Ask any manager who's run a field team without software what they don't trust, and "attendance" comes up fast. Paper registers get backfilled at the end of the week. A pinned location on a chat app can be sent from anywhere. Even a plain GPS-stamped check-in only proves a phone was near a coordinate — it says nothing about whether that coordinate was actually the customer's site, the warehouse, or a parking lot two streets over.
What a geofence actually does
A geofence is a defined radius around a real place — an office, a customer site, a branch. When a field employee checks in, their GPS coordinates are matched against every geofence configured for the organization. Land inside one, and the check-in is verified automatically — no manager has to eyeball it. That's the entire point: verification that doesn't require a human to manually cross-check every single record.
What happens outside a geofence
This is the part most systems get wrong. The naive approach is to block the check-in outright if it falls outside every geofence. In practice that's a bad idea — GPS accuracy varies with building density, weather, and device quality, and a legitimate field visit can land 40 meters outside a poorly-drawn radius. Reject it, and you've just taught your team to lie about where they are to get the app to cooperate.
The better answer: outside every configured geofence, the check-in is flagged for review instead of blocked. A manager sees it, sees the actual coordinates and distance, and approves or corrects it. GPS is treated as strong evidence, not absolute proof — which is the honest way to describe what GPS actually is.
The org with no geofences at all
Not every organization is ready to map every site on day one. If no geofences are configured yet, every check-in verifies automatically — there's nothing to fail a match against, so it doesn't block onboarding while you're still setting things up. Geofences get added incrementally as sites are defined, and verification tightens as you go.
The result is attendance data a manager can actually act on: verified by default, flagged by exception, and never a black box.