When employees clock in/out to a location with geofence warnings/restrictions enabled, your employees are expected to receive the warning/restriction if they are outside the selected location's Geofence. Your employees may also receive a warning/restriction when they believe that they are at the correct location.

There are a couple of things that you can double-check to see what is causing the warning/restriction when you do not believe that it should be happening. 

Table of Contents

• Double-Check the Location Geofence
• Employee Clocking Out on Different Device
• Device GPS Accuracy

Double-Check the Location Geofence

Incorrect Geofence

The Geofence is automatically generated by ExakTime Connect when an address is entered and sourced from Bing.

Depending on the issue, you may need to either check the address entered for the location or the GeoFence for the location. 

If the address was incorrectly entered in ExakTime Connect, the GeoFence will be incorrect as a result. You will want to update the address and update the GeoFence for the location. Updating the address for a location will not update the GeoFence and the GeoFence must be manually updated. 

If the address was correctly entered in ExakTime Connect, but the GeoFence is incorrect, then the data obtained from Bing may be incorrect. This can be due to incorrect information in Bing's database or the location may be too new and does not exist in Bing, forcing Bing to give us the best possible location such as the middle of a zip code, city, county, etc. In either instance, you will need to manually update the GeoFence for the location. 

To manually update a Geofence, please refer to the following dedicated article. 

No Geofence

If there is no Geofence for a location, the employee will see warning/restriction messages when trying to clock in/out as ExakTime Mobile is unable to determine if the employee is within the vicinity of the location. This can be easily fixed by creating the Geofence for the location on ExakTime Connect. 

To manually update a Geofence, please refer to the following dedicated article. 

Small Geofence

If the Geofence is too small, it is possible for an employee to receive a false negative as the employee's device places them outside the GeoFence. These false negatives are generally due to the inaccuracy of a device's GPS which can be affected by the device itself and environmental factors such as mountains, buildings, being indoors/underground, etc. These factors can affect the accuracy of a device's GPS from as small as 16 ft. to as large as 60 ft. or more.

In the example below, an employee was working on-site, but their device placed them in a building across the street and just outside the GeoFence. While it would normally be within an acceptable margin of error by a person, ExakTime Mobile will prompt the warning/restriction.

Due to these factors, some of which are uncontrollable, we generally recommend the Geofence being larger than the given location to take into account GPS inaccuracy and other possible factors such as employees clocking in from their truck, then walking to the location.

To manually adjust a Geofence, please refer to the following dedicated article. 

Employee Clocking Out on Different Device

If your employees clock in and out on different devices, you can enable the option for Employees to select their location when clocking out. If you do not, the employees may run into an issue where the device doesn't have an appropriate Location to associate with the "Out" punch and the GeoFence Restriction may block their ability to make a punch as it does not have the location from a previous "In" punch to refer to.

To avoid this type of situation, you can either:

• Have the employee clock out on the device they previously clocked in on so ExakTime Mobile recognizes the appropriate location worked.
• Enable the option for the employee to select a location when clocking out.

Device GPS Accuracy

As noted above, the accuracy of the GPS for a device can vary on multiple factors. It is possible for ExakTime Mobile to show the employee where the device has calculated where it is in the world by pressing the cross hair icon at the top-right. This can help you and your employees understand why they may be receiving the Geofence warning/restriction when clocking in/out. Something that employees can do to improve their GPS accuracy is to walk outside and stay away from obstructions such as tall buildings, landmarks, overhead objects, clouds, mountains, etc. as accurate GPS can require clear line-of-sight with satellites in space.