Geofenced clock-in for UK construction crews
Pay for the hours that happened.
Your crew tap in on their own phones. Hours only count inside the site boundary you draw. Anything odd is flagged for you to look at, not buried in a timesheet.
Now in pilot with a small group of UK contractors, free while it runs. Nothing to install from an app store. Works on any phone. Built by a groundworks contractor, not a software firm. Already on the pilot? Open ClockFence.
What trust is costing you
An hour a week per worker adds up fast.
Late starts, long dinners, early finishes and the odd day that never happened. Move the sliders to your own numbers.
Assumes 4.33 weeks a month and that verified clock-ins recover half the unaccounted time. Your figures will differ; this is a sanity check, not a promise.
How it works
Three things. That's the whole system.
Draw the fence
Drop a pin on the site, set a radius and the start and finish times. Add the crew with a name, trade and a PIN. Two minutes per site.
Tap in, tap out
Operatives open the app on their own phone, enter their PIN and press one button. Location is checked against the fence at that moment, then let go.
Review the flags
The live board shows who is where. Anything outside the fence, late, early or missing lands in one queue. Add a note, mark it reviewed, export the week.
What you get
Built for gangs that move between sites.
Geofenced clock-in
Hours count when the phone is inside the boundary you set. Outside still records, but flagged, so nobody gets locked out on a bad GPS day.
Live board
Every site, every person, right now. How long they've been on, whether they're inside the fence, who hasn't turned up.
Exceptions queue
Outside boundary, late start, early finish, no clock-out, low GPS accuracy, late sync. Review with a note so the trail is there when a subbie disputes a week.
Timesheets and CSV
Weekly summary or full detail by person or site. One click to a CSV your accountant or payroll can use. Direct exports to accounts packages are on the roadmap.
Photo verification
Require a quick selfie on clock-in for sites where it matters. Stored 90 days by default, then gone.
Offline and no app store
Open it in the browser, add to the home screen. Poor signal on site? Events queue on the phone and send later, marked as a late sync.
I built this because I was paying for hours I couldn't see.
Why it exists
Made on site, not in a software office.
Most workforce apps were designed for warehouses and shops, then sold to builders. ClockFence started as an in-house tool at a Yorkshire groundworks firm running gangs across several sites, relying on trust alone for the wage bill.
It is deliberately narrow. It does not try to be your HR system, your scheduler or your project manager. It answers one question well: who was on which site, for how long, and can I prove it.
Ask about the pilotThe pilot
Free while we prove it on real sites.
A handful of UK contractors are running ClockFence on live jobs through autumn 2026. There is no charge during the pilot and no card is taken. Pricing afterwards will be per active worker per month, so a subbie who leaves stops costing you, and pilot companies will get first sight of it.
What you get
The full product, on your own sites
- Geofenced clock-in and out, unlimited sites
- Live board and exceptions queue
- Weekly timesheets and CSV export
- Optional selfie on clock-in, per site
- Worker privacy notice and data processing agreement
- Direct line to the people building it
What we ask
In return for free use
- Use it as the timesheet on at least one live site
- Tell your crew how it works (we give you the notice)
- Tell us what is wrong with it, bluntly
- A twenty-minute call at the end
On the roadmap
Shaped by what pilot firms ask for
- Multiple managers and roles
- Xero, QuickBooks, Sage and FreeAgent exports
- CIS payment applications and client evidence packs
- iPhone and Android store apps with reminders
Questions builders ask
Straight answers.
Can the lads fake their location?
Spoofing GPS on a phone is possible with effort, and we don't pretend otherwise. What ClockFence does is make it visible: low accuracy, impossible distances between events, simulated locations and photo mismatches all raise a flag, and the record of who reviewed what is kept. In practice, the honest majority are protected and the rest stop bothering.
Is it tracking people all day?
No. Location is read once, at the moment someone presses Clock In or Clock Out, and the app tells them so on screen. There is no background tracking, and the app cannot see where anyone is between events.
What about GDPR?
You are the controller of your workers' data and we process it for you under a data processing agreement. Location and photos are only captured at clock events, retention is set and documented, and we give you a one-page notice to hand to your crew. Because monitoring workers is high-impact, you should record a short data protection impact assessment; we provide the template.
Do subcontractors have to use it?
That's between you and them, but a verified week is in their interest too: it ends arguments about hours and speeds up payment. Self-employed operatives are added as subcontract so their hours sit separately for CIS.
Do we need signal on site?
No. The phone records the event and its GPS fix and sends it when it next has signal. Late-synced events are marked so you know they arrived after the fact.
Is there an app to install?
It runs in the phone's browser and can be added to the home screen like an app. No app store, no updates to chase, works on iPhone and Android.
What does the pilot involve?
You set up your company and sites in the app (about ten minutes), add your crew, and run it as the timesheet on at least one live site. We check in with you, fix what you find, and at the end ask for twenty minutes of honest feedback. It costs nothing and you can stop at any time.
What happens to our data after the pilot?
It stays yours. Export your timesheets as CSV whenever you like. If you carry on, nothing changes. If you stop, we delete your company's data within 30 days of you telling us, and confirm when it is done.
Want a place on the pilot?
We are taking a small number of additional UK contractors. Tell us a little about your crew and we will reply within one working day with the link, a one-page worker notice and a five-minute setup guide.