Staff Attendance and Clock-In

Staff clock in and out from their own phone. The platform checks they are at the school when they do it, and builds each person's day from what they actually recorded.

How a member of staff clocks in

Clocking in happens in the 1410SMS app, on the member of staff's own phone. There is nothing to install at the school and no hardware to buy.

1. Open More, then My Attendance. It is called My Attendance rather than Attendance because the pupil register sits beside it under the same word, and one of the two marks 4B.
2. Set up this phone, once. The first visit offers a single button. Tapping it ties clocking in to that handset, which is what stops one phone clocking in three people. Depending on how your school has set things up, an administrator approves the phone before it can be used, and the screen says so while that is pending.
3. Tap Clock in. The button is the whole screen's point and reads Clock in or Clock out according to which one is next. If your school has set a location, the phone is asked where it is at that moment; a tap from outside the radius is refused and says why, rather than being recorded and queried later.
4. Tap Clock out on the way home. The same button, now reading Clock out. The hours between the two are the day's total, and the screen shows the day as it stands, along with a link to the member of staff's own last thirty days.

A morning reminder can be sent to anybody who has not clocked in yet. It is a clock rather than a tracker: the app never watches where a member of staff is, and asks for their location only in the moment they tap the button. See Privacy below.

What a clock-in is checked against

Their own phone, always. Each member of staff sets up their own device, and no two accounts at your school can share one. This is what stops a single phone clocking in three people, which is the thing that actually happens where only location is checked, and it is not something a school can switch off: without it a clock-in tells you a phone was at the school, not who was holding it. You do choose how many phones one person may set up, for staff carrying a work handset and a personal one, and each of those still belongs to that one person.

Your school's location is the check you add on top. You set a pin and a radius; a clock-in from outside it is refused. Clearing it means a clock-in can be made from anywhere, on the right phone, which suits a school whose staff move between sites.

More checks always run and cannot be switched off, because without them the first two do not mean much. These three can refuse a clock-in:

• A location reading too vague to prove anything. A phone on battery-saving location reports a position accurate to a few hundred metres, which would satisfy your radius from the next street. A reading that does not say how accurate it is counts as vague, rather than being let through.
• A device reporting a faked location. Spoofing apps are one search away, and a radius check cannot see them.
• A second tap moments after the first. There is a minimum gap between one person's punches, so a double tap on a slow morning is turned away instead of recording an arrival and a departure seconds apart that somebody has to correct later. It is the one refusal that is nothing to do with where you are: the message says another punch was just recorded and how long to wait, and waiting is the whole of the remedy.

Two more things always hold, and are worth knowing even though neither turns anybody away:

• The time is stamped by the server, never taken from the phone. Otherwise changing the phone's clock would change somebody's arrival time. How far the handset's own clock was from ours is recorded beside the punch as evidence, for the argument six months later, but it never refuses anything: there is nothing to refuse, because the phone's clock was never used.
• A day your calendar records as closed does not stop anybody clocking in. Staff work when the pupils are away: holiday classes, the office over half term, exam marking, a caretaker on site. The closure is recorded beside the punch instead, so a shift worked over the break is visible as one, and the hours count towards the timesheet as normal. What the day does not become is a "day present" in the punctuality figures, because those are measured against the days your school was open, and counting a holiday on one side of that sum and not the other would push the rate above 100%. A class register is still refused on a closed day; that rule is about pupils and has not changed.

When a clock-in is refused, nothing is recorded and the staff member is told exactly what to do about it. The refusals are also logged, so if your pin is in the wrong place you can see the pattern rather than hearing about it one person at a time.

Setting your school's location

Go to Attendance → Settings on the web, or Settings → School location in the mobile app. You can type coordinates you already have, or stand at the school and capture the pin, which is what most schools do. The radius is set beside it; 75 metres reaches a gate and a car park.

Set it from a phone if you can. A laptop works out where it is from the Wi-Fi around it and is routinely hundreds of metres out, while a phone has a GPS in it. Both screens tell you how accurate the reading was and say so plainly when the accuracy is looser than the radius you have chosen, which is the case worth taking again outdoors.

Below about 30 metres, staff standing in the right place will still be turned away on an ordinary phone signal, so the platform will not let you go tighter than 20.

A school with a second site, such as a nursery down the road, adds another location, and staff clock in at whichever they are actually at.

Phones, and what happens when somebody gets a new one

The first phone a member of staff sets up is accepted automatically. Any phone after that waits for an administrator to approve it: Attendance → Staff on the web, where Devices at the top of the tab opens the queue, and the Devices tab under More → Staff Attendance on the phone.

Reinstalling the app looks like a new phone. Neither iOS nor Android offers an identifier that survives being removed and reinstalled, so this will happen. The approval queue shows the model and operating system so you can see it is the same handset, and approving is one tap. If you would rather not maintain a queue at all, Approve new phones automatically turns it off.

Revoking a phone stops it clocking in and leaves every record it made intact. The entry is kept rather than deleted, which is what lets the next person use the same handset when one is passed on.

Phones per staff member is under Attendance → Settings. Raise it for staff who carry a work phone as well as their own. Whatever it is set to, a phone belongs to exactly one member of staff: raising the number lets somebody clock in from either of their own handsets, and never lets two people share one.

The board

Attendance → Staff shows the day: who is in, who was late, who has not arrived, and how long each person has been on site. Every active staff account appears, not only the ones who clocked in.

Tap a name for the full day: each stretch of being at work, the breaks between them, and anything that needs a person to look at it.

The same board is in the mobile app, under More → Staff Attendance, alongside the roll call, punctuality across your school, the leave register and the queue of phones waiting to be approved. Each of those five is shown only to somebody who holds the permission for it, so a bursar who may approve phones and nothing else opens straight onto that queue. Step back a day at a time, or pick a date, and tap a name for their last 30 days, their timesheet and the correction form.

Staff who have no phone to clock in with

Not everybody carries a smartphone, and for those staff there is nothing to clock in with. Somebody authorised ticks their names off a list instead, and the platform records what they attest. That is the Staff roll call, and it has a page of its own: Clocking staff in by roll call.

It is not a correction and is not filed as one. A roll call records the moment it is taken, with no time for anybody to set, and says on the timesheet that the day was attested rather than measured, which is what keeps the checks on this page meaning something for everybody else.

Those staff often have no email address either, which the platform no longer requires. See Staff without an email address.

Corrections

Phones go flat and people forget. An administrator with the right permission can record a clock-in or clock-out on somebody's behalf from that same panel, or from a colleague's day in the mobile app, with a reason that stays on the record. The reason is required either way, because a backdated entry about somebody's hours with nothing saying why is the one least worth having.

A correction adds to the record; it never edits or removes anything. Both what was recorded at the time and what you entered afterwards stay on the day, so the trail is always complete.

A correction is for a day that was recorded wrongly, which is why its reason is required and why it can reach back to last Tuesday. Clocking this morning's arrivals in for staff who have no phone is the roll call above, not this.

Forgotten clock-outs

If somebody forgets to clock out, the platform closes the day off at the time you have said your building empties, once that day is over.

The hours are still credited, because the person was at work. But the day is marked as an estimate everywhere it appears, and the staff member is told, so they can ask for it to be corrected. A figure the platform guessed never looks like one it measured.

When your staff day runs

Under Attendance → Settings you set when a late arrival begins (08:00), when an early departure begins (14:00), and when forgotten clock-outs are closed off (17:00). The fourth time, when the morning reminder goes out (08:00), sits with the reminder's own switch under Settings → Attendance. All four arrive filled in with those times, so a school switching this on is not asked four questions about a day it has not described yet.

Clear any of them and it follows the working hours you have already set under Academic Calendar → Settings instead. A school that has described its day once should not have to describe it again, and if you later correct those hours, a cleared box follows them.

The close-off time is worth a moment's thought, because it is also the time credited to a forgotten day. Set it to when your building actually empties rather than to when lessons end: too early and somebody's after-school hours are cut, too late and a forgotten tap credits an evening nobody worked. Either way the day is marked as an estimate and the staff member is told, so it can be corrected.

A late arrival is recorded whether or not anybody is told about it, so Tell staff when they arrive late is on: a mark somebody first hears about in a review, with no memory of the morning, is one they cannot answer.

Privacy

The app reads a staff member's location only at the moment they tap to clock in or out. It never reads it in the background, and it cannot read it while the app is closed. Nothing about staff attendance is ever shown to a parent or a student.

Leave, absences and printed sheets

Recording that somebody is on leave or on official duty, the one message each morning naming yesterday's absences, and the reminder to whoever has not clocked in are on their own page: Staff leave and absence reporting. Timesheets and the payroll export are under attendance documents.

On the phone

Staff attendance is built for the phone first: clocking in and out happens there, and so does the administrative half. More → Staff Attendance opens a board for one day, stepped a day at a time or picked from a calendar, with the day's tally across the top and every member of staff below it carrying their clock-in, their clock-out and the hours between. Late, present and absent are the board's own words, derived from the times your school set. Punctuality, leave and the registered devices are the tabs beside it, each shown only to a reader who holds the key for it.

What is not here yet

• A kiosk screen. Clocking in works with no hardware at all, and staff with no phone are covered by the roll call. A screen at reception showing a rotating code, so those staff could clock themselves in rather than being ticked off by somebody else, is planned and optional.
• Cover. The platform records who is away; it does not yet reassign their lessons.
• Shift patterns and entitlement balances. Both belong to workforce management rather than to attendance, and are on the roadmap as their own module.