Society staff attendance app with GPS and biometrics
Attendance recorded where the work happens, verified against a geo-fence or a device, and reconciled against what the agency invoices at the end of the month.
A society staff attendance app records punch-in and punch-out inside a geo-fence or at a biometric or face device, manages shifts and rosters, tracks overtime and leave, and produces payroll-ready reports that agency invoices can be verified against.
Know who actually showed up
A society of five hundred flats typically pays for somewhere between fifteen and forty staff — guards across three shifts, housekeeping, gardeners, plumber, electrician, lift operator — most of them supplied by agencies and invoiced monthly against a headcount. The society is buying hours, and in most cases has no independent record of the hours delivered.
The register in the guard room is not that record. It is signed in batches, guards cover for each other, and a shift where two of the three contracted staff turned up looks identical on paper to one where all three did. The invoice arrives for the full contracted headcount either way.
This is the largest recurring cost most societies cannot verify. It is also the easiest to verify, because attendance produces its own evidence if the punch happens where the work is and is tied to a person rather than to a signature.
- Registers are signed in batches. A morning signature proves nothing about a night shift.
- Buddy punching is structural. Where one person can sign for another, some will.
- Agency invoices go unchecked. Most societies pay for contracted headcount without ever comparing it to attendance.
Staff with smartphones and staff without: two ways to punch
Both write to the same attendance record, and neither can be signed by somebody else.
GPS geo-fenced punch in and out
Staff with smartphones punch from the app, and the punch is accepted only inside the geo-fence drawn around the property. A punch attempted from home fails, which removes the most common form of attendance inflation without anyone supervising it.
Geo-fences are set per site with a tolerance appropriate to GPS accuracy. Too tight and staff get failed punches at the gate and stop trusting the system; too loose and it stops meaning anything. This is worth tuning during the first fortnight.
Biometric and face device integration
For staff without smartphones — in most properties, the majority of housekeeping and gardening staff — a fixed device at the staff entrance handles it. KeyMatrix reads from the common fingerprint and face terminals rather than requiring a particular brand, so an existing device usually keeps working.
Face devices have largely displaced fingerprint readers here, being faster at shift change and not requiring shared touch. Where face entry is deployed at the gate, the same verified face both admits the staff member and marks them present.
Shift and roster management: making an absence visible
Shifts are defined per role and rostered ahead — three guard shifts covering twenty-four hours, housekeeping on a day shift, a technician on call. The roster is what makes an absence visible: attendance without an expected roster is just a list of arrivals.
Replacements are recorded as replacements. When an agency sends a different person to cover, the roster shows who was expected and who came. It also settles patrol questions: a missed round attributable to nobody being on shift is a staffing failure, not a guard failure, and only the roster can tell you which it was.
Overtime and leave tracking
Hours beyond the rostered shift accumulate as overtime, subject to approval, so overtime becomes a decision rather than a line that appears on an invoice. Leave is applied for and approved in the same place, so the roster reflects it. For directly employed staff this feeds the obligations that are easy to get wrong in a notebook — leave entitlement, weekly off, overtime rates.
Checking an agency invoice against attendance
The month-end check is the step that pays for the module.
Agency staff and contractor tracking
Agency staff are tracked against the agency that supplies them, with their police verification and ID documents held against the record and expiry dates monitored. A guard whose verification has lapsed is visible before an inspection finds it.
Contractors on a work order are recorded the same way for the duration of the job, so the people on site for a lift service are known and their access ends when the job does.