Punchwell’s job is to lock the clock to your office and stop buddy punching. But once your team is on the system, you already have a roster of WordPress users sitting right there — so the everyday HR work that usually means another tool, another login, another monthly fee comes bundled too.
No à-la-carte modules. No per-user creep. When you buy Pro, you get the recruitment funnel, employee loans with automatic payroll deduction, attendance reports with manual punch correction, and granular role-based access — alongside the office-IP clock-in lock, GPS geofence, kiosk, mobile punch, leave, PTO accrual and payroll export. One flat annual price, unlimited employees.
Get Punchwell Pro — $99/yr → Per site, not per seat. Unlimited employees. Renewal price locked if you never lapse.
Module-stacking is the competitor’s business model. It isn’t ours.
Here’s the math that pushes shops to look for an alternative. On WP ERP — the closest WordPress competitor — you pay for Pro, then a per-user fee per year, then bolt on the Attendance module monthly, then the Payroll module monthly. Each feature is its own recurring line item. For a small team, that stack crosses Punchwell’s whole annual price at around three users.
Punchwell does the opposite. Everything below is part of the Pro bundle. You don’t shop for it, you don’t unlock it later, and your bill doesn’t move when you turn it on — or when you hire your hundredth employee.
| Punchwell Pro | Typical WordPress HR stack | |
|---|---|---|
| Recruitment | Included | Often a separate add-on |
| Loans + payroll deduction | Included | Rare; usually missing |
| Attendance reports + manual edits | Included | Module, billed separately |
| Role / tab access control | Included | Module or per-tier upsell |
| Per-user fee | None | Common ($/user/yr) |
| Pricing shape | One flat annual price | Pro + per-user + per-module/mo |
See the full ladder on the pricing page.
Recruitment — post the job, take applications, hire straight into your roster
Most SMBs run hiring out of an inbox and a spreadsheet. The Recruitment module (the hrm-recruitment add-on) keeps the whole funnel inside the WordPress site you already run — and ends it in the one place that matters: a real employee record, not a copy-paste job.
- Publish job posts on your own site — your domain, your branding, no third-party careers page.
- Public apply form for candidates, with résumé upload. The upload allowlist is locked to safe file types (a
.phpmasquerading as a résumé is rejected) — hardened in the security audit. - Review applicants in one list inside Punchwell.
- One-click hire → employee. When you hire someone, their details flow straight into a Punchwell employee record. They become a WordPress user on the
hrm_employeerole, ready to be assigned a department and a shift policy — and, if they’re on-site, flagged office-IP-only so they can only clock in from your network from day one.
That last step is the point. There’s no double entry between “candidate” and “team member,” and a new hire lands already inside the attendance-integrity controls that make Punchwell worth running.
Honest note: Recruitment is a hiring funnel and hire-to-employee flow — job posts, an apply form, and applicant review. It isn’t a full enterprise ATS with scoring pipelines or interview scheduling. It does the job a 10–100-person shop actually needs.
Employee loans — advance the money, recover it automatically from pay
Small teams lend to their people. A salary advance before payday, a one-off to cover an emergency — it happens, and tracking the repayment by memory is how it goes wrong. The Loans module (hrm-loan) makes it a clean, recorded process.
- Record a loan against an employee — amount, terms, monthly installment.
- Repay automatically via payroll deduction. Instead of chasing repayments, the balance draws down through payroll over time, so recovery is built into the pay cycle rather than tracked on a sticky note.
- HR-managed, on the employee’s behalf. This is a control for the employer, not a self-service “request a loan” portal — you decide who gets an advance and on what terms, and the system keeps the ledger straight.
Pair it with the payroll export engine and the deduction shows up where it belongs — in the payout figures you take to your payroll provider.
Attendance reports — and the manual punch edit you’ll actually use
A hard IP lock means most punches are clean and on-network. But people forget to clock out, a kiosk hiccups, someone’s shift starts before the device is awake. You need a record you can read and — when a genuine mistake happens — a way to fix it that leaves a trail. That’s the Attendance Reports module (hrm-attendance-report).
- Day-by-day attendance reports across your team — who worked, when, and for how long.
- Manual punch edits for the real-world misses: add a forgotten clock-out, correct a wrong time, fix a punch that didn’t land. The correction is made by an authorized person, not the employee.
- Reads from the same attendance engine that powers rounding, grace periods, auto clock-out and overnight shifts — so a corrected punch flows straight into the payout math.
This is the pressure valve that keeps a strict office-IP lock fair. The lock blocks the cheating; the reports and edits handle the honest mistakes — so you can run enforcement tight without punishing the cashier whose phone died mid-shift.
By design: manual punch edits are an HR/manager action, nonce- and capability-gated — an employee can’t quietly rewrite their own attendance. Optionally, edits can be set to require a reason, so every correction carries its own paper trail.
Permissions — give managers the tabs they need, and nothing more
Once HR, payroll figures and attendance live in one place, “who can see what” stops being a nicety. The Permission module (hrm-permission) lets you shape access without making everyone an administrator.
- Granular custom roles beyond the built-in employee and manager roles.
- Per-tab access toggles — decide which Punchwell areas each role can open, so a shift lead sees the schedule and their team without seeing salary figures or company settings.
- Works alongside Punchwell’s built-in capability gates: payout dollar amounts stay admin/manager-only, the IP and geofence settings stay locked to admins, and an employee’s self-service view shows only their own data.
Security here isn’t a marketing line — it’s how the suite is built. Punchwell was security-audited, the endpoints behind the original plugin’s public disclosures are capability-gated, and “a nonce alone is never enough for a privileged action” is a hard project rule. The Permission module is the friendly front end on top of that foundation.
All of it is in Pro. None of it bills again.
Every module on this page is part of the Punchwell Pro bundle — recruitment, loans, attendance reports, and permissions — together with the flagship office-IP clock-in lock, GPS geofence, kiosk and mobile punch, leave and PTO accrual, payroll export, HR reminders and checklists, and employee self-service.
| Tier | Price | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Free / Community | $0 on WordPress.org | Base HR: employees, departments, leave, basic attendance, basic single-office IP lock. The on-ramp. |
| Pro | $99 / year, per site | Everything bundled — including all four modules on this page. Unlimited employees. |
Per site, never per seat. Unlimited employees on every tier. Renewal price locked for as long as you never lapse — no surprise increase at hire #26.
Get Punchwell Pro — $99/yr → · Compare the plans →
FAQ
Are these really included, or are they paid add-ons I unlock later? Included. Recruitment, employee loans, attendance reports, and the permission/role module are all part of the Pro bundle at one flat annual price — $99/year per site. There’s no per-module monthly fee and no per-user charge. That’s the deliberate contrast with stacking-model competitors, where attendance and payroll are each their own recurring line item.
Do the add-ons work without the main plugin? No — they’re add-ons to the Punchwell base, so the base plugin must be active. If it isn’t, the add-ons stand down rather than misbehave. In practice you install the base and the add-ons together and it all works inside your normal WordPress dashboard.
Can an employee edit their own attendance or request their own loan? No on both. Manual punch edits are a manager/HR action, capability-gated — an employee can’t rewrite their own times — and edits can be set to require a reason. Loans are HR-managed on the employee’s behalf, not a self-service request. Employees do get a self-service view, but it shows only their own data (their hours, leave balances, and an opt-in “My Pay” estimate).
How does loan repayment connect to payroll? Loans repay automatically through payroll deduction — the balance draws down across pay periods rather than being chased manually. It feeds into the payroll export engine, which produces the payout figures and CSV you hand to your payroll provider. Important and deliberate: Punchwell exports payroll data — it does not move money, so there’s no payment-processor or tax-custody risk on your side.
Is the recruitment module a full applicant tracking system? It’s a focused hiring funnel: publish job posts on your own site, accept applications with résumé upload, review applicants, and hire the right one straight into a Punchwell employee record in one click. It’s not a heavyweight enterprise ATS with scoring pipelines or interview scheduling — it’s the hiring flow a 10–100-person on-site team actually uses, ending in a real employee who’s ready to be locked to your office network.
Why bundle all this instead of charging per module like everyone else? Because module-stacking and per-user creep are exactly what send people looking for an alternative. Punchwell is self-hosted, GPL, and priced per site — your data stays in your own WordPress database, your bill doesn’t grow with your headcount, and turning on another module costs nothing. One flat price for the whole HR suite is the point.
See where the modules fit
These secondary modules round out a suite built around one ownable idea: a hard-enforced, per-employee office-IP clock-in lock that refuses an off-site punch instead of just logging it.
- The office-IP clock-in lock → — the flagship: block buddy punching, server-side.
- Attendance & time clock → — shifts, rounding, grace, auto clock-out, overnight.
- Payroll export → — payout reports, overtime, CSV and connectors (where loan deductions land).
- Leave & PTO accrual → — leave types, approvals, accrual, holiday import.
- Pricing → — the flat, per-site ladder.
Get the whole suite for one flat price
Stop paying for HR a module at a time. Punchwell bundles recruitment, loans with payroll deduction, attendance reports with manual punch edits, and granular role access into Pro — alongside the office-IP lock that makes the whole thing worth running. Self-hosted, GPL, your data on your own server. Punchwell, by Sturdyhaus.
Get Punchwell Pro — $99/yr → Free on WordPress.org first if you’d rather start there. Per site, not per seat. Your data stays on your server.
Punchwell is an independent, third-party maintained fork of the GPL-licensed “WP Human Resource Management” plugin. Sturdyhaus is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by wpspear, weDevs, or the original author. Product names are referenced descriptively (nominative fair use) only, to identify the software lineage. All trademarks belong to their respective owners.