Help · Choosing LiteEntry

Why not just ask employees to install an app?

An app would add automatic clock-in, push reminders and working offline. What each one costs, and why LiteEntry records attendance in the browser instead.

You could ask, and most of your team would do it. LiteEntry has no employee app because the install is the step where attendance rollouts stall, and because almost everything an app would add is something staff object to once they understand it.

The camera and browser already on the phone are enough to record a check-in. That is the whole of the employee side.

What an app would actually add

Three things, and it is worth being straight about them.

Automatic clock-in. An app can watch for you arriving and record it without anybody pressing anything. That needs location access while the app is closed.

Push reminders. An app can nudge somebody who forgot to check out.

Working with no signal. An app can hold a check-in on the phone and send it when the network comes back.

What each one costs

Automatic clock-in costs the argument you are trying to avoid. Background location is the objection staff actually have, and they are right that it is a different thing from opening a page at a door. It is also the feature that turns an attendance record into a movement record.

Push reminders need somebody to install and keep the app. A reminder only reaches the people who installed it, which is never everybody, so the chasing comes back in a different shape.

Offline check-ins cannot be verified. LiteEntry signs the code on the server and verifies it on the server, so a check-in is confirmed at the door rather than assembled later from what a phone remembered. A record that syncs an hour later cannot tell you whether somebody was actually there, which is the only question attendance exists to answer.

What you skip by not having one

There is no rollout. Nobody is chased to install anything, there are no separate instructions for iPhone and Android, no app store review, no device policy, and no version anybody is stuck on. A new starter’s setup is their first scan.

There is nothing to remove either. Somebody leaves, you disable them in LiteEntry, and there is nothing left on their phone to think about.

And there is no argument to have. An install is something an employer has to ask for and justify; a page that opens when somebody scans a code is not.

What it costs you, plainly

LiteEntry needs a network at the moment of the scan — the screen by the door and the phone both. That is the real trade, and it is deliberate rather than unfinished: verifying at the door is what makes the record worth keeping.

For a site with no reliable connection at the entrance, that is a genuine problem, and worth knowing before you start rather than after.

The version most teams actually want

Attendance that is one button on a phone somebody already carries, about three seconds, and nothing running in between. See attendance without an app for what the day-to-day looks like, or attendance without creating employee accounts for the other half of why there is nothing to roll out.

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