Help · Questions
Frequently asked questions
Cost, privacy, offline behaviour, and what happens when somebody forgets.
Short answers to what people ask before they set LiteEntry up. Several of these have a page of their own where the honest answer is longer than a paragraph — those are linked from the answer.
Do employees need to install an app?
No. They scan the code with the camera they already have and the page opens in their browser. There is nothing to install, update, or ask IT to approve.
More on this, including what you give up by not having one: attendance without an app. If the question is whether you can require one, see personal phones.
What hardware do we need?
A screen by the door with a browser — a tablet, a spare phone, a TV, or a laptop. Anything that can display a web page and stay awake. There is nothing to buy.
Does it work without the internet?
No. The code is signed on the server and verified on the server, so both the screen and the phone need a connection. This is deliberate: a system that records check-ins offline and syncs them later cannot tell you whether somebody was actually there, which is the only question it exists to answer.
Can somebody check in for a colleague?
They can try. The code rotates every thirty seconds, so a photograph is useless within a minute. If they use their own phone for somebody else’s account, that device is flagged as shared. If geofencing is on, they have to be at the site. None of these are perfect alone; together they make it more effort than turning up.
The longer answer, control by control: what actually stops buddy punching.
What happens if somebody forgets to check out?
Nothing breaks. The check-out is simply missing, and it shows as missing rather than being guessed at. LiteEntry does not invent an end time, because an invented time is indistinguishable from a real one once it is in the record.
Do you calculate hours worked?
No. The report has a Duration column — the day’s completed sessions added up, each check-in paired with the check-out that closed it — but that is not hours worked, and it is never labelled as though it were.
The difference is not a technicality. Duration counts anything somebody stayed checked in through, lunch included; it is blank rather than zero while a session is still open; and a shift running past midnight closes on the next business day, so each of its two days holds one event rather than a completed session.
Because it pairs sessions rather than spanning the day, somebody who checks out at 12:30 and back in at 13:30 has that hour excluded — the record says they were not checked in, so the figure agrees with it. Turning any of that into hours, overtime or pay means rules about breaks and rounding that belong to your payroll system and your local law — and those rules are not the same in every country you operate in.
You can export the column and do your own arithmetic. We will not do it for you and call the result hours.
What data do you collect about employees?
A name, a work email, and a record of each check-in: time, place, device. If geofencing is on, coordinates at the moment of a check-in. Nothing in the background, nothing between check-ins, no access to contacts, photos or files.
Who can see the records?
Administrators at your own organization, and nobody else. Each organization’s records are isolated from every other’s.
What does it cost?
Every plan is free during the beta. After that the Free plan stays free within its limits and the paid plans are billed monthly — the current numbers are on the pricing page.
What free tiers in this category usually withhold, and what ours does not: is free attendance software actually free?
Can we export our data?
Yes, as CSV, from the attendance page. It is your record of your people; a tool that made it hard to leave would be telling you something about itself.
Does it work across offices in different countries?
Yes, and it is the part we take most seriously. Each location keeps its own timezone and a check-in belongs to the business day where it happened, so a scan in Singapore lands on Singapore’s Tuesday rather than London’s Monday. One report reads across all of them, with a toggle that changes the clock and never the date. See attendance across offices.
Can people check in from home?
Only if an administrator switches it on for that location, and every check-in made that way is marked Remote in your reports. It verifies who and when exactly as a scan does; it does not check where anybody is, which is why it is marked rather than hidden.
It is meant for the morning that starts before the commute does, not as a replacement for scanning a display. A location where everybody checks in remotely is a location whose checks have stopped meaning anything.
What is the difference between attendance and time tracking?
Attendance records that somebody was at work. Time tracking measures how their hours were spent, usually against projects or tasks, and feeds payroll.
LiteEntry is the first one. There is a Duration column — the day’s completed sessions added up — but it is not hours worked and is never labelled as such: it counts breaks, it is blank when somebody forgot to check out, and turning it into pay means rules about rounding and overtime that belong to your payroll system and your local law.
Do you use facial recognition or photographs?
No, deliberately. Both turn an attendance record into biometric data, which brings consent requirements, storage obligations and a category of risk out of proportion to knowing who was at work. We verify with a rotating code, an account somebody already has, and optionally location and network — see what each check does.
Do we need Google accounts?
Yes — everyone who checks in signs in with a Google account, a work one or a personal one you have on file. It is why there are no invitations to send and no passwords to reset: the credential already exists and somebody else maintains it.
Microsoft 365 sign-in is being built. If your organization is on Microsoft today, tell us and we will let you know when it lands.
How accurate are the recorded times?
Every check-in is timestamped by our server in UTC at the moment it is accepted. The phone’s clock plays no part, so somebody changing the date on their device records the same minute as everybody else.
Each row also carries the business day of the location it happened at, decided from that location’s timezone when the row is written and never recalculated afterwards — so a check-in in Singapore stays on Singapore’s Tuesday however you read the report later.
Still stuck? Try the demo — most questions here are quicker to answer by pressing the thing than by reading about it.