Beyond construction: attendance for farms, factories, and field teams

Twese was built for construction sites, but the problem it solves isn’t really about construction. It’s about any business that pays a large, changing workforce based on whether people showed up — and tries to track that on paper. Once you see the pattern, you see it everywhere: farms, factories, security firms, cleaning and facilities companies, event staffing, logistics. Different industries, identical leak.

The pattern that repeats across industries

Wherever you find a big workforce, casual or shift-based labour, cash or per-day pay, and attendance recorded by hand, you find the same three problems: ghost workers who draw pay without showing up, time theft from rounded hours and one worker signing in for another, and disputes when the paper record fails. The American Payroll Association’s finding that time theft can cost up to around 2.2% of gross payroll isn’t a construction statistic — it’s a workforce statistic. Any labour-heavy business paying on attendance is exposed to it.

Farms and agriculture

A commercial farm at harvest can employ hundreds of seasonal pickers for a few weeks, paid by the day. Attendance is usually a supervisor with a notebook at the edge of a field — the exact conditions where padded headcounts and phantom names thrive. A QR card scanned as workers enter the field turns a chaotic seasonal payroll into a clean, verifiable one, and gives the owner a live count of who’s actually working across scattered plots.

Factories and manufacturing

Factories run shifts, and shifts invite buddy punching — a friend clocking in for someone running late or not coming at all. That’s the precise problem behind the estimate that around three in four businesses are affected by buddy punching. Tying attendance to a physical card scanned at the entrance, per shift, removes most of the opportunity and gives clean hours for each shift without a supervisor reconstructing them later.

Security, cleaning, and field teams

Security firms and cleaning companies face the hardest version of the problem: their workers are spread across many client sites the manager can’t see. “Was the guard actually at the client’s premises last night?” is a question that decides whether you keep the contract. Scan-in at each site turns a nightly act of faith into a record you can show the client — proof of presence, not just a promise of it.

Why the same tool works across all of them

The reason one approach fits so many industries is that the fix is the same everywhere: capture attendance with a scan instead of a signature, store it the instant it happens, and let the workforce carry a card rather than a smartphone. Whether the gate is a building site, a factory door, the edge of a field, or a client’s reception desk, the mechanics don’t change — and neither does the payoff: accurate pay, no ghosts, and proof you can hand to whoever is asking.

Where this fits for Rwanda

Rwanda’s economy is full of exactly these businesses — agriculture is the largest employer by far, manufacturing is growing, and services like security and facilities management are expanding with the cities. Most of that labour is informal and paid on attendance. The same QR-card approach that fixes a construction payroll fixes a farm’s harvest payroll or a security firm’s night roster. If you run a labour-heavy business outside construction and the paper register is costing you, the fix is the same one — and worth a conversation.

Where these numbers come from

The buddy-punching figure (~75% of businesses affected) and the ~2.2%-of-payroll time-theft estimate come from the American Payroll Association and US payroll-industry research. Rwanda’s employment structure (agriculture as the largest employer; high informal share) is drawn from Rwanda’s Labour Force Survey (National Institute of Statistics of Rwanda). Figures are cited as reported and rounded for readability.