The time clock, breaks and geofencing

Clocking in and out

A shift moves through states as the day goes: published, confirmed, clocked in, completed. Clocking in stamps the real start; clocking out stamps the real end, which is what payroll uses rather than what was scheduled.

Employees clock themselves from the web app, their phone, or by asking the assistant. A manager can clock somebody in on their behalf — the dead-phone case is common enough that refusing to handle it just moves the record onto paper.

A shift that is already clocked in, completed, cancelled or marked no-show will not accept another clock-in. Fixing one of those is a deliberate edit by a manager, and it is recorded as one.

Breaks

Breaks are started and ended against the shift, and recorded as meal, rest or other. The distinction is not cosmetic: in several jurisdictions a meal break is unpaid and legally mandated at a given length, and a rest break is paid and shorter.

On Pro, the meal-break analysis compares what your rules require against what was actually recorded. Where a missed meal break carries a premium payment, that is the report that pays for itself.

Geofencing

Optional, per location, and off unless you configure it. Set a pin and a radius, and an employee clocking into a shift at that location must be inside it.

What it does:

• Asks the browser for the device's position at the moment somebody presses Clock in, and compares it to the pin.
• Records the distance on the clock-in, so a borderline punch is visible rather than merely allowed or denied.
• Lets a manager clock somebody in past the fence. That bypass is flagged as a bypass in the record.

What it does not do:

• No background tracking. Location is read at the instant of a clock-in and at no other time. There is no trail, and nothing runs while the app is closed.
• No third-party geocoding. The coordinates go to our own check and nowhere else. Setting the pin uses the browser's own location API, not a mapping service.
• No silent permission prompt. The browser asks only when somebody deliberately presses Clock in, or Use my location while configuring the fence.

Radii in the tens-to-hundreds of metres are the practical range. Set it too tight and phone GPS accuracy alone will lock out honest staff on a cloudy day inside a concrete building.

No-shows

A shift nobody worked can be marked as a no-show, which distinguishes it from one that was cancelled in advance. That distinction is what makes the reliability and attendance analysis on Pro meaningful — see Insights and analytics.

The best predictor of a no-show is a shift nobody acknowledged, so the acknowledgement panel on the schedule page is worth a glance before the week starts.