How geofenced check-in works
You create work sites — an office, a factory gate, a client site, a project location — by searching an address, pasting a Google Maps link or entering coordinates, and give each one a radius in metres. Then you map employees to the sites they work from.
In Verdeshell, a mapping is the permission: an employee can check in from the phone at a site they are mapped to, and a punch inside any of their sites is accepted. Roles that genuinely work from anywhere get an anywhere grant instead of an oversized fence, and a day with a missed punch — a client visit, say — is corrected with a regularisation request.
- Check-in and check-out are both judged against the fence, and check-out uses the same site that admitted the check-in.
- Face check-in on the phone — employees enrol their face on their own device, and the face check-in is judged by the same fence rules.
- Shifts are respected, including overnight shifts, so a night-shift punch lands on the right working day.
- Biometric devices are not affected. The fence applies only to check-ins from the mobile app.
Audit mode: see the refusals before anyone is refused
Switching on a fence across a company that already checks in from phones is where most rollouts go wrong: someone's site is drawn in the wrong place, or a person was never mapped, and their attendance quietly turns into absences. Each attendance policy therefore has three Mobile Check-in modes.
| Mode | Who can check in from a phone | What you see |
|---|---|---|
| Open | Anyone the policy covers, from anywhere | The punch, with no fence applied |
| Audit | Anyone the policy covers — nobody is refused | Which punches would have been refused under Restricted, and why |
| Restricted | Only mapped employees, from inside a site they hold | Refused punches, kept for review |
The rollout summary in Settings → Mobile Check-in shows punches evaluated, accepted and would-be refused, with a reason for each — not mapped to any site, outside every site they hold, or a site that has been switched off. Fix those, then move the policy to Restricted at the start of a payroll period.
Reviewing out-of-fence punches
Out-of-fence punches go to a review queue rather than failing silently, so HR can see who tried to check in, from where, and decide what to do. The insights also flag implausible travel between two punches — a check-in too far from the previous one for the time between them.
Changes to a site are kept in its history, so you can see who moved a fence or changed its radius and when. Punch-location details in the attendance register are cleared after 365 days.
Punches without a signal
Field staff, basements and remote sites all lose signal. When the phone is offline, the app keeps the punch on the device and sends it once the phone reconnects. The punch is timed from the moment the employee tapped, not the moment it synced, so a 9:02 check-in made in a lift is still a 9:02 check-in.
- A queued punch must reach Verdeshell within 48 hours; an older one is refused, and the employee can raise a regularisation instead.
- The queue holds a small number of punches per phone and tells the employee if it is full.
- Missed or wrong punches are fixed through regularisation, which goes to the manager for approval — from the app or the web.
What a geofence can and cannot prove
The location comes from the employee's phone. Verdeshell checks it against the fence and keeps a clear record, and a policy can also look at GPS accuracy and, on Android, a mock-location setting. A determined person can still fake a phone's location, so treat the fence as a deterrent and an audit trail, not proof of where someone was.
Plans and getting started
Geofenced mobile check-in, face check-in and the employee app are part of the Starter plan, alongside payroll, leave and the rest of the HRMS — there is no separate attendance add-on. Book a demo and the Verdeshell team sets up a 14-day trial account for your company after it.