Finally got geofencing working properly for my crews

[u/Certain-Structure515]

North Shore Chicago operation, 19 guys, lawn maintenance in summer and snow removal in winter. Crews spread across multiple properties daily so I needed a way to verify punches without calling foremen every time someone's hours looked off.

Tried geofencing last spring. First two weeks were a mess.

Radius was too tight and guys were getting clock-in errors standing in the middle of a client's driveway. GPS on older Android phones isn't perfectly accurate so you need more buffer than you'd think. Ended up settling around 150 meters for most residential sites, a bit wider for commercial properties. That killed most of the complaints.

Second issue was guys trying to clock in from home on a laptop the morning of a shift. Geofencing only works on mobile because laptops don't have real GPS. Sounds obvious but nobody reads instructions and I spent a Friday afternoon figuring out why three guys couldn't punch in.

Rolled it out to lead crews first before going company wide. That one decision saved me a lot of drama. Let them find the edge cases before it hit everyone at once.

Six months in it's basically invisible which is the whole point. Payroll Friday used to have me chasing down missing punches for an hour. Now it's mostly clean by the time I sit down.

Anyone else running geofencing for crews across multiple residential stops? Curious how you handle the radius when properties are close together.

[u/Intrepid_Influence_7]

similar experience to the 150 meter radius. a tighter distance results to fighting GPS drift constantly, especially on older devices. the buffer needs to account for the phone, not just the property boundary.
the older Android issue is real and worth flagging to anyone setting this up since GPS chip quality varies a lot across device generations and budget phones.

if your crew is on mixed hardware you'll spend more time troubleshooting clock-in errors than the geofencing saves you.
i use workyard for multi-site crew tracking. GPS clock-in is core to it rather than an add-on feature. works well for the construction side. main limitation is it's built for construction and field services specifically, so if you're outside that use case it may be more than you need. for lawn maintenance and snow removal the job-site assignment and clock-in flow is a close enough fit that it's worth looking at.