Geofenced clock-in for hospitality venues: how it works and how to set it up

Most venues that go looking for geofenced clock-in are trying to solve one problem: hours on the timesheet that nobody can check. Someone clocks in from the bus, or a mate taps the iPad for them, and by the time the pay run comes around there's no way to know. A geofence answers a narrow question well. Was this phone at the venue when the person pressed Clock in? It doesn't answer anything else, and the setups that go wrong are usually the ones that expect it to.

This is how it works in Kaslu Work, and what I'd tell any venue manager setting it up, whichever app they use.

What a geofence actually checks

A geofence is a boundary drawn on a map around your venue. When a staff member taps Clock in on their phone, the app reads the phone's location at that moment and compares it with the boundary. Inside, and the clock-in counts. Outside, and it's held for a manager to look at.

Two things follow from that. First, the check happens at the tap, not all shift. Kaslu Work reads location when someone presses a clock button and at no other time. It doesn't follow staff around the venue or home afterwards, and we've decided against it: Apple won't approve an app that tracks employees' location in the background, and you don't need that to know someone turned up. Second, a phone's reported location is an estimate. Outdoors with a clear sky it's often within a few metres. Inside a brick pub, under a steel roof or down in a basement it can be out by tens of metres, and the phone knows that and reports how unsure it is.

So a good system doesn't treat the boundary as a hard wall. A reading just outside the line from a phone that says it's unsure could well be someone standing at the bar. In Kaslu Work those clock-ins are flagged for review instead of refused, and flags never take money off anyone's pay by themselves. A manager decides.

Drawing the boundary

Draw it around where people start work, not around the building's title. For most venues that means the building itself plus the places a shift really begins: the staff entrance down the lane, the loading dock, the beer garden if the floor team sets it up before opening. Walk the route your staff take from the street to the roster board and make sure all of it is inside.

Then leave out what isn't work. The car park across the road, the bus stop, the café next door where people grab a coffee before a double. If a clock-in from there would annoy you on the timesheet, it shouldn't be inside the line.

Give the boundary some slack past the walls. A tight line traced along the outside of the building will flag honest clock-ins every time the signal is poor, and after a fortnight of approving false alarms your managers will stop reading the flags at all. That's worse than having no geofence, because the real ones get waved through with the rest. A margin of a room's width around the building is a reasonable start. Tighten it later if the flags are telling you nothing.

If you run two venues close together, say a pub and a bottle shop on the same corner, draw each one tight enough that they don't cover each other. Staff should be clocking into the venue their shift is at, and overlapping boundaries make that harder to check.

Cool rooms, basements and no signal

Every hospitality venue has somewhere the phone gives up. The cool room, the cellar, the kitchen behind two brick walls. Plenty of people start a shift in exactly those places.

Kaslu Work saves the clock-in on the phone with the time it was tapped and sends it once the phone has signal again. The location is still checked. It just gets decided a little later, and a clock-in that turns up long after the tap is marked so a manager can see it arrived late. Either way nobody has to walk out to the street to start their shift.

Telling your staff

Tell staff before you switch it on, in writing, and say plainly what's collected: location, read only when they tap Clock in or Clock out, used to check they're at the venue. Most people are fine with that once they know it isn't following them home. The ones who aren't will say so, and it's far better to hear it before the first pay run than after.

In some states it isn't optional. New South Wales and the ACT both have workplace surveillance laws that require written notice before tracking an employee's location, and NSW sets a minimum notice period. I'm not a lawyer and this isn't legal advice, so check the rules for your state with whoever handles your employment matters. Written notice costs you one email, so send it wherever you are.

What to do with flagged clock-ins

A flag is a question, not an accusation. Most will be honest: a weak signal, a new starter who clocked in from the car park because nobody told them not to, a phone that sat in a cool room. Approve them, and if the same person keeps getting flagged from the same spot, have a word or widen the boundary.

What you're looking for is a pattern. The same person clocking in from the same address across town every Saturday. A phone running an app that fakes its GPS, which Kaslu Work flags on its own. Those are worth a conversation, and when you have it you'll want the record. In Kaslu Work the original clock-in and any change a manager makes to it are both kept, so the timesheet can always show what happened and who changed it.

What a geofence won't do

It won't prove someone worked the whole shift, only that their phone was on site when they started and finished. It won't stop two staff swapping phones. It can't tell you whether the rostered hours were the right ones. For all of that you still need a manager who knows the venue. What a geofence does is take the easy cases off that manager's plate, so the hours they do look at are the ones worth looking at.

We're building Kaslu Work for hospitality groups that want this set up venue by venue, with each venue's boundary, rounding and approval rules its own. Early access is opening a few groups at a time, and the waitlist is on the home page.