By Presentee Team · June 2, 2026 · 4 min read
Ask most companies how they know an employee was actually at work today, and the honest answer is: they don't, not really. A button tap in an app proves someone had a phone in their hand at a certain time. It doesn't prove where that phone was. For an office job that mostly doesn't matter. For anything involving shifts, field work, client sites, or a distributed team, it matters a great deal — and it's the single easiest thing to fake in most attendance systems.
Geofencing closes that specific gap. It doesn't solve every attendance problem, but it solves the first one: was this check-in even physically possible from where the employee claims to be.
A geofence is a virtual boundary drawn around a real location — an office, a warehouse, a store, a client site — usually as a center point and a radius. When an employee checks in, the app reads the device's GPS coordinates and the server calculates the distance from that point. If the distance is inside the radius, the check-in is accepted. If it isn't, it's rejected or flagged, depending on policy.
The important detail is where that calculation happens. If the app itself decides whether the employee is 'inside' the fence and just reports a yes/no answer to the server, the check is worthless — a modified or rooted device can simply report 'yes' regardless of the truth. The coordinates have to travel to the server raw, and the server has to do the geofence math itself. That's the difference between a feature that looks like verification and one that actually is.
GPS accuracy varies a lot: wide open outdoors it can be within a few meters, but indoors, near tall buildings, or on a lower-end device it can drift by 50 meters or more. A geofence radius set too tight rejects legitimate check-ins from employees standing in the building. Set too wide, and it stops meaning anything — a 500-meter radius around an office technically includes the coffee shop across the street and the parking structure two blocks away.
A workable radius is usually informed by the actual site: a single-building office can run tighter than a large campus or a warehouse with an outdoor loading area. The right approach lets an admin set this per location rather than applying one global number to every site a company operates, because a 30-meter radius that works for a small retail unit will constantly reject valid check-ins at a large industrial yard.
Outright silent rejection is the wrong default — an employee whose GPS briefly drifted, or who is standing at the edge of a legitimate radius, ends up locked out with no explanation and no path forward, and the first anyone hears about it is a payroll dispute days later.
A better pattern is to reject the automatic check-in but leave a route to a manual correction that a supervisor reviews and approves, with the original attempt and its location kept in the record rather than overwritten. That way the geofence stays strict — no unverified check-ins slip through — but a genuine edge case doesn't turn into an unpaid day or a fight with HR.
Location alone answers 'was this device in the right place' — it doesn't answer 'was this the right person holding it.' A shared login or a phone handed to a coworker still checks in from the correct GPS coordinates. That's why geofencing is usually paired with a second signal: a selfie captured and verified at the moment of check-in, and a device restriction that ties an employee's attendance to one approved phone rather than any device with the app installed.
None of these controls are complicated on their own. What makes them effective is that they're all enforced on the server, at the same time, before an attendance record is created — not layered on as an afterthought that a determined employee can route around.
Not if it only reads location at the moment of check-in rather than tracking continuously in the background. Presentee requests a single location fix when an employee opens the check-in screen — it doesn't run a persistent location service, so there's no meaningful battery cost.
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