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The Best Geofence Time Tracking App

Prevent employees from clocking in or out when they’re not on the job site with the geofencing feature in Buddy Punch’s time-tracking app.

Geofencing Map

Geofence time-tracking apps are ideal for companies with employees who work in the field.

It prevents employees from clocking in or out when they’re not on the job site, which improves accountability among your crews, prevents off-site punching, and gives you detailed records of where all of your employees are located in real-time.

Geofencing works by creating a virtual border around one or more job sites. When employees try to clock in or out, it checks their location using the GPS technology that’s built into their mobile phones. If the GPS location isn’t within the geofence, it blocks them from clocking in/out.

Geofences can also alert you when employees leave the job site while they’re on the clock.

With the right time-tracking app, it’s easy to set up geofencing radiuses for all of the locations where your employees should be working.

We’ve compiled this list of the nine best geofence time-tracking apps, plus what each app is best for, to help you find the perfect solution.

The 9 Best Geofence Time Tracking Apps

1. Buddy Punch

2. QuickBooks Time

3. Hubstaff

4. Timeero

5. Connecteam

6. ExakTime

7. OnTheClock

8. Homebase

9. Hellotracks


1. Buddy Punch

Best for affordability and ease of use.

Buddy Punch’s geofencing feature lets business owners and admins create geofences around one or more locations where employees work. You have complete control over the size of the boundary. Limit it for small office locations by making the radius 50 meters in diameter, or expand it for large job sites to as much as 1,500 meters.

With geofence boundaries set up, employees can only clock time within those boundaries. Buddy Punch uses GPS tracking on your employees’ mobile phones to identify where they’re located, and if they’re outside of the geofence, they’re prevented from punching in or out.

Buddy Punch gives admins a lot of flexibility when it comes to setting up geofencing rules. You can:

  • Create a single geofence and assign all employees to it.
  • Create multiple geofences and assign different employees to different geofences.
  • Make clocking in and out within the geofence required for all employees.
  • Make clocking in and out within the geofence required for only specific employees.

And in addition to geofencing, Buddy Punch has a lot more workforce management features to help you reduce labor costs, prevent time theft, and streamline all of your administrative work:

GPS and Geofencing: Type and Device

Buddy Punch’s web app makes it accessible on any internet-connected device, including Windows and Apple computers and iPad and Android tablets. Additionally, Buddy Punch has mobile apps for both Android and iOS phones, and a Google Chrome Web Store app for Chromebooks.

And with Buddy Punch, you don’t have to worry about your employees complaining about the app draining their data or the battery life of their phones. For geofencing, less than 10 KB of data is used on average for clocking in and out. And since the app only needs to be active at clock in and out, there isn’t any battery drain associated with it.

Pricing

Buddy Punch offers a free 14-day trial — no credit card required. Its plan that includes geofencing starts at $5.99 per user per month plus a $19 per month base fee.

2. QuickBooks Time

Best for companies using QuickBooks Payroll Premium or Elite.

QuickBooks’s time clock app allows employers to create different types of geofences. You can create them for specific office locations, job sites your employees are working at, or customers you’re doing work for.

To create a geofence in QuickBooks time, you can enter an address that’s recognized by Google Maps, or for job sites where an address isn’t available, you can use latitude and longitude values. The minimum radius for geofencing in QuickBooks is 100 meters, and the maximum is 1,000 meters.

One unique feature of geofencing in QuickBooks Time is that you can also automate the process of creating job locations using the QuickBooks Time API, which syncs your data with other platforms. If your company needs to create geofences in bulk, the API is a great way to save time, improve productivity, and avoid manual work.

Once a geofence is set up, employees will receive alerts on their mobile devices when entering and leaving the radius. This helps them remember to start or stop tracking time when arriving at or leaving a worksite.

Additionally, you can set up workflows to automatically clock employees in and out when entering and exiting the geofence. On the employee’s side, notifications prompt them to specify why they’re leaving work locations, letting them select between options like taking a break, clocking out, or switching jobs.

Key features

  • GPS tracking
  • Geofencing
  • Mileage tracking

Key integrations

  • All Intuit products
  • ADP
  • Square Payroll

Pros

  • Integrates seamlessly with other Intuit products
  • The audit log feature allows you to see all changes made to timecards and schedules

Cons

  • Many people have reported issues with their customer support
  • Expensive when compared to other products

Pricing

QuickBooks Time is a great option for companies that are already paying for QuickBooks Payroll’s Premium or Elite plans. If you subscribe to one of those plans, you get access to all of QuickBooks Time’s geofence time clock at no additional cost.

If you’re not already subscribed to one of QuickBooks Payroll’s premium plans, individual QuickBooks Time plans that include geofencing start at $10 per user per month plus a $40 base fee.

3. Hubstaff

Best for creating geofences in bulk.

Hubstaff’s time-tracking software is another great option for creating geofences in bulk.

While QuickBooks Time requires you to connect to its API to create bulk geofences — which might not be an option if you don’t have anyone particularly tech savvy on your team — Hubstaff has automation that lets you create bulk geofences using a CSV, XLS, or XLSX file.

To do so, you can download a template from Hubstaff. Using the template, you add your geofencing data: the name and address of your job sites, the email addresses of the employees who should be assigned to those job sites, and the size of each geofence radius in meters.

After that, you can import it to Hubstaff to create all of your geofences at once.

Once you have geofences set up in Hubstaff, you can select what happens when employees enter or leave the geofence:

  • Have the timer start and stop automatically when entering the job site.
  • Have the app send a reminder for employees to check in or out.
  • Take no automatic action.

If the third option is selected, the geofence is used only to ensure employees are on-site when clocking in and out. This can be controlled at the individual or organization level, allowing you to customize which employees should be restricted to clocking in and out based on their locations.

Key features

  • GPS tracking
  • Geofencing
  • Real-time route tracking
  • Productivity monitoring

Key integrations

  • Paymo
  • Trello
  • Github
  • Slack

Pros

  • Intuitive design
  • Includes productivity tracking features for team members who do most of their work online
  • Has built-in reward systems for employees

Cons

  • Customers report some issues with project tracking and productivity tracking
  • Location tracking features are only available as an add-on product

Pricing

Hubstaff’s plans start at $4.99 per seat per month with a two-seat minimum. However, its geofencing features are only available in a separate add-on package that costs an additional $4 per seat per month, so the base cost for geofencing is $8.99 per seat per month.

4. Timeero

Best for employee flexibility.

To enable geofencing in Timeero, you simply select the “require geofencing” checkbox when creating a location in the software. After that, you can set the geofence’s radius, which can be as small as 100 meters in diameter or as large as 1,000 meters.

After that, you can choose how your geofence behaves. You can:

  • Require employees to be within the geofence to clock in/out.
  • Automatically clock employees in and out when entering/exiting the geofence.
  • Send employees notifications when entering/leaving the geofence’s boundaries to remind them to clock in or out.

However, the most unique feature of Timeero is that you can make geofencing required for employees but set the system up so that they can still clock in or out even if they’re not within the geofence. When this happens, the action is flagged so an administrator can look into it.

This feature is helpful if your employees are working in a location where mobile phone service isn’t available or is unreliable. Instead of being prevented from clocking in or out and having to contact someone in the office for help, they can clock in and out anyway.

Key features

  • GPS tracking
  • Geofencing
  • Mileage, speed, and distance tracking
  • Real-time employee location mapping

Key integrations

  • Quickbooks
  • Xero
  • Rippling
  • Paychex

Pros

  • Has features that automatically clock employees in and out based on their locations
  • Great customer service

Cons

  • Customers report issues with the mobile apps being buggy and say that sometimes results in employees being double-clocked

Pricing

Geofencing features are available on Timeero’s Pro and Premium plans, which start at $8 per user per month.

5. Connecteam

Best low-cost geofencing app.

Connecteam’s geofencing time clock app is another option that provides some flexibility when you want to enable the technology but not block employees from clocking in and out outside of the geofence.

In Connecteam, when an employee clocks in or out outside of the geofence, they have to provide a reason, and then the reason and punch are added to their time cards and sent to their manager to approve or deny the request.

This is helpful if an employee leaves work but forgets to clock out. They can still clock out even though they’re outside of the geofence, and their manager can use Connecteam’s breadcrumbs feature to review the employee’s GPS location data and determine at what time they left the job site and should have clocked out.

These features can be really helpful for reducing time theft because managers can see exactly when employees entered and left job sites, and employees can clock out when they remember it rather than driving back to the job site to clock out and then billing for those extra hours.

Key features

  • GPS tracking
  • Geofencing
  • Location breadcrumbs

Key integrations

  • QuickBooks
  • Gusto
  • Paychex

Pros

  • Features a newsfeed that gives you live updates on where employees are and when they clock in
  • Allows you to message employees, clients, and customers through the app

Cons

  • Customers report that the app is not as customizable as it needs to be
  • Difficult to set up 

Pricing

Geofencing is available on Connecteam’s Advanced plan, which is $49 per month for the first 30 users and $1.50 per user per month for each additional user above 30.

To get GPS breadcrumbing, you’ll need to be on the Expert plan, which is $99 per month for up to 30 users and $3 per user per month for each additional user above 30.

6. ExakTime

Best for large construction companies.

For geofencing and a number of other features focused specifically on construction workforce management, ExakTime is a good choice.

Its geofencing feature works much like that of all of the software in this list. After you create the geofence boundary, employees are either presented with a warning when clocking in or out outside of the geofence, or they’re required to leave a comment stating why they’re punching outside of the job site.

Geofencing in ExakTime also pairs well with its real-time GPS tracking feature that pings your employees’ locations throughout the day while they’re clocked in, creating both a breadcrumb trail of their location data and a real-time location map that shows you where all employees are throughout the day.

In addition to tracking employees, ExakTime can also be used to track equipment and monitor usage and inventory levels of materials on job sites. Its app also supports translations into French and Spanish, which can be helpful if you have employees who don’t speak English.

Key features

  • Geofencing
  • Maps to job sites
  • Real-time GPS tracking
  • Live feed of clock-ins and outs

Key integrations

  • Sage
  • QuickBooks
  • ConstructionPayroll.com
  • Procore

Pros

  • Employees can send updates like photos and voice memos when clocking in/out
  • Keeps track of equipment, which can be useful for reducing theft or unauthorized use

Cons

  • One of the more expensive options on this list
  • Some customers report having issues with ExakTime’s scheduling feature

Pricing

While much of ExakTime’s pricing is only available if you request a demo of the platform, the company does have a basic plan that starts at $9 per employee per month and includes geofencing and GPS time tracking.

7. OnTheClock

Best for for small businesses looking for a free option.

If you only have a couple of employees, OnTheClock has a free plan that includes geofencing that could be right for you. And even if you have more than two employees, it’s the lowest-cost software on this list from a per-user cost perspective.

Geofencing in OnTheClock is called “Punch Locations.” You set them up by entering the address or latitude and longitude of the geofence you want to create, then expand or collapse the geofence diameter to as small as 100 meters or as large as 10,000 meters — the largest diameter available of any app on this list.

OnTheClock also provides flexibility in how the geofence behaves. You can simply record an employee’s location when they clock in and out. You can warn them that they’re outside of the geofence but allow them to clock in any way. Or you can prevent them from clocking in if they’re not within the geofence.

Key features

  • GPS punch recording
  • Geofencing
  • GPS breadcrumb trails

Key integrations

  • QuickBooks
  • Gusto
  • Paychex

Pros

  • Allows employees to communicate why they couldn’t clock properly, giving admins more oversight and the ability to quickly make edits

Cons

  • Some customers report that the product was difficult to set up

Pricing

OnTheClock has one of the more unique pricing models on this list. It has only one pricing package that includes all of the features the app offers, and the pricing model scales based on the number of employees using it.

For only two employees, OnTheClock is free. For 3-10 employees, it’s $3.50 per employee per month. The per-employee-per-month cost then scales as you add more employees, costing $3.45/employee/month for 11-25 employees, $3.40/employee/month for 26-50 employees, and so on.

8. Homebase

Best for companies with very few locations.

If you only have one or two locations you want to create geofences for, Homebase is a great low-cost option to consider. Unlike all of the other apps on this list that charge by number of employees, Homebase charges by number of job sites, which could significantly reduce your costs if you have few locations.

As far as geofencing goes, you set Homebase geofences up much like all of the other apps on this list. Simply enter an address or latitude and longitude coordinates. If the geofence is enabled, employees can only clock in and out when they’re inside of it.

However, Homebase does have some unique radius-creation options. You can set the radius at 150ft, one block, or five blocks. Those are the only three options. This makes it great for tracking employees working in an office, but it might not work as well for construction sites or other large work areas.

Key features

  • Capture GPS location at clock-in
  • Geofencing
  • Team communication features

Key integrations

  • Sure Payroll
  • QuickBooks Online
  • Toast POS

Pros

  • Offers a free plan for those with simple needs
  • Priced by location instead of per employee, allowing smaller businesses to have a much more cost effective option

Cons

  • Customers report a number of issues with bugs and lag, especially with employee notifications

Pricing

While Homebase has a free plan for one location, geofencing is not available on that plan. Plans that include geofencing start at $20 per location per month for unlimited employees.

9. Hellotracks

Best for creating customized geofenced areas.

Hellotracks is largely built around GPS tracking. It’s designed to improve productivity for field service management and logistics companies, with features like route tracking, route optimization, and real-time location visibility. So if all you’re looking for is geofencing, it might not be the right option.

However, Hellotracks does have the most customizability of all of the geofencing apps on this list when it comes to defining your geofence radius.

Unlike the other apps that define the geofence radius using a circle, HelloTracks allows you to create any shape you’d like — circles, squares, triangles, and even polygons — so you can be specific about which exact areas employees can be working in while billing time.

This could be really helpful if you have a defined delivery area. You can set up the geofence around your exact delivery area so employees can only clock in and out within it. Then, you can watch their exact movements throughout the day while they’re clocked in.

Key features

  • Same-second GPS tracking
  • Dispatching
  • Route optimization

Key integrations

  • Slack
  • Excel
  • Google Calendar

Pros

  • Very useful for transportation businesses
  • Reported to be very easy to use and makes tracking and assigning work a breeze

Cons

  • Has fewer features than many of the other logistics software options
  • Not as customizable as some customers need

Pricing

Hellotracks’ base plan starts at $10 per user per month and includes real-time GPS location tracking, geofencing, on-site time recording, and unlimited location history.

Frequently Asked Questions

Geofence time tracking is a technology that uses virtual boundaries to track time spent within specific geographical areas. Companies use it to monitor and record an employee’s time at a specific location, typically a job site or designated area.

A variety of location services and technologies can be used to determine if someone is located within the boundaries of a geofence, including GPS, Bluetooth, IP addresses, and RFID signals.

You can generally create geofences in three different ways:

Using an address: Create a radius around a specific point on a map. For example, you’d select your business address and then create a circular radius around your business. This is your geofenced area.

Using latitude and longitude: If the location you want to geofence does not have a mailing address, you can input latitude and longitude coordinates, then create a circular radius around that location.

Using footprints: This is perhaps the most exact form of geofencing where you use polygonal geofences to recreate the physical boundaries of your business.

Employers use geofences to ensure employees are located at job sites when they’re charging for their time. This creates more accurate time reports and prevents time theft.

Additionally, geofences can be really useful to track time in field and trade businesses where it’s important to know exactly how much time was spent on the job site for billing purposes.

The average cost of a time-tracking app that includes geofencing is $6.12 per user per month. On the lower end, you’ll find apps priced between $1.50 and $4 per user per month. On the higher end, apps are priced between $8-$10 per user per month. Some apps do offer geofencing in their free plans, but the capabilities are usually very limited.

Beyond the ability to create geofences, there are many other features you might want to look for in a geofencing app:

Mobile apps: A time-tracking tool with mobile apps will allow your employees to clock in and out no matter where they’re working.

API: If you have a lot of job sites to create geofences for, finding a tool that has an API (or other means of letting you create geofences in bulk) will save you a lot of time.

Override mode: If employees have poor internet or phone service, it may not be possible for the system to determine their locations. You’ll want to make sure that employees have a way to override the location requirement so they can still clock in.

Privacy settings: In some states, it’s illegal to track employees’ locations when they’re not on the clock, so make sure to find an app that only monitors employees’ locations when they’re working.

Battery protection: Employees will complain about their time-tracking app if it drains their phones’ batteries or data, so make sure to ask about battery drain and data usage when comparing options.

Yes, for the most part, employers have the right to track employees’ locations. However, Some states have specific regulations around GPS tracking. Before you begin using a geofencing app to track your employees’ locations, review the laws in the locations where your business operates.

Generally speaking, businesses can only track employees using GPS during their working hours and when using company-owned vehicles. So make sure that the app you choose will only track employee locations in specific snapshots (like when they clock in/out) or while they’re on the clock.

Finally, before you begin GPS tracking, you should establish a written policy for employees describing how they will be monitored and how this data will be used. It’s always best to get employees’ consent whether you’r state requires you’re required to do so or not.

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