Hi Rob,
I agree with you, the point that I was stressing on was that the attendance machine is just 10% of the full attendance system. Next 10% is Cards making for all the employees, next 10% is for Cabling (if the attendance machine is located far from the PC), and the rest of it depends solely on the Attendance reporting software.
Just implementing it once is not enough, because, you need to give a hell lot of Customer Support, on each of the fronts I mentioned above.
So when you think of making attendance system think of the percentages I mentioned above.

And Most importantly, the Attendance System is just 50% of your full Attendance & Payroll system. Payroll is 100% Software. So when designing such a system you should be aware of the above percentages, and must give proportional importance/development time/development efforts for building this full system, otherwise you will land up in troubles.

I hope my ideas are clear to everybody.

Thanks.
Mr. Kiran V. Sutar