Buddy Punch vs Deputy for Blended Hourly and Commission Pay

Both tools solve the hourly half of the equation well: accurate clock in and clock out, overtime alerts, and a clean export of hours worked. Neither tool calculates commission based on treatment revenue, since that calculation depends on your point of sale or practice management system, not on a time clock. The realistic expectation is that either tool gives you clean hourly data to feed into a commission calculation that happens elsewhere, not a single system that does the whole blended pay calculation end to end.

A provider's clocked hours and their treatment schedule should match closely, but they often do not, since a provider might clock in before the first patient arrives or stay late finishing charting after the last one leaves. Deputy's scheduling can be built around the actual appointment calendar more precisely than Buddy Punch's simpler clock in, which helps narrow that drift, but no time tool eliminates the gap between when a provider clocks in and when billable treatment time actually starts and ends.

A single provider practice does not need much scheduling sophistication, but a clinic running several providers across overlapping shifts, some hourly, some blended, some salaried, benefits from Deputy's ability to model different pay structures within one schedule view. That visibility matters most when you are trying to staff appointment slots efficiently across providers with genuinely different pay economics, since overstaffing an hourly only provider during a slow afternoon has a different cost impact than overstaffing a commission heavy one.

The practical fix for the reconciliation headache is not a smarter time clock, it is a cleaner handoff between the time clock's export and whatever calculates commission, usually the practice management or point of sale system. Map exactly which fields the commission calculation needs from the time export before choosing between Buddy Punch and Deputy, since the tool that formats its export closer to what your commission process already expects will save more manual work than any other single feature comparison.

To build a clean handoff from clock data to commission, follow these steps:

1. Map exactly which fields the commission calculation needs from the time clock export.
2. Keep the commission math in the practice management or point of sale system, since neither Buddy Punch nor Deputy calculates it.
3. Compare clocked hours with the treatment schedule, expecting some drift when providers clock in before the first patient or stay late charting.
4. Update the time review policy whenever a provider moves from purely hourly to blended pay.
5. Walk a newly blended provider through their first pay calculation manually before the first real pay period.

Clinics that shift a provider from purely hourly to a blended structure often forget to also update how that provider's time is tracked and reviewed, since the old hourly only review process does not surface commission related questions like whether treatment time was recorded accurately. When a provider's pay structure changes, revisit their time tracking configuration at the same time, not as an afterthought discovered at the next confusing paycheck.

Before a newly blended provider's first real pay period, walk through the full calculation once manually with them so both sides agree on how clocked hours, treatment volume and commission combine into a final number. This single conversation prevents most of the confusion that otherwise shows up as a dispute after the paycheck already went out, since a provider who understands the mechanics in advance is far less likely to be surprised by the actual figure, even when it differs from what they informally expected a busy week to produce, especially the first time a slower week produces a noticeably smaller check.

A practice adding a second or third location, or bringing on several new providers at once, often finds that the manual spreadsheet reconciliation that worked for one clinic breaks down quickly once multiplied across locations and providers with different blended structures. That growth point is usually when Deputy's scheduling depth starts to justify its added setup cost, not because the commission math changes, but because keeping track of which provider is on which pay structure at which location becomes a real coordination problem on its own, separate from the commission calculation itself.