Check in at the job, not the office

Check in systems mostly assume a building. Staff arrive somewhere, a device at that somewhere records them, and a geofence around it stops anybody clocking on from the car park of a different job.

That assumption holds for a cafe, a clinic and a warehouse. It fails completely for a cleaner, a plumber, a gardener or a mobile technician, whose entire working day happens at addresses the office has never visited. A geofence around head office, for somebody who visits head office twice a year, is a lock on a door nobody uses.

What people do instead, and what it costs

Faced with that, most businesses pick one of three workarounds, and all three cost something.

• Turn the geofence off. Now check in is an honour system, and the hours are whatever somebody remembered to tap.
• Widen it. A radius big enough to cover the suburb covers the pub as well.
• Stop using check in and pay from the roster. Now you are paying planned hours rather than worked hours, and the roster was written last Tuesday.

The third is the most common and the most expensive, because it pays every shift at its rostered length regardless of what happened. Checking a pay period before anybody is paid covers what that looks like at the other end.

Measure against the job, not the building

The answer is to move the reference point. A mobile worker's check in should be measured against the site of the job they are booked on, which changes several times a day, rather than against one fixed address that never changes.

In Diract there is nothing to set up for this. Once the calendar books jobs, every site's address on the map becomes its check in location. The check in card names the job and the address before anybody presses anything, for example Next up: Fortnightly clean at 48 Sample Road.

Stand within 200 metres of the site and check in as usual. Too far away, and the app names the job and the address you are expected at, which turns a refusal into an instruction. An admin can change the 200 metres under Admin, then Check in.

A company that books shifts rather than jobs keeps the single office geofence, because for them it is the right answer.

The failure that matters: an address the map cannot find

This is the case worth understanding before you roll it out, because it decides whether the feature helps or becomes a support queue.

A site whose address was never found on the map leaves nothing to measure against. The check in goes through, and the card says why. That is the right way round: a typo in a site address entered by the office is not the cleaner's fault, and refusing their check in at seven in the morning punishes the wrong person.

It does mean the quality of your site addresses is now the quality of your check in data. Correct the address and the check works again, so the practical habit is to read the check ins that went through unmeasured and fix those sites, rather than waiting for somebody to complain.

Correcting a check in without editing hours

Mistakes happen at both ends: somebody taps check out at morning tea, or a check in lands on the wrong person's row.

On Quick Glance or any dashboard with the Daily check-in widget, click View today's roster. The arrow beside somebody under Checked out reopens a check out tapped by mistake, and they show as checked in again. The bin removes a check in that should never have been recorded, and it comes off their hours.

What you cannot do from there is check somebody in. That stays with the person, at the device, and it is a deliberate line: the moment an office can create a check in, the record stops being evidence of who was where. Only an admin, or a role with Correct check-ins, sees the widget at all.

What you get once it is running

Worked hours instead of planned hours, attached to the job rather than to the day. That is what makes the rest of it possible: comparing time on site against what you quoted, spotting the job that always runs over, and paying the hours somebody actually did.

It also removes an argument. "I was there" and "the system says you were 400 metres away at 8:10" are different kinds of statement, and the second one ends the conversation without anybody having to be accused of anything.

Rolling it out

1. Book work as jobs with a site, not as shifts with a note. The site address is the whole mechanism.
2. Check the addresses on your regular sites first, since they carry most of the check ins.
3. Tell staff what the card will say, including what happens when they are too far away.
4. Watch the first fortnight for check ins that went through unmeasured, and fix those site addresses.
5. Decide who holds Correct check-ins, and keep it to the people who would answer for the hours.

If the runs themselves need arranging, planning the day's runs covers putting jobs in driving order and seeing who is rostered with nothing booked.