Know when.
And know where.

Clocking in never waits for a satellite

Grace taps Clock In inside a basement plant room. The shift starts at that second. Her phone keeps hunting for a fix in the background and attaches it when it lands — usually within a few seconds, sometimes never.

When it never lands, the record says so, plainly, instead of pretending. Every position carries its accuracy and how it was obtained, so a 3 km cell-tower guess never gets filed as though it were a 12 m satellite fix.

Sites have edges, and edges have distances

Draw a boundary around a client's premises, or drop a radius around a gate. Every clock event is matched against it in the database, so it resolves to Melrose Arch — Office Block C, not to a shrug.

When somebody is outside every boundary you've drawn, you get the distance to the nearest one. Forty metres outside a gate is a GPS drift conversation. Forty kilometres outside is a different conversation entirely.

What happened between the two taps

A shift tells you somebody was at work. It doesn't tell you they visited four clients, spent fifty minutes at the third, and logged an odometer reading at each one.

Staff start and stop individual jobs inside a shift. Location is captured at both ends, and you decide what they fill in — a text field, a number with a unit, a dropdown, a photo, a signature — without anyone writing code. Change the form later and old records still read the way they were captured.

Signal drops. The shift doesn't.

Half of South Africa's field work happens where the bars run out — basements, plant rooms, farms, the wrong side of a hill. Taps are queued on the device and sent when the connection returns.

A clock-in queued underground at 06:00 and delivered at 14:00 is credited to 06:00, because that is when the work started. Every event carries a key generated on the phone, so a queue that gets sent twice still produces one shift.

Hours that payroll can actually use

Hours come out split by rate, not as one number you still have to sort out. Set your working days and the split follows the Basic Conditions of Employment Act by default.

Public holidays are worked out from the Act rather than typed into a table that goes stale. A night shift running into a holiday changes rate at midnight, and a holiday that falls on a Sunday moves to the Monday — but one falling on a Saturday does not.

Staff submit a period, a manager approves or sends it back with a reason, and an approved period locks. After payroll has run, the numbers stop moving — reopening one takes a reason and leaves a record.

Face recognition you could defend to the Regulator

A face template is special personal information under section 26. You may only process it under a section 27 exception, and in an employment relationship consent is only valid if refusing costs the employee nothing.

So refusing costs them nothing. They clock in with a PIN on a device bound to them, and lose no function at all. Enrolment is blocked until a signed consent exists naming the system, the purpose and the retention period — and withdrawing consent destroys the templates and issues a deletion receipt.