Check in at the job, not the office

Most check in systems assume a building. Staff arrive somewhere and a device there records them. 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. Their whole working day happens at addresses the office has never seen. 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.

• Nobody measures the distance. A check in is then 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.
• The roster pays instead. That pays planned hours rather than worked hours, from a roster somebody wrote 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 belongs against the site of whichever job they hold that hour, which changes several times a day. Not against one fixed address.

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 expecting them, which turns a refusal into an instruction. An admin can change the 200 metres under Admin, then Check in settings.

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 never reached the map leaves nothing to measure. The check in goes through, and the card says why. That is the right way round. A typo the office made in a site address is not the cleaner's fault. A refusal 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. A corrected address makes the check work again. The practical habit is reading the check ins that went through unmeasured and fixing those sites, rather than waiting for a complaint.

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 nobody should have made, and the hours drop with it.

The one thing missing from that screen is a way to check somebody in yourself. That stays with the person, at the device, and the line is deliberate. The moment an office can create a check in, the record stops being evidence. 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. Time on site against what you quoted, the job that always runs over, and the hours somebody actually worked.

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. The second ends the conversation without an accusation.

Rolling it across the team

1. Work gets booked as jobs with a site, never 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. Staff hear what the card will say, including what happens when they are too far away.
4. The first fortnight gets watched for check ins that went through unmeasured, and those site addresses get fixed.
5. Decide who holds Correct check-ins, and keep it to the people who would answer for the hours.

Where the runs themselves need arranging, planning the day's runs covers putting jobs in driving order and finding who has a roster and no work.