The finances sound like a mess. Operating and planned capital expenses need to be held back for the business to scale. You shouldn’t be paying out salaries or bonuses or whatever without a budget and plan. The partners should not have to “pay back in” for the business to buy more product or scale up operations. You’re paying extra taxes on this money if nothing else and causing extra work and broken promises.
This is the answer, and why you should just buy the hardware. You’ll be money ahead in your time spent alone.
Employees can check and monitor their hours too, and you can watch them daily by just logging in. It’s easy to log and account for PTO, days off requests, OT, etc.
We had a homebrewed system like you for years because we didn’t want to pay the $50-100/mo and the $500 reader. It’s been so helpful though and we should have done it prior.