Attendance without arguments
Most attendance disputes are not about dishonesty. They are about a record that nobody could see until it was too late to fix.
The typical attendance argument happens at the end of the month, about a day three weeks earlier, between two people who each remember it differently and neither of whom has anything written down. The fix is not stricter enforcement. It is making the record visible while it is still fresh enough to correct.
A missing check-out is the single most common cause. Someone leaves in a hurry, the shift stays open, and the system either counts the day as absent or leaves it ambiguous. If that shows up the same evening, it takes ten seconds to fix. If it shows up on payroll day, it takes a meeting.
This is why check-out confirmation matters more than check-in. Check-in happens when people arrive, alert and at a door. Check-out happens when they are already thinking about something else, which is exactly when a record gets lost.
Reconcile nightly rather than monthly. A daily job that flags open shifts, impossible durations and days with a check-in but no check-out turns a month-end argument into a series of same-day corrections that nobody remembers having.
And publish the rule before you enforce it. Most people accept a policy they knew about and resent one applied retroactively, even when the policy itself is reasonable.