Employee tracking app

Employee Tracking App with Live GPS, Built for Indian Teams

Track staff on a live map, prove every visit, and pay from the same data. Works offline on entry-level Android, with consent handling built in and GPS in every plan.

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Why most employee tracking purchases go wrong

You are sold continuous live location when a check-in with a geofence would have answered the question, and you pay the difference every month for years.
The trail proves somebody drove somewhere. It never becomes hours and it never becomes a salary, so payroll is still done by hand from a spreadsheet at the end of the month.
The price is not on the vendor's website. You sit through a demo to find out what it costs, and the number arrives per user per month, so it grows every time you hire.
Nobody tells you what Indian law now expects you to put in writing for staff, so the consent conversation happens badly, on the day somebody objects to it.
It works on the sales engineer's phone and dies on the Rs 8,000 Android your supervisor actually carries, in a basement, with one bar of signal.

The five different things "employee tracking" can mean

Time only, no location

A punch in and a punch out, nothing more. Half the products sold as employee tracking apps are this. It is the right answer for an office, and it is worth knowing that is what you are buying before you pay for a map you will never open.

A coordinate on the punch

One latitude and longitude, stamped at the moment somebody checks in. It proves a phone was at a place at one instant. It does not prove where that phone went next, and on its own it does not prove the person was holding it.

A geofence around a place

A circle drawn on a site, and a check-in that is only accepted inside it. This is what most businesses actually need. Watch the limit: many products cap the number of geofences by plan, so the price jumps at your third branch.

A continuous route trail

Location sampled through the working day, so you get a route rather than a moment and can replay a day point by point. Genuinely necessary for field visits. Expensive and intrusive for anybody who sits in one building.

Anti-spoofing, which decides whether any of it counts

Mock location apps are free and take two minutes to install. Without detection for them, every tier above is a number your staff can type in. This is the tier buyers never ask about and the one that decides whether the data is evidence.

Which one do you actually need?

The five tiers above are not a ladder you climb. They are different products, and buying a higher one than the work requires costs money every month and buys goodwill problems for free. Pick the situation closest to yours.

You need attendance, not tracking

If everyone comes to the same address every day, live location adds nothing you cannot get from a check-in. Put a geofence around the building and let staff punch in on their own phone. You get arrival times, hours and a photo, with no location recorded at any other moment. Buying a tracking product for this is paying for a feature you will then have to explain to your team for no operational gain.

Can I see where my staff are right now?

Yes, where a route trail is switched on: the Shiftelio dashboard shows today as a live map, with who is checked in, which site or customer they are at, and the sequence of the day so far. You can also scrub back through a finished day point by point, which settles the two arguments that actually come up, namely whether a visit happened and how long it took.The part worth looking at closely is what sits beside the map. A visit that took four minutes at the right address is a different fact from one that took forty, and neither is visible from a coordinate alone. The map is the interface. The verified session underneath it is the thing with value, because that is what the next section pays people from.

A laptop showing the web dashboard: a city map filling most of the screen with a blue GPS route trail and waypoint markers, and a sidebar of four summary cards. — The web dashboard: the day's route trail, visit markers, and the summary that feeds payroll.

Is employee tracking legal in India?

Yes, for work purposes, with conditions that are now written down. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023 treats location as personal data, and the Digital Personal Data Protection Rules 2025 were notified on 13 November 2025 with the operational obligations commencing on 13 May 2027. That is a deadline rather than a suggestion, and it is close enough that a system you buy this year should already handle it.None of it is complicated. It is four obligations, and a workforce app should make three of them automatic.

1. Tell staff, in writing, before you start

Section 5 requires a clear notice of what personal data you collect and the purpose you collect it for. The notice obligation is independent of consent: even where you rely on a legitimate use rather than asking permission, the notice is still owed. In practice that is a paragraph in the appointment letter or the HR policy, in a language the employee reads, handed over before the app is installed rather than after somebody complains.

2. Have a lawful basis, and know which one you are using

There are two routes. Section 6 is consent, which must be free, specific, informed and unconditional, and which the employee can withdraw. Section 7(i) is the legitimate use for employment purposes, which covers processing for the purposes of employment and for safeguarding the employer from loss or liability, and which does not require consent at all. Attendance and payroll verification sit comfortably inside Section 7(i). Continuous location outside working hours sits inside neither, whichever route you pick.

3. Collect only what the purpose needs

The purpose you disclosed is the boundary of what you may collect. If the purpose is attendance verification, that is a coordinate at check-in, not a trail through the evening. This is the most useful line to hold, because it is also the line that keeps staff on side: a system that visibly stops at the end of the shift is one people stop arguing about after the first month.

4. Let staff see it, correct it, and complain about it

Sections 11 to 13 give the employee the right to a summary of the data held about them, the right to have an inaccuracy corrected, and the right to a readily accessible grievance mechanism that you must respond to. Naming a person and a contact address in the clause below is what turns the third one from a legal phrase into something a worker can use.

Sample employee location consent clause

Location data collection. The Company uses a workforce management application that records the employee’s device location for the purpose of verifying attendance, confirming presence at an assigned work site, and calculating payable hours.

When location is recorded. Location is recorded only during the employee’s rostered working hours, and only in connection with a check-in, a check-out, or an assigned visit. Location is not recorded outside working hours, on leave days, on weekly offs, or after the employee has checked out for the day.

What is collected. The data collected consists of the geographic coordinates of the device at the time of the action, the time of the action, and where enabled, a photograph taken by the employee at check-in. No call, message, browsing, contact, photograph library, or other personal content on the device is collected at any time.

Purpose and retention. The data is used solely for attendance verification, payroll calculation, and statutory record-keeping, and is retained for the period required by applicable law and Company policy. It is not sold, and it is not shared with any third party except where required by law.

Employee rights. The employee may at any time request access to the location data recorded about them, request correction of an inaccuracy, and raise a grievance regarding its collection or use, by contacting __________ at __________.

Consent. The employee confirms that the above has been explained to them in a language they understand, and consents to the collection and processing of location data on the terms set out in this clause.

This is a starting point drafted for a typical Indian small business, not legal advice. Have your lawyer or HR consultant check it against your contracts and your state's shops and establishments rules before you use it.

Statute checked on 6 September 2026

The section numbers above were read against the Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023 and the Digital Personal Data Protection Rules 2025 as published, on 6 September 2026. Commencement is phased: Rules 1, 2 and 17 to 21 took effect on 14 November 2025, Rule 4 on 13 November 2026, and Rules 3, 5 to 16 and 22 to 23 on 13 May 2027. This is a summary written for business owners, not legal advice.

Tracking that ends in a payslip

This is the gap in almost every product sold at this query. A route trail is a report, and a report nobody opens twice is a subscription you cancel in the second year. The value appears at the moment location stops being a picture and becomes an input to money.A check-in becomes a verified session with a start, an end, a site and a photo. The session becomes hours, split correctly across the shift, with overtime applied by the rule you set rather than by whoever is doing the arithmetic. The hours become a salary line, with advances and loan instalments already deducted. Nobody retypes anything, and when a day is disputed you open that day and the evidence is attached to the same record that paid for it.

Four steps connected by arrows: a map with a GPS route, a blue verification tick, a clock face, then rupee notes and coins. Location becomes a verified session, then hours, then pay. — Location, then a verified session, then hours, then pay. Four steps, one record, no retyping.

How do you stop staff marking attendance from home?

Draw a geofence around the work site and Shiftelio accepts a check-in only from inside it, then checks whether the fix came from real satellite and network sources or from a mock location app, so a punch made from a sofa is refused rather than recorded. What follows is everything that gets between that rule and a real check-in on a real site, because every vendor demo runs on a new phone, on office wifi, with one cooperative employee.

A field service team of two women and two men in matching navy uniforms stands talking beside a white van on an Indian residential street in late afternoon light.

Fake GPS

Mock location apps are free, are not hidden, and take two minutes to install. A check-in has to record whether the fix came from a real satellite and network source or from a mock provider, and flag the difference rather than accepting the number. A product that cannot tell you the provenance of a coordinate is reporting a value your staff can choose.

The phone that is switched off, or the permission that is denied

Both will happen, and neither should silently produce an absent day. The system should mark the gap as a gap, visible to the supervisor at the time rather than discovered on payroll day, so it can be settled while somebody still remembers what happened.

No network, which is most sites at least sometimes

Basements, lifts, factory floors, rural roads and prepaid data that ran out on the twenty-fourth all produce the same thing: a working phone with no connection. Check-ins have to be captured on the device and queued, and they have to upload with the original time and coordinate rather than the time of upload, or an offline day quietly becomes a late one.

Aggressive Android power management

MIUI, ColorOS and several other Indian-market Android skins kill background apps far more aggressively than stock Android, and they do it silently. Anything that relies on a background service running all day will lose whole afternoons on those handsets. Recording at check-in, check-out and visit is not only cheaper on battery, it is the design that survives these phones.

Entry-level hardware

The supervisor at the gate is carrying a Rs 8,000 Android with 2 GB of RAM and very little free storage, not the device the software was designed on. If the app takes forty seconds to open on that phone, the check-in does not happen and the entire system is decorative.

What it costs, on the page, without a demo

Almost every product at this query charges per user per month, and several will not tell you the number until you have sat through a call. A flat annual price behaves differently: hiring five more people does not change the bill, so the cost of the system stops being a reason to keep somebody off it.

Prices exclude 18 percent GST and were verified against the pricing page in August 2026. GPS tracking is in every plan and is never an add-on.
Plan	Price a year	Team size	Locations	GPS tracking
Basic	Rs 999 (Rs 99 a month)	up to 2 staff	1 location	Included
Growth	Rs 5,999 (Rs 599 a month)	up to 25 employees	3 locations	Included
Business	Rs 14,999 (Rs 1,499 a month)	up to 100 staff	unlimited locations	Included
Enterprise	Custom	100+ staff	unlimited locations	Included

Roughly Rs 240 per employee for a year

The Growth plan at Rs 5,999 across 25 people works out at about Rs 240 per employee for the whole year, which is less than most per-seat products charge for a single month.

How the main employee tracking apps differ

These products are not competing on whether they can put a dot on a map. They all can. They differ on how they charge, whether they will tell you that before a demo, and how far the record travels after the location is captured.

Checked in September 2026 against each vendor's own public pricing and product pages. Vendors change both, so confirm before you buy.
Product	Pricing model	Price on the website	Built around	Where it stops
Shiftelio	Flat yearly plan, no per seat fee	Yes, from Rs 999 a year	Attendance, GPS and payroll as one record	It does not stop. The verified session is what pays the salary.
Connecteam	Per user per month, tiered	Yes	Team communication and scheduling	Payroll is an export into another system
Truein	Per user per month	On request	Face recognition attendance	Payroll is an export
Jibble	Per user per month, with a free tier	Yes	Time tracking and timesheets	Payroll is an export
Keka	Per employee per month	Yes	A full HRMS, where attendance is one module	Priced and built for larger teams
ConnectMyWorld	Not published, demo request only	No	A live map and day replay	The trail never becomes a payslip

Setting it up takes about ten minutes

There is no hardware, no installation visit and no biometric machine bolted to a wall. Four steps, and the third is the one most rollouts skip and later regret.

Add your work siteDrop a pin where your staff actually work and drag the radius until it covers the building or the yard. Most businesses set one. If you have three branches you set three, and each keeps its own rules.
Add your staffA name and a mobile number is enough to start. They get an invite by WhatsApp or SMS, install the app from Play Store or the App Store, and sign in with the number you entered. No email addresses to chase.
Tell them what is recorded, in writingSend the consent clause above with the invite, in the language they read. This takes five minutes now and is the single thing that stops the whole system being argued about six months from now.
Let the first day run, then check itStaff check in from their own phone with a selfie. At the end of the day open the dashboard: arrival times, hours, sites and routes are already there, and the payroll figure is already calculated from them.

Three phone screens side by side: a staff list with avatars, a map with a large blue check-in button, and a bar chart of hours worked. — The staff list, the check-in screen your team sees, and the hours that come out of it.

Employee tracking app: questions people actually ask

What is the best app to track employee time?

The honest answer is that it depends on whether you need location with it. If your staff come to one address, a plain time tracking app is cheaper and simpler, and adding GPS buys you nothing. If your staff move between sites or visit customers, you want time and location in the same record, because otherwise you are reconciling two systems by hand every month. The second thing to check is what happens after the hours are counted: an app that produces a timesheet has done half the job, and you still have to turn that timesheet into a salary. Shiftelio is built for the second case, at a flat yearly price rather than per user per month.

How to track location of staff?

Install a workforce app on the phone the employee already carries, define the places they are meant to be, and record location at the moments that matter: check-in, check-out, and each assigned visit. Continuous background tracking is a separate and much heavier setting, and most businesses do not need it. Before you switch anything on, tell your staff in writing what is recorded, when, and why, and get their acknowledgement on record. In India that written notice is a legal requirement rather than a courtesy.

How to track WFH employees?

Not with GPS. Tracking the location of somebody who works from home means tracking their home, which is intrusive, is very hard to justify as necessary for employment, and will not survive a challenge under the DPDP Act. Track output instead: hours logged against tasks, work submitted, and check-ins that record time without a coordinate. Shiftelio supports time-only attendance for exactly this, so a remote employee and a field employee can sit in the same payroll run without the remote one being mapped.

What is the best app for tracking a person?

There is no honest product recommendation for this question, and it is worth being direct about why. Tracking a person, as opposed to tracking work, means following somebody through their private life, and an employer who does that is outside what the DPDP Act 2023 allows, whatever the app is capable of. Workforce apps like this one are built for the opposite: location recorded during rostered hours only, tied to a check-in or an assigned visit, stopping when the shift ends, with the employee told in advance and able to see their own record. If a product offers to hide itself from the person being tracked, that is the line, and no business use case sits on the other side of it.

Is it legal to track employees by GPS in India?

Yes, for work purposes, with conditions. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023 treats location as personal data. You need to give staff a clear written notice of what you collect and why (Section 5), you need a lawful basis, which for employment is usually the legitimate use in Section 7(i) or the employee consent described in Section 6, and you have to honour their rights to see, correct and complain about the data (Sections 11 to 13). What is not defensible is tracking outside working hours, tracking for a purpose you never disclosed, or hiding the tracking from the person being tracked.

Does an employee tracking app work without internet?

A good one does. Check-ins should be captured on the device, held in a queue, and uploaded when the phone next has a connection, with the original timestamp and coordinate preserved rather than the time of upload. This matters more in India than most vendors admit: basements, factory floors, lifts, rural sites and prepaid data that ran out mid-month all produce the same result, which is a working phone with no network. Shiftelio queues offline check-ins and reconciles them on reconnect.

How much does an employee tracking app cost in India?

Most vendors charge per user per month, so the cost grows every time you hire, and many keep the number off their website entirely. Shiftelio publishes a flat annual price: Rs 5,999 a year covers up to 25 employees across 3 locations, which is about Rs 240 per employee for the whole year, and GPS is in every plan rather than being an add-on. Prices exclude 18 percent GST and were verified in August 2026.

Can employees fake their GPS location?

They can try, and on Android it is easy: mock location apps are free and take two minutes to install. That is why anti-spoofing is the tier that decides whether any of the others mean anything. Shiftelio checks whether a location came from a real satellite and network fix or from a mock provider, and flags a check-in that came from a simulated one rather than silently accepting it. A product that reports a coordinate without ever saying where the coordinate came from is reporting a number your staff can choose.

Does GPS tracking drain the battery?

Continuous background tracking does, which is the main practical reason not to use it unless the work genuinely requires it. Recording location only at check-in, check-out and each visit costs almost nothing, because the radio is woken for a few seconds at a time. If you do need a route trail, sample it at intervals rather than continuously, run it during rostered hours only, and expect to explain the battery cost to staff, because they will notice it before you do.

Do employees need to install anything on their own phone?

Usually yes, and that is normally the cheapest option, because the phone already exists. Where staff do not carry a smartphone, or where the work makes a personal phone impractical, attendance can be marked from a shared supervisor device at the gate, which keeps the photo and location proof without asking anybody to install anything. Shiftelio runs on Android 6.0 and above and on iPhones from iOS 15, which covers the entry-level handsets most site staff actually carry.

What is the difference between employee tracking and employee monitoring?

Tracking answers where and when work happened. Monitoring, as the word is normally used, means watching what somebody does: screenshots, keystrokes, browsing, app usage. They are different products with very different legal weight, and blurring them is how a reasonable attendance rollout turns into a staff relations problem. This is an attendance and location product. It records check-ins, sites, visits and hours, and it does not read messages, browsing, contacts or the photo library.

Can I see the route an employee took during the day?

Yes, where you have enabled visit tracking for that role. The dashboard shows the day as a map with the sequence of visits and the time spent at each, so you can confirm a visit happened at the right address for a plausible length of time. Two limits are worth setting deliberately: record during rostered hours only, and stop when the last job is closed. Both are settings rather than defaults you have to accept, and both are what makes the record defensible if it is ever questioned.