily entry or an undocumented correction from before the current system was in place, address it directly with your contracts team rather than trying to quietly patch the historical record, since an attempted retroactive fix without a clear audit trail of its own tends to look worse than the original gap.