Check-in verified at the right place, not just the right time.

What does unverified off-site time cost?

For people who never pass a gate, the start and end of a shift are whatever was reported. These are the minutes nobody can confirm either way.

Three facts in one check-in.

A field worker opens the Attend app on their own phone at the start of the shift and looks at it. The face is matched against their enrolment, liveness confirms it is a living person rather than a photograph held up by somebody else, and the phone’s location is recorded and compared against the geofence for the site or job they are scheduled to. Inside the fence, the check-in is normal. Outside it, the record is flagged and a supervisor sees it, with the distance, rather than discovering a discrepancy at month end. Then the app stops. There is no tracking between check-in and check-out, because that is not what the record is for.

What it does not do: it does not confirm the work was done. It confirms a specific living person started and finished a shift at a specific place, which is a smaller and more defensible claim.

GPS attendance verification: how the check-in is tied to a place.

A check-in from a phone carries the device’s location at the moment it was made. On its own that is weak evidence, because a location says nothing about who was holding the phone. Paired with a face check and liveness it becomes a complete statement: this person, alive and present, at this place, at this time.

That pairing is the whole argument. A location-only app proves a phone was somewhere. A photo-only app proves a picture was taken, and typically stores it for a manager to look through afterwards. A failed liveness check blocks the check-in when it happens; nothing is saved for someone to review after payroll. The difference matters most for field teams, where nobody is standing at a gate to notice anything.

A check-in made outside the geofence is not silently discarded — it is recorded and flagged with the distance, because there are perfectly good reasons for it. A job moved, a gate was blocked, the crew was redirected that morning. The supervisor sees it the same day and resolves it in a sentence, which is a very different conversation from an accusation three weeks later.

What it does not do: consumer phone GPS is accurate to a handful of metres in the open and worse between tall buildings or inside a steel structure. Set geofences with that in mind rather than expecting metre precision.

Geofences per site and schedules per location.

A geofence is a radius around a place where check-ins for that work are expected. Most operations end up with a set of them: each branch, each client site, each field or block, each depot. Schedules can be tied to locations, so the system knows not only that somebody is working today but where they are supposed to be — which is what makes a flag meaningful rather than noisy.

One person can be authorised for several sites, which is the normal case for cleaners, guards and maintenance crews who cover a round. The schedule says which site applies to which shift, so a check-in at site three on a day scheduled for site three is simply normal.

Geofence size is a judgement rather than a setting to maximise. Too tight and a worker standing at the far gate of a large yard is flagged every morning; too loose and the check loses meaning. For a building, a hundred metres or so is usually sensible; for a farm block or a construction site, the fence follows the boundary.

What it does not do: geofencing does not work indoors in the way people expect. Deep inside a large structure, a phone may fall back to a much less precise fix — for sites like that, a shared station at the entrance is the better tool.

What is and is not tracked.

Location is captured at two moments: the check-in and the check-out. Between them nothing is recorded, nothing is transmitted and nothing is stored. This is a design decision rather than a limitation, and it is the single most important thing to be able to say plainly to a workforce.

It matters legally as well as culturally. Continuous location monitoring of employees attracts a far heavier compliance burden in most jurisdictions than recording the start and end of a shift, and in several it is difficult to justify at all. Recording two moments for a stated purpose, with consent and a retention rule, is a much more defensible position — general guidance, not legal advice.

It also matters for how the system is received. Field staff are not naive about this, and a product that quietly logged their movements all day would be found out and resented. Two timestamps with a location each is something most people accept readily once they understand that is genuinely all it is — and the same record protects them when somebody claims they turned up late.

What it does not do: because nothing is recorded between check-in and check-out, this cannot tell you where a crew went during the day. If that is what you need, this is not the product and we would rather say so now.

Three ways to record an off-site shift.

Who this is for — and who it is not.

What is geofenced check-in?

A geofence is a virtual boundary around a real place. Geofenced check-in means an attendance record is compared against that boundary at the moment it is made, so a check-in for a particular site has to happen at that site. On its own a geofence proves only that a device was inside an area, which is why it is paired with a biometric check: together they establish that a specific living person was at a specific place at a specific time. It is sometimes called GPS attendance verification or location-verified check-in. It is distinct from location tracking, which records continuous movement — geofenced check-in records two moments and nothing in between.

What to check before you commit.

Before you ask us.

Keep reading.

Last reviewed: October 2026. Templates, not photos; deleted on request; on-premises keeps everything inside your network. Details on the security and compliance page.