4 October 2026 · 5 min read
If everyone you employ works in the same building, a time clock is a solved problem. The trouble starts when your people are spread out: a physio at a care home in the morning and a clinic in the afternoon, two cleaners in a client's kitchen, a crew on a site you'll never visit. The hours still have to add up on payday.
Most small businesses in that position end up with one of three systems. Paper sheets that come back on Friday, half-filled and in three different handwritings. A group text where people say "in" and "out" and the owner scrolls back through it at the end of the month. Or a dedicated piece of workforce software, bought for one job and paid for every year.
All three are trying to answer the same two questions: when did they start and finish, and were they where they said they were. The second one is what makes this hard.
A phone knows roughly where it is, and that is enough to answer the second question. But there is a right and a wrong way to use it. The wrong way is to follow people around: a dot on a map all shift. It is more than you need, it drains batteries, and it tells your staff you don't trust them.
The right way is to read the location at the two moments that matter, when they tap Clock in and when they tap Clock out, and at no other time. That answers the question you actually have, and nothing else.
Each place your staff work becomes a pin with a circle around it. It is tempting to draw that circle tight, around the front door. Don't. Inside a large building a phone's location is often 30 to 100 metres out, and someone parking at the far end of a care home's lot has arrived. Around 150 metres suits most sites; a campus or a big facility wants more.
If your staff go to private homes, add the ones they visit regularly. A tap somewhere that isn't on your list should still be recorded, just flagged, which brings us to the most important rule.
Phones fail in boring ways. Location gets switched off. A basement has no signal. The fix comes back vague. A time clock that refuses to clock someone in when that happens has made the phone's problem into your payroll problem, and it will happen at 7 a.m. when nobody can sort it out.
So the shift should always be recorded, and anything unusual should be flagged for you to look at later: no location, a fix too vague to trust, a tap away from every site, a shift that runs past sixteen hours because someone forgot to clock out. You decide whether it matters. Usually it doesn't, and when it does, you'll know who to ask.
People forget to clock out. You will need to fix shifts. The question is what a fix looks like afterwards. A good time clock asks you for a reason and keeps the times you replaced, so the timesheet you hand your bookkeeper shows both what the phone recorded and what you changed. A record that can be quietly rewritten isn't much of a record.
Whatever you use, tell your staff their location is checked when they clock in and out. In Ontario it isn't optional for larger employers: one with 25 or more employees on January 1 needs a written policy on electronic monitoring, saying how and why it monitors, and has to give it to employees. Read the rules where you are; they differ.
We built PhonePick's staff time clock to answer yes to the ones that should be yes: location at the tap only, nothing refused, corrections with a note, hours by person and by site, and a link instead of an app store. It's part of the Operations plan, alongside the phone. If you'd rather keep what you have, the list above is still the one to hold it to.
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