Fingerprint, face or card: choosing your time clock terminal

Before buying a terminal, some good news: you may not need one. ZKTeco, Digital Persona and HIKVision terminals already installed usually connect to OPTimes without replacement. If you do need to equip a site, here are the criteria that matter.

Fingerprint

This is the most widespread and most affordable mode. It is reliable and fast for the vast majority of employees. Its limit: hands worn by manual work, dust or humidity degrade the reading. In those cases, plan for a second mode.

Facial recognition

Contactless and fast at peak times, it suits busy entrance halls and environments where hygiene matters. It needs good lighting and careful placement of the terminal. Recent models often combine face, fingerprint and card.

NFC or RFID card

Simple and inexpensive, but a card can be lent: it does not identify a person, it identifies a holder. Used alone, it does not prevent clocking in for a colleague. As a complement to a biometric mode, however, it is very practical.

Other criteria

• Throughput: how many employees arrive in the same quarter of an hour?
• Environment: indoors, outdoors, dust, direct light.
• Capacity: number of users, fingerprints, faces and clock-ins stored.
• Power: plan for a UPS, and therefore a spot near a protected outlet.
• Connectivity: network cable or Wi-Fi, depending on the building.

Supported models, their capacities and their verification status are listed on our Hardware page. And whatever the model, it keeps clocking in during outages: see Load shedding and network outages.