Geofenced attendance — how it works and how to use it fairly
10 September 2026 · 1 min read · by the DeskAttend team
A geofence is a circle on the map — a centre point and a radius. When someone clocks in, their phone shares its location once, and the system checks whether that point falls inside one of your circles.
The check must happen on the server
If the phone decides "I'm at the office" and sends a yes or no, anyone can change that answer. The phone should only send coordinates; the server compares them with your locations and records the result. DeskAttend works this way — a client can never claim to be inside a geofence.
Choosing a radius
Phone location is often accurate to 5–20 metres outdoors and much worse indoors or among tall buildings. A radius that is too tight marks honest people as off-site.
- Single office building: 150–250 m
- Large campus, factory or depot: 300–600 m
- Construction site: the site boundary plus 100 m
Start generous, look at a week of clock-ins, then tighten if you need to.
Off-site is a signal, not a verdict
People clock in off-site for ordinary reasons: a client visit, a GPS glitch, a different gate. Blocking the clock-in punishes them and loses the record. A better approach is to record it and flag it so a manager can see it and ask if it keeps happening.
Privacy
Only read location at the moment someone clocks in or out. Tracking people all day is rarely necessary, is hard to justify, and erodes trust. Tell your team exactly what is collected and when.
Missing or strange coordinates
Phones sometimes send no location, or nonsense. Treat that as "no location" — not as "outside" — so a technical problem doesn't look like misconduct.
In DeskAttend, geofences are set per location, checked on the server, and off-site clock-ins are flagged for review rather than blocked.