Setting Up Your First Geofence: A New Site Without New Hardware
Draw the fence, invite your team, and approve hours — no badge readers or wall clocks to install at a new site.
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Opening a new site usually starts with a shopping list: badge readers, wall clocks, wiring, and someone to install them all before the first shift. Then the first crew arrives, the hardware is not quite ready, and the timesheets start with guesswork anyway.
ClockLap takes a different route. A geofence is a boundary drawn on a map, not hardware bolted to a wall. There is no kiosk to steal off a fence at night, no reader to wire in, and no clock for staff to queue at. For a manager opening a second, third, or tenth site, that is the whole point: the site can be ready for clock-ins as soon as the boundary is drawn and the team is invited.
Draw the fence, don’t install it
Start with the address. Search for the site, then draw the boundary to match how the site actually works: drag a circle around a compact yard, or trace the lot outline where a circle would spill across the road or into the neighbour’s property. A fence that matches the real site matters, because a punch is only useful if it proves the person was at the right place.
Then set how long someone must be inside before it counts. This is the setting that stops drive-bys from becoming shifts. A delivery driver passing the gate, or a supervisor dropping off supplies, should not accidentally clock in. A short dwell requirement means the system waits until someone is genuinely on site before the clock-in counts.
A few practical checks before you save the fence:
- Walk the boundary in your head: does it cover the yard, the entrance, and the work areas, without covering the public road?
- If the site is large, split it into zones rather than drawing one giant circle that covers places nobody works.
- Remember that big sites can have as many fences as they need, so you do not have to force one shape to fit everything.
Set the rules once, then let sites inherit them
A new site should not mean rebuilding your attendance rules from scratch. Set the company rules once — overtime, rounding, breaks, and geofence timing — and let the new site inherit them. Override a rule only where that site genuinely works differently, for example a different break pattern or a different rounding rule.
Site access works the same way. Give a manager a role for the sites they actually run, and they see those sites and nothing else.
Invite your people once
Once the fence and rules are set, invite the team. You can paste a list of people or sync from your HR system, and everyone gets an email, installs the app, and allows location once. That is the last setup step they have to think about.
Keep the invitation message simple: location is recorded at clock-in and clock-out, and location during a shift is opt-in rather than always on. Staff accept new tools faster when that deal is stated plainly up front.
For people without a phone of their own, or for a shared entrance, a tablet at the door can act as a kiosk: staff clock in with a PIN or a QR badge, with a photo if the site requires one. A supervisor can also clock a saved crew in and out from one phone, which helps on sites where handing every worker a device is not practical.
What the first week should look like
In the first week, watch three things rather than every single punch:
- Live attendance: who is on site, on a break, or late, on a map and a list. If someone is missing, you find out in the morning, not on Friday.
- The exceptions inbox: missed clock-outs, clock-ins away from the site, fake-GPS attempts, and correction requests, sorted by urgency. Fix the odd exception instead of rebuilding the whole timesheet.
- The evidence behind each shift: each clock-in and clock-out keeps its map point, GPS accuracy, and distance to the fence. When a dispute comes up, that record settles it in a minute instead of a meeting.
Mock-location apps are detected, and a clock-in or clock-out made with one is stopped and flagged, so the exceptions inbox is also where spoofing attempts surface. You do not need to police phones; you need to review the flagged cases.
A rollout-day checklist
| Step | Done when |
|---|---|
| Draw the fence | The boundary matches the real site, not just the street address |
| Set the dwell time | A drive-by cannot accidentally start a shift |
| Confirm inherited rules | Overtime, rounding, and breaks are right for this site |
| Scope manager access | Each manager sees only the sites they run |
| Invite the team | Everyone has the email, the app, and a one-line explanation of what location is used for |
| Test a clock-in | One person clocks in and out, and the map point and distance to the fence look right |
Run that test before the first real shift. It takes a few minutes, and it catches the two most common setup mistakes: a fence drawn too tightly around the building, so staff standing in the yard are marked outside it, and a dwell time set so long that a genuine arrival is still waiting to count.
Approve, then send
When the week closes, hours land in timesheets with breaks, rounding, and overtime already applied. Fix the odd exception, approve the whole period in one click, and lock it. For multi-site managers, that approval step is where the setup work pays off: instead of chasing five sites for five versions of Friday’s hours, you approve one consistent record per site and send the approved hours to payroll.
New sites will always bring surprises — a gate moved, a yard extended, a crew that starts at a different entrance. The advantage of a drawn fence over installed hardware is that the fix is a redraw, not a work order. Move the boundary, check the test punch, and the site is ready again. That is what makes geofenced setup scale: the tenth site costs the same effort as the first, because there is nothing new to install.
Learn more about how ClockLap sets up sites at clocklap.com.