Clock-ins  that  respect  the  jobsite 

A geofence is an allowed area for clocking in or out. Administrators draw the fence (a circle around the office, a polygon around a construction site), assign it to a department, user, or project, and the app blocks or flags clock-ins that fall outside. Employees see a live status banner above the Clock In button so they know where they stand before they tap — no mystery rejections.

Use a circle for simple sites where a single centre + radius covers the whole area (an office building, a single warehouse, a downtown client office). Use a polygon when the site has an irregular shape — a construction site spanning multiple blocks, a hospital campus with specific wings, a delivery depot that wraps around a parking lot. The editor supports both from a single toggle, and you can switch at any time.

REQUIRED blocks out-of-bounds clock-ins with a clear rejection modal and nearest-fence guidance. OPTIONAL lets the clock-in through but flags the entry on the compliance dashboard for admin review. LOG_ONLY silently records the condition for reporting — useful for rolling out geofencing gradually without disrupting employees. You pick the mode from /settings/timetracking.

Yes. That is the core use case. Assign one fence to your head office (where most work happens) and separate fences to each client site or construction project. When an employee clocks into "Project: Q4 Rollout", the project-scoped fence is enforced; when they clock into a generic internal project, the org-wide default applies. Precedence is Project > User > Department > Organization.

Under REQUIRED mode, a missing or weak GPS fix is treated as "cannot clock in here" with a specific rejection message encouraging them to move outdoors or near a window. Under OPTIONAL / LOG_ONLY, the clock-in proceeds and the low-confidence condition is recorded on the entry for admin review. GPS accuracy tolerance and the maximum acceptable accuracy are both configurable from /settings/timetracking.

Yes. The fence editor ships with a provider toggle — Google Maps is the default when you have GOOGLE_MAPS_API_KEY configured, and OpenStreetMap (via Leaflet) is available as a no-key alternative. Both support circle + polygon drawing with draggable edit handles, and you can switch between them at any time without losing your fence geometry.

Every fence create / update / delete, every assignment change, and every blocked clock-in attempt is recorded in the organization's audit log with the actor, the fence id, and the before/after payload. Administrators and Executives see a dedicated compliance dashboard that lists out-of-bounds clock-ins with 7-day and 30-day summaries, and the list exports to CSV with safe encoding.

The clock-in / clock-out endpoints emit an X-API-Version response header and return structured error codes (GEOFENCE_VIOLATION, LOCATION_REQUIRED, TIMESTAMP_OUT_OF_RANGE, etc.) so a native iOS / Android client can match on stable identifiers instead of parsing human messages. An offline-queue timestamp protocol lets the mobile app replay clock events captured while the device was offline, with a ±15 min future / 24 h past tolerance window.