When your staff work at a head office and several branches, or at centers spread across governorates, or on project sites that change every few months, a fixed fingerprint machine leaves gaps. You either buy a machine for every site or take the supervisor's word that someone came in. What many organizations do now is let employees check in from their own phones, with the app verifying both their location and their face.
How does location-based attendance work?
Management draws a boundary on the map around each work site, called a geofence. When the employee taps the check-in button, the app reads the phone's GPS position, compares it with that boundary and accepts the record if the phone is inside.
You draw the boundaries from the dashboard and link each site to its shift and its employees. When a new site opens or an old one closes, you edit the map instead of moving a machine or running new cables.
- Open the appOn the phone registered to that employee
- Face checkA live scan confirms a real person is in front of the camera
- Location checkGPS position compared with the site boundary
- Record savedRight away, or stored on the phone if there is no internet
- Manager dashboardThe record shows up with its point on the map
How do you manage employees who work at more than one site?
Give each employee a list of sites they are allowed to check in from, instead of a single one. A supervisor who visits three branches a week can check in at any of them, and the report shows where they were each day.
The system also has to move people between sites and shifts easily, because transfers are frequent in large organizations. If you have a structure of directorates and departments, ask for a report of check-ins recorded outside the employee's own directorate. It reveals people actually working at another site before that turns into a payroll dispute.
Shifts follow sites. An employee who works mornings at one site and evenings at another needs two shifts tied to two sites. A system that allows only one shift per employee will push you into manual fixes every week.
Why isn't GPS location enough on its own?
Location proves where the phone is, and says nothing about who is holding it. An employee who leaves their phone with a colleague on site will show as present, and fake-location apps for some phones are well known.
So you add an identity check at every check-in: a fingerprint or face scan on the employee's own phone. For faces in particular you need a liveness check that confirms a real face is in front of the camera, so a printed photo or a picture shown on another phone's screen is rejected.
Why bind the account to the employee's phone?
Binding the account to the employee's device ID stops anyone from logging in as a colleague on a different phone. When an employee changes phones, the old one is unlinked from the dashboard and the new one is linked with management's approval.
This step sometimes raises privacy questions among staff. Ask the vendor whether the app reads location only at the moment of check-in or tracks the phone all day, and explain the answer to your employees before launch.
What if the internet is weak or GPS doesn't update?
At remote sites, and inside some buildings, the connection is weak. The app has to work offline: record the check-in on the phone, tell the employee it has not been sent yet, and sync it when the connection returns.
GPS does not refresh with the same accuracy on every phone, and readings indoors are less precise than outdoors. So do not draw the boundary too tightly around the building, and make the dashboard show the exact point the employee checked in from. The manager can then see whether they were a few meters outside the line or somewhere else entirely.
Test the boundary at every site with several phones of different brands before the general launch. A boundary that works fine on your phone may reject an employee standing on the ground floor of the same building.
What does the manager see, and which reports do you need?
Managers follow their team's attendance live from their own app: who is in, who is late, who is on leave or a short departure. They approve or reject requests from the same place.
The reports you usually need cover attendance and absence, lateness, leave and departures, overtime, and check-ins recorded outside the site or directorate. In Dawami, the app we built at Visual Innovate that started as a solution for the Jordanian Ministry of Youth, these reports come straight from the dashboard. Lateness and departure balances are calculated automatically, and management can accept or cancel each penalty.
If you are still weighing this approach against a fingerprint machine, the full comparison is in mobile attendance app or fingerprint machine. Connecting attendance to leave and payroll is covered in our HR system article.
We build multi-site attendance systems and connect them to your existing systems as part of our custom software service. Send us the number of sites you run and what your field staff do, and we will suggest how to draw the boundaries and which checks suit you.
Questions our partners ask
What is a geofence in an attendance system?
It is a boundary that management draws around a work site on a map. The app accepts a check-in when the employee's phone is inside that boundary, and rejects or flags it when the phone is outside.
Can one employee have more than one work site?
Yes. You assign several sites to the employee so they can check in at any of them, and you can move them between sites or shifts from the dashboard without changing their account.
Is location enough to stop attendance cheating?
On its own, no. Add a live face or fingerprint check at every check-in and bind the account to the employee's phone, so nobody can check in for someone else.
Written by the Visual Innovate team, the people who build, host and follow up systems, websites and apps for our clients in Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Egypt.
