Setting up your first geofence, without overthinking it
The single most common question we get from a new organization is some version of: "how big should the radius be?" There's no universal number, but there's a simple way to think about it that gets most people to a good answer in under a minute.
Start with what the site actually looks like
A small retail counter or office needs a tight radius, often 50 to 100 metres, since the whole site sits well within that. A warehouse, a construction site, or a farm needs something much wider, because staff might legitimately be working 200 or 300 metres from where the pin sits.
The goal isn't precision to the metre. It's making sure someone standing anywhere on the actual site falls inside the circle, without making the circle so wide it stops meaning anything.
Build in a little buffer
GPS accuracy on a phone is typically within a few metres outdoors, but it can drift wider indoors, near tall buildings, or in bad weather. Adding a modest buffer beyond the site's physical edge, rather than drawing the radius exactly on the boundary, avoids flagging genuine clock-ins for no good reason.
If clock-ins are getting flagged too often
This almost always means one of two things: the radius is too tight for the site's real footprint, or staff are clocking in from just outside the boundary, like a car park across the road. Either way, the fix is usually a quick radius adjustment rather than anything more complicated.
- Check the flagged clock-ins first. If they cluster in one obvious spot (like a car park), that tells you where staff are actually standing.
- Widen the radius a little rather than a lot, then watch the next few days before adjusting further.
- For a site with multiple real entry points, it's often better to widen the single geofence than to try to split it into several.
Once it's dialled in, most organizations don't touch it again. It's a five-minute job, once, per site.