Most time clocks hand you raw punches and leave the tidying to you: the punch that’s three minutes early, the one nobody clocked out of, the overnight shift that splits across two days and breaks your math. Punchwell does the everyday work of a time clock the way a busy shop owner actually needs it — punch in, punch out, apply your rules, and produce a timesheet that’s already ready for payroll.
It runs inside the WordPress site you already have. Employees are just WordPress users, so there’s nothing new for your team to log into. And when attendance integrity matters, the same time clock can be locked to your office network — so an off-site punch is refused, not just recorded. See how the office-IP lock works →
Get Punchwell Pro — $99/yr · Start free on WordPress.org
Self-hosted · No per-seat fee · Unlimited employees · GPL
Punch in, punch out — with shift policies that fit how you work
The basics, done properly. Employees clock in and clock out, and each department runs on its own shift policy — so a morning retail crew and a late warehouse shift don’t have to share one set of rules.
Three things have to line up before someone can clock in, by design: they need the employee role, they need to be assigned to a department, and that department needs a shift policy. It’s a deliberate guardrail — it stops stray, un-assignable punches landing in your timesheet from people who aren’t set up yet.
- Per-department shift policies — set the schedule once, apply it to the team.
- Web, kiosk, or mobile — clock in from the dashboard, a shared wall tablet, or a phone. See the kiosk and mobile punch options →
- Employees are WordPress users — no separate accounts, no new tool to learn.
Rounding and grace periods — so small noise doesn’t become a dispute
Real punches are messy. Someone clocks in at 8:58, someone else at 9:04. Left raw, that’s a column of odd minutes you end up arguing about. Punchwell lets you smooth it out with rules you set once.
- Configurable rounding — round punches to the nearest interval (for example, nearest 15 minutes) so timesheets stay clean and consistent.
- Grace periods — decide how much leeway a punch gets around shift start before it counts as late.
- Debounce — ignore an accidental double-tap on the punch button instead of logging a phantom in-and-out.
Set the policy, and the cleanup happens automatically — the same way for everyone, every week.
Auto clock-out — for the punch someone forgot to close
The single most common timesheet mess: a worker clocks in, gets busy, and walks out without clocking out. Left alone, that’s an open shift running until you catch it — and a number you have to guess at and fix by hand.
Punchwell can close forgotten punches for you. Turn on auto clock-out and set a max-shift cap, and a shift that runs past your limit is closed off automatically with a consistent, recorded punch-out time. No 14-hour phantom shifts, no manual surgery on the timesheet Monday morning.
Like every new setting in Punchwell, it defaults to off — it changes nothing until you decide to switch it on.
Overnight shifts — handled, not hacked around
If your crew clocks in before midnight and out after it, plenty of time clocks fall apart — the day rolls over and the hours stop adding up. Punchwell supports overnight, cross-midnight shifts natively: the worked duration is derived from the start-to-end span, so a 10 p.m.–6 a.m. shift counts as eight hours, not a broken two-day puzzle.
For warehouses, clinics, security, and hospitality that run past midnight, that means the timesheet is right the first time — no splitting one shift into two rows by hand.
Attendance reports and manual punch edits — fix the exception, keep the record
Even with good rules, exceptions happen: a missed punch, a typo’d time, a worker who forgot their PIN. The Attendance Reports add-on gives you day-by-day reports and lets a manager edit a punch manually when something needs correcting — so one bad entry doesn’t force you to redo a whole timesheet.
- Day-by-day attendance reports — see who worked, when, and how long.
- Manual punch edits — correct missed or wrong punches without rebuilding the sheet.
- Optional reason-on-edit — require a note when a punch is changed, so corrections are deliberate, not silent.
This is the everyday safety valve: the rules handle the routine, and a quick manual edit handles the one-off — with a clear note of what was changed and why.
How it ties to payroll — one clean handoff, no re-keying
The whole point of a tidy timesheet is the moment it becomes payroll. Punchwell carries your attendance straight into a payout report: per-employee hours with weekly and daily overtime, double-time, and holiday pay, plus an employer summary.
From there, you export a payroll-ready CSV — with Generic CSV built in, plus SurePayroll and Gusto connectors — and hand it to your payroll provider.
Be clear on the boundary, because we are: Punchwell exports payroll data. It does not move money. No direct deposit, no tax filing, no tax custody — which means no payment-processor risk lands on you. You take the clean CSV to where the money actually gets paid. See payroll export in detail →
Honest about the limits
We’d rather you trust the parts that work than oversell the parts that don’t.
- It exports payroll data — it doesn’t pay anyone. You take the CSV (or a connector file) to your payroll provider. That’s deliberate: no money movement means no payment-processor or tax-custody risk for you.
- The mobile punch is a web/PWA screen, not an app-store app. It’s installable to a phone’s home screen and works in the browser — but there’s no native iOS or Android app, and no facial recognition or biometric punch.
- “Warn” and “flag” enforcement modes don’t block. Only Block mode refuses a punch; Warn and Flag let it through and record it. If you want hard enforcement, use Block. How enforcement modes work →
- Not built for WordPress Multisite. Punchwell is designed for a single WordPress site.
If a stricter control is what you’re after, that’s the office-IP lock’s job — it refuses an off-site punch server-side instead of merely noting where it came from. GPS geofence, kiosk, and mobile punch ride alongside it, so you choose softer or stricter per situation.
Built to stay clean, on a site you already own
- Self-hosted — attendance lives in your own WordPress database. No cloud holds your timesheets and there’s no data call-home — the free version makes no outbound calls at all (verified), and Pro’s only outbound call is license validation, never your data.
- Unlimited employees, no per-seat fee — hire your hundredth person and your bill doesn’t change.
- PHP 8 / WordPress 7 / MySQL 8 clean, security-audited, and GPL.
Get Punchwell Pro — $99/yr · Compare the plans →
FAQ
How does time rounding work? You set a rounding interval — for example, nearest 15 minutes — and Punchwell applies it to every punch the same way. An 8:58 in and a 9:04 in both land on 9:00, so your timesheet stays consistent and you’re not arguing over odd minutes. You can also set grace periods around shift start and a debounce to ignore accidental double-taps.
What happens when someone forgets to clock out? Turn on auto clock-out and set a max-shift cap. Any shift that runs past your limit is closed automatically with a consistent, recorded punch-out time — so you don’t get a runaway open shift or have to fix it by hand on Monday. It’s off by default; nothing changes until you enable it.
Do overnight shifts that cross midnight calculate correctly? Yes. Punchwell supports cross-midnight shifts natively. The worked duration is derived from the start-to-end span, so a 10 p.m.–6 a.m. shift counts as eight hours instead of breaking across two calendar days.
Can a manager fix a wrong or missed punch? Yes — the Attendance Reports add-on lets managers edit punches manually to correct missed or mistyped entries, with an optional “reason for edit” note so corrections are deliberate and recorded. You fix the one exception instead of rebuilding the whole timesheet.
Does Punchwell run payroll? It does the calculation and the export — per-employee hours with weekly and daily overtime, double-time, and holiday pay — then gives you a payroll-ready CSV (Generic CSV built in, plus SurePayroll and Gusto connectors). It does not move money. You hand the export to your payroll provider, which keeps payment-processor and tax-custody risk off your plate.
Is this per-seat? What happens when I hire more people? No per-seat fee, ever. Pricing is per site — a flat $99/year — with unlimited employees on every tier. A 25-person shop pays roughly $1,500–2,100/year to per-head SaaS clocks; Punchwell is $99/year flat.
Stop fixing timesheets by hand
Set your rounding, grace periods, and shift policies once. Let auto clock-out catch the forgotten punches and overnight shifts add up on their own. Then export a clean, payroll-ready timesheet — from a plugin that lives on your own server.
Get Punchwell Pro — $99/yr · Start free on WordPress.org
Per site, not per seat. Unlimited employees. Your data stays on your server.
Explore more: Office-IP clock-in lock · Kiosk & mobile punch · Payroll export · Leave & PTO accrual
Punchwell, by Sturdyhaus. 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 only.