Help · How it works

How geofencing a check-in works

A centre, a radius and a GPS accuracy allowance, compared against the phone when somebody scans — and what happens when the reading is too vague to judge.

LiteEntry compares the phone’s location reading against the location’s coordinates and radius at the moment somebody scans, and records the distance. The geofence has three settings — Off, Record and Require — and only Require turns anybody away.

The phone is asked once, at the scan. Nothing runs in the background and nothing is recorded between check-ins.

Off, Record or Require

Off — the location is not asked for and not collected.

Record — the check is made and the result is written down, but nobody is stopped. Somebody scanning from the far side of the car park is checked in, with a note saying how far out they were.

Require — a check-in that fails the geofence is refused, and the refusal is kept with its distance.

Start at Record. It shows you what your own building does to a GPS reading before the setting starts making decisions, and the distances it collects are what tell you whether the radius you picked is the right one.

What you set

Open Locations, press the gear beside Geofence, and you get a map. Search for the place or use your current location, drag the pin to the door, and the circle drawn around it is the radius.

Radius (m) — between 20 and 5000, and 150 by default. It is the distance from the pin, so it has to cover the building rather than the doorway.

Max GPS accuracy (m) — between 10 and 1000, and 100 by default. A phone reports how confident it is, and this is the point past which LiteEntry stops believing it.

Why the accuracy allowance matters more than the radius

A phone indoors, on a low floor, in bad weather, is routinely wrong by tens of metres. The Max GPS accuracy figure does two jobs at once, and both of them are about that error.

A reading vaguer than the threshold is rejected outright rather than compared to the radius — a fix claiming 3 km of accuracy is a coarse network estimate, not GPS, and letting it through because its error circle overlaps your office would accept somebody in the next city.

A reading inside the threshold has its own reported accuracy subtracted from the distance before the comparison. Somebody standing in the lobby with a 40 m fix is judged at 40 m closer than the raw number says, so an honest person is not turned away by their building’s concrete. The subtraction is capped at the threshold, which is what stops it becoming the same hole in reverse.

When the phone gives nothing back

Some phones, in some lobbies, produce no usable reading at all. Allow check-in with no location at all is on by default and covers exactly that case: the person can press Check in without location, the check-in is recorded, and it is marked checked in without location permanently.

That override is only available when there is no reading to judge. A confident fix placing somebody 400 m away can never be overridden — otherwise the geofence would mean nothing — and the mark is permanent so a phone that never works is visible rather than a quiet exemption. Turning the setting off means an employee whose sensor is broken cannot record their day at all.

What LiteEntry records

Under Require, a refused scan is written down: who, where, when, and how far outside the radius they were. It appears in the Attempts view of the attendance report, which is the only view that can show a check-in that did not happen — “tried three times, then got in” is the shape that diagnoses a radius set too tight.

Under Record, the check-in happens and carries the miss with it. The Events view notes it on the event itself — Location noted: outside the radius, 412 m away — and the Review queue lists it as checked in from elsewhere, recorded and allowed. Marking it reviewed records that an administrator saw it, and nothing more.

Before anybody taps

The scan page checks the geofence before the button does anything, and says which checks passed and which did not — Move closer to the office, or Wait a moment for a better location. That preview records nothing, so a phone settling on the pavement does not fill the review queue.

What a geofence cannot tell you

A geofence confirms the phone was near the location. It does nothing about somebody standing at the screen holding a colleague’s phone — that is what device recognition watches for, and neither of them prevents it outright.

Remote check-ins skip the geofence entirely, along with every other check, which is why they are off until an administrator allows them and why every one is labelled Remote.

See what each check does for the other two, or the office network check for the same question answered without GPS.

Still stuck? Try the demo — most questions here are quicker to answer by pressing the thing than by reading about it.