Geofencing attendance marks someone present when their phone enters a set radius around a work site, and it genuinely solves a real problem — proving a field employee reached the client — for roles that don't work at a fixed gate. It turns into surveillance the moment it tracks location continuously instead of only at defined check-in points, and consent has to be explicit either way.
A sales rep says they visited a client on Tuesday. Was it a fifteen-minute drop-in or did they never leave the car park down the road? A service engineer logs a repair at a factory two hours from the office — did they actually go? For staff who don't clock in at a gate, this used to be unanswerable without asking a client to confirm.
What is geofencing, in plain terms?
A geofence is a virtual boundary drawn around a location — a client site, a branch, a warehouse gate — usually a radius of 50 to 200 metres. When an employee's phone enters that radius, the app can prompt a check-in; when it leaves, a check-out. The record that gets stored is "this person's phone was within this boundary at this time," nothing more, if the system is built correctly.
Where does geofencing genuinely help?
It fits roles that are, by definition, not at a fixed location: sales representatives doing client visits, service engineers doing site repairs, delivery staff, auditors doing multi-site rounds. For these roles, "were you at the site" is the actual question that needs answering, and a geofenced check-in answers it directly — no camera or biometric machine can, since there's no fixed gate to install one at.
It also removes a specific kind of dispute: an employee claiming a visit happened that a client later disputes. A time-stamped, location-stamped check-in settles that faster than a phone call.
Where does it turn into surveillance theatre?
Two failure modes show up repeatedly. First, continuous tracking instead of event-based check-ins — the app pings location every few minutes all day, so management can see a dot moving on a map, including during lunch, a toilet break, or after hours if the employee forgot to log out. That data almost never gets used for anything except making people feel watched.
Second, geofencing gets bolted onto roles it was never meant for — someone tracking an office-based employee's phone "just in case," when that employee already has a fixed desk and a normal attendance record. If the role has a fixed workplace, geofencing is the wrong tool; it adds tracking without adding any information a simpler system doesn't already give you.
The test is simple: does the system log a location only at a defined check-in event at a named site, or does it log a continuous trail? The first is attendance. The second is something else, and calling it attendance doesn't make it one.
What does consent actually require?
Real consent, not a line buried in an onboarding form nobody reads. The employee should know, before it's switched on: what is tracked (check-in points, not a live trail, if it's built right), when (working hours, not 24/7), and why (verifying site visits, not general monitoring). If an employee would be surprised to learn how the system actually behaves, consent wasn't real.
This is a compliance area, and the specifics vary by state and by the terms of the employment contract — this isn't legal advice, and a compliance advisor should confirm what applies to your business before you roll geofencing out.
What should a fair field-attendance policy look like?
Three lines, stated plainly to every field employee before day one: what gets recorded, when it gets recorded, and who can see it. Pair that with event-based check-ins rather than continuous tracking, and most of the "big brother" objection disappears — because the system genuinely isn't watching them all day, and they know it.
One honest limitation: we build fixed-site, camera-based attendance for gates and entrances, not phone-based field tracking, so this isn't our product — but the same principle we apply to our own systems holds here too: record only what answers the actual question, nothing more.