A client flagged that one guard at a specific unit had worked 36 hours twice. He had pulled 24-hour shifts more than six times in a single month.
This violates our internal safety rules. It violates basic labour laws. On paper, this is impossible; our system caps extended shifts.
But it happened. And worse—I didn’t know.
At the time, nothing looked broken. Attendance arrived daily. Manpower coverage looked green. The daily WhatsApp updates said “No issues.”
My ops staff had learned how to pass the rule checks without technically breaking them. Not maliciously, just enough flexibility to “manage” the chaos of the field.
My current couldn’t stop such violations, only report them later on.
When the System Speaks Too Late
In my business, these issue surfaces monthly during payroll processing.
My Payroll team flags excess hours. Not as a blocker, but as a post-facto alert. By then, the shifts were done. The guard was exhausted. The risk had already been created.
This wasn’t enforcement. It was bookkeeping.
Every month, the same ritual followed:
- HR and Accounts pulled a list of violations.
- Field Ops were called for explanations.
- I reviewed the “Exceptions List.”
- Ops Staff were reprimanded.
- Everyone promised it wouldn’t repeat.
The count kept reducing monthly, but it never hit zero. Four to five cases kept slipping through every month.
That number matters. Because in the security business, you don’t need a 10% failure rate to die. One is enough to break trust.
The Reconstruction Tax
We were living in two versions of reality.
- Version A (Daily): WhatsApp updates saying “All clear.”
- Version B (Month-End): Signed attendance sheets showing repeated rule breaches.
To reconcile this, we relied on memory, explanations, and retroactive justification. No one was lying with certainty. No one was right with certainty.
That is the Reconstruction Tax: the massive amount of energy spent figuring out what actually happened 30 days ago.
Why Financial Numbers Didn’t Save Us
Here is the trap:
- Payroll was correct (we paid for the extra hours).
- Invoices were raised (most customers paid without any issues).
- Salaries went out on time (guard was happy for extra pay).
Financial systems only care after the fact. They assume the underlying truth is sound. They don’t enforce behaviour; they only summarise outcomes.
By the time we noticed a violation, it was already weeks old. Sometimes the customer has already noticed. Sometimes they haven’t.
Most customers ignored it. That made it worse.
Ignored issues don’t disappear. They accumulate silently until a larger client, an auditor, or a guard decides to pull the thread.
The Risk Equation
This wasn’t about the few thousand rupees in overtime. It was about credibility at scale.
Large customers don’t forgive patterns. Labour law doesn’t forgive repetition. A single guard complaint regarding forced overtime can trigger penalties exceeding ₹50,000 per incident.
More importantly, I realised something uncomfortable: I was running a business where truth was discovered late, not enforced early.
That’s not an operations issue. That’s a control failure.
The Constraint
Operations don’t fail when calculations are wrong. They fail when violations stay invisible long enough to feel normal.
That was the moment I knew O9X couldn’t just be a digital timesheet.
Attendance couldn’t be a monthly artefact or a WhatsApp update. It had to be real-time, enforceable, and boringly strict.
Not to look modern. To stay alive.