Geofenced clock-ins for field teams: how location-based attendance works
When people start work at a customer's site, a warehouse or a construction job instead of an office, "did they clock in on time?" becomes "did they clock in at the right place?". Geofencing is the usual answer. Here is how it works, what it can and can't tell you, and how to roll it out well.
What a geofence is
A geofence is a circle on a map: a centre point (the site) and a radius. When someone clocks in from their phone, the app reads the phone's location and checks whether it falls inside an approved circle. The punch is then recorded as on-site or off-site.
What location data can and can't prove
- It can show roughly where the phone was at the moment of the punch.
- It can't prove who was holding the phone, or that the person stayed on site after clocking in.
- Accuracy varies. Outdoors a phone is often accurate to 5–20 metres; indoors, in dense cities or basements it can drift by 50 metres or more. Good apps record the reported accuracy alongside the location.
That's why geofencing works best as a flag for review, not an automatic block. A blocked clock-in because of a bad GPS reading means lost time records and frustrated staff.
How big should the geofence be?
| Site type | Suggested radius |
|---|---|
| Small shop or office in an open area | 100–150 m |
| Office in a dense city centre | 150–250 m |
| Warehouse, factory or large campus | Cover the whole site plus 50 m |
| Construction site | Cover the site boundary and the site entrance |
Start generous, then tighten if you see off-site punches that shouldn't be there. Too tight a radius produces false alarms that train managers to ignore the flag entirely.
Offline sites
Many field locations have poor signal. Choose a system that records the punch — time and location — on the phone and syncs it when the connection returns, so a dead zone doesn't become a missing record.
Privacy: collect less, explain more
Location data is personal data, and in many countries collecting it requires a clear purpose and telling employees what you collect.
- Record location at the punch only, not continuously throughout the day, unless you have a specific and lawful reason.
- Tell people exactly what is collected and who can see it before you switch it on.
- Limit who can view it to the managers who need it, and keep an audit trail of changes.
A simple rollout plan
- Map your sites and set generous radii.
- Explain the change to the team: what's collected, when, and why.
- Run for two weeks in "flag only" mode and review off-site punches together.
- Adjust radii for sites with poor accuracy, then make it part of normal practice.
How DeskAttend handles it
In DeskAttend, admins add locations with a centre and radius. The mobile app records location with each punch — not continuously — stores punches offline when there's no signal, and flags punches made outside an approved location for a manager to review.