Why Face Recognition for Attendance?

The problem with paper sign-in sheets

Paper sign-in sheets have been the default for decades. They're cheap, they're simple, and everyone understands them. But they have obvious problems: people forget to sign in, handwriting is illegible, sheets get lost, and there's no way to verify that someone actually signed in at the time they claimed.

For a coffee shop owner who needs to know which barista opened the shop, a paper sheet taped to the wall is barely better than guessing.

Time clock apps aren't much better

Digital time clocks and attendance apps solved the legibility problem but introduced new ones. Employees need to remember passwords, download apps, or carry badges. Buddy punching — one employee clocking in for another — is rampant and nearly impossible to detect.

A study by the American Payroll Association found that buddy punching costs U.S. employers hundreds of millions annually. For a small business running on thin margins, even a few falsified hours per week adds up.

Biometric systems: fingerprints have problems too

Fingerprint scanners solved the buddy-punching problem — you can't fake a fingerprint easily. But they introduced friction: dirty hands don't scan well, scanners break, and in healthcare and food service settings, shared touch surfaces raise hygiene concerns.

Post-2020, the world became much more aware of surface contamination risks. A shared fingerprint scanner in a clinic or restaurant is a hard sell.

Face recognition: passive and frictionless

Face recognition attendance eliminates all of these problems at once. There's nothing to forget (no badge), nothing to touch (no scanner), nothing to fake (no buddy punching), and nothing to learn (no app). People walk through a door, and attendance is recorded.

The key word is "passive." The system recognizes people without requiring any action from them. A camera sees them, AI identifies them, and an event is logged. The entire process is invisible to the person being tracked.

Why now?

Face recognition technology has improved dramatically in the last few years. Modern AI models are accurate, fast, and can run on your server with GPU acceleration. Real-time recognition is possible without expensive cloud infrastructure. And self-hosted architectures mean face data never needs to leave your hardware — addressing the biggest privacy concern.

The technology is finally good enough, affordable enough, and private enough for small businesses. That's why we built Eyetelli.

What makes Eyetelli different

Eyetelli uses AI models purpose-built for face recognition. All processing runs on your server — face images never leave your hardware. All data stays on your infrastructure, under your control. And the system works with standard security cameras, so you probably don't need new hardware.

It's attendance tracking that just works. No effort required from the people being tracked, and complete records for the people who need them.