How it works
From drawing a zone to a finished timesheet, in plain words.
Ten minutes for a manager, once.
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Create your company
Sign up in the app with your name, email and a password, and name your company. You are the first manager.
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Draw a zone
Open Zones, tap New zone and trace the site on the map. Give it a name such as "Main warehouse".
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Add your team
Open Team, add each person with an email and a password, and choose their zones. Tell them to install the app and sign in.
Nobody has to do anything.
This is what happens on an ordinary shift.
1. An employee arrives
The phone's own location service notices that it has come close to the work zone and wakes the app, even if the app is closed.
2. The phone takes a few readings
While the person is near the zone, the app records their position every few minutes. Each reading is a point and a time.
3. The server works out the visit
From the readings it finds the moment the person crossed into the zone and the moment they left, even if no reading fell exactly on the edge. That is the visit.
4. The timesheet builds itself
Visits add up per person and per day. The manager sees them at once; the employee sees their own.
What the manager sees, and what they do not.
- They see: that someone was at a zone from 08:55 to 12:05, and the totals.
- They do not see: a position, a route, or where someone is right now. There is no such screen.
- The employee sees: all of their own hours, and a map of their own zone that only their phone draws.
What ClockZone does about it.
Standing at the fence
GPS wobbles by a few metres. Visits that are separated by less than three minutes are merged, and visits shorter than a minute are dropped as noise.
The phone goes quiet
If no reading arrives for 45 minutes, the visit is capped at the last reading and flagged "needs review" for a manager.
No signal
Readings wait on the phone and are sent later, with the time they were taken. Hours do not move to the time of upload.
Someone forgot the phone
A manager adds the time by hand, with a reason. The change is logged and cannot be silently overwritten.
A very long visit
Visits are cut at midnight in the company's time zone, so a night shift adds up correctly on both days.
Two zones at once
Overlapping time in two zones is counted once.
The honest limits
- Location permission is required. Without "Allow all the time" on Android, time is only recorded while the app is open.
- A switched-off phone records nothing. After a restart, recording resumes when the phone is first unlocked.
- Some phone makers stop background apps to save battery. The app has a status page that shows the settings to change.
- Accuracy is metres, not centimetres. A position within about 10 metres of the edge counts as inside.
Questions about any of this? See Support.