Interactive Tool
The Payroll Leak Calculator
What unverified punches and manual timesheets cost you every pay period.
Two things quietly inflate payroll every pay period: punches nobody can verify, and hours that get moved between systems by hand.
A shared PIN or a swapped badge puts hours on the clock that nobody worked, and payroll pays them at full rate. Separately, paper timesheets filled out from memory, manual re-entry, missing punches, rounding, and mismatched pay codes push the numbers off in both directions. Punch sharing is a choice. The rest usually isn't. All of it gets paid the same way.
This calculator estimates the total: what unverified punch time costs, what correction labor costs, and what the payroll handoff costs. Adjust the inputs below to see your numbers. No email required to see your results.
Your Team
Where the Hours Go
Adjust each slider based on your operation. Defaults are industry averages.
Your Results
Your annual payroll exposure
Where the costs come from
The Other Direction: Unrecorded Hours
The same gap in the record cuts both ways. Unverified punches inflate payroll with hours nobody worked. Missed and mistyped punches leave real hours off the check. Based on your inputs, an average worker in your operation loses an estimated $146 per year in unrecorded or inaccurately recorded time.
At your current error rate, roughly 0.3 out of every 26 paychecks contains an inaccuracy. Research shows that 49% of employees consider leaving after just two payroll mistakes.
Estimated annual turnover cost from payroll dissatisfaction: $2,293
What Verified Punches and a Clean Payroll Handoff Recover
With every punch tied to a verified identity and time flowing straight into payroll:
Per employee, that's $595 per year, between payroll the company stops leaking and hours workers stop losing.
See how your whole system stacks up
This calculator estimates one number. The Gap Assessment scores your whole time-and-pay chain across punch verification, overtime exposure, payroll accuracy, compliance, job costing, and admin burden, then benchmarks you against companies your size.
Why the total is split three ways
Most calculators hand you a single number. This one splits it, because each piece has a different fix and you should know which one you're buying.
Unverified punches.When a PIN can be shared or a badge can be handed off, the record shows someone on the clock who wasn't there. Those are hours nobody worked, paid at full rate, and no amount of timesheet review catches them after the fact. Verified identity at the clock is the only thing that closes this one.
Correction labor. Missed punches, illegible paper, and disputed hours pull supervisors into cleanup every cycle. That time is real payroll spend on work that produces nothing.
Payroll handoff errors. Re-keying hours between systems introduces transposition mistakes, pay code mismatches, and rounding drift. These run in both directions: sometimes the company overpays, sometimes the check comes up short.
Most of what lands in this total isn't deliberate, and the process categories are usually the larger share. But intent doesn't change what payroll pays out, and leaving unverified punches off the ledger only makes the estimate wrong. Both are real costs. Both are fixable.