Shiftelio

Multi-site attendance

Five branches. One app. Nobody picking a location from a dropdown.

Every site gets its own fence and its own radius. A punch is matched to the branch the worker is actually standing in, and a day that crosses three sites is recorded as three, not one.

Sound familiar?

  • The same employee works Monday at one branch and Thursday at another
  • Your current app makes you create them twice, once per location
  • Staff choose their branch from a list, and the list gets chosen wrong
  • Two of your sites are 80 metres apart and the app cannot tell them apart
  • You cannot answer "how many hours did we spend at the Andheri site last month"

What multi-site actually means here

One employee, many sites

Attach a person to as many locations as you like. No duplicate records, no transferring anybody between branches when the rota changes.

Per-site radius

A shop counter and a five-acre plot do not need the same tolerance. Radius is set per site, defaulting to 100 metres where you have not chosen one.

Automatic branch matching

The punch is matched to a site by position, not by what somebody tapped. Nobody selects a branch, so nobody selects the wrong branch.

Overlaps resolve the same way every time

We pick the fence the worker is most clearly inside of, not the nearest centre, then break ties toward the smaller fence. Same position, same answer, always.

A day can span several sites

One session holds a timeline of site segments with minutes at each. A supervisor covering three branches reads as three stretches, not one guess.

Site-level hours

Because the minutes are attributed as they happen, you can ask what a location actually cost you, rather than dividing a total by hand at month end.

Can staff clock in only when they are at the work site?

Yes: Shiftelio accepts a check-in only when the phone is inside the GPS geofence you drew around that site, so a punch from home, or from the tea shop down the road, is never recorded as attendance. The harder question is which site, once you have more than one, and it is the question most apps get wrong. Most attendance apps that support several locations match a punch to whichever site centre is nearest. That works until two of your sites are close together, which in Indian cities is most of the time. A mall with three units, a market street, two floors of the same building, a depot and the office beside it.

Nearest-centre gets those wrong in a specific and irritating way. Suppose you have a large site with a 300 metre radius and a small one with a 100 metre radius, and their centres are 250 metres apart. A worker standing well inside the small site can easily be nearer to the centre of the large one. Nearest-wins attributes their whole day to the wrong branch, and it does it silently.

So we compare a different number: how far inside each fence the worker is, which is the distance to the centre minus that site radius. The most negative value wins, meaning the fence they are most clearly within. Where that ties, we prefer the smaller radius, because a tighter fence is a more specific statement about where somebody is. Where that still ties we prefer the site you marked primary, and after that we sort by identifier so the answer never depends on the order the sites happened to load in.

That last part sounds pedantic and is not. An attendance record that resolves differently on two different days for the same position is one you cannot defend when an employee disputes it. Determinism is the feature.

One more decision worth stating. If an employee has no sites configured at all, we record the punch and mark it as having no site, rather than attaching it to the nearest thing we can find. Reports then show a gap where a gap exists. Every alternative we considered produced a number that looked like data and was not.

Can a security agency track guards at client sites?

Yes: each client post is a location in Shiftelio with its own fence and its own radius, and a guard is matched to the post they are standing at rather than to a name they picked off a list. It is the hardest version of this problem, which is why it is a section here rather than a page of its own.

A manpower or security agency runs the same machinery described above under harder conditions. The locations are not your branches, they are your clients' premises. You may hold thirty of them and add two more next month. The roster changes on a phone call when somebody does not turn up. Most posts run through the night. And the person who cares most about whether the guard was actually there is not you, it is the client paying the invoice.

What changes, and what does not

Nothing in the matching logic changes. A client site is a location with coordinates and a radius, a guard is attached to the posts they are rostered to, and a check-in is matched to the post they are standing in. What changes is what you do with the record afterwards. Site-level hours stop being a management report and become the backing document for a bill, so two things matter more here than anywhere else on this page: that a night shift is recorded as one shift rather than two half days, and that a punch with no site configured says so instead of being quietly attached to the nearest post.

Onboarding a new client is adding a location

Drop a pin on the client's premises, set a radius that suits the site, attach the guards who will work it, and the first shift is recorded that night. There is no per-branch charge on any plan, so winning a contract does not change what you pay us until your headcount moves into the next band.

Where this is the wrong tool

This is attendance and payroll, not a guard management platform. There is no patrol or checkpoint scanning, no incident reporting, no visitor log, no client portal your customer logs into themselves, and no rostering engine that fills a vacant post for you. If your contracts are won and lost on patrol evidence, buy a guard tour system and run it alongside this. What you get here is the attendance record, the hours per site, and the wages that come out of them, which is the half most agencies are still doing on paper.

Questions owners ask about multiple locations

Can one employee be assigned to more than one location?

Yes. An employee can be attached to any number of sites, and check in at whichever one they are standing in that day. You do not create duplicate employee records per branch, and you do not move anybody between branches in the system when their week changes.

How does the app know which branch someone checked in at?

Each site has its own coordinates and its own radius. When a punch arrives we measure the distance to every site that employee is allowed to use and pick the one they are most clearly inside, then store that site on the attendance record. Nobody picks a branch from a dropdown, so nobody picks the wrong one.

What happens when two sites overlap?

Overlapping fences are common in a market or a mall, so the rule is deliberate rather than nearest-wins. We compare how far inside each fence the worker is, not how far from each centre, then break ties toward the smaller and more specific fence. The result is the same every time for the same position, which is what makes it defensible when somebody disputes a day.

Can staff move between sites during one shift?

Yes, and the day is recorded as a timeline rather than a single location. One session can hold several site segments with the minutes spent at each, so a supervisor covering three branches shows as three stretches on one day, not as one branch chosen at the moment they clocked in.

Do different sites get different radii?

Yes. A retail counter and a construction plot do not need the same tolerance, so radius is per site. Where none is set we use 100 metres.

What if a site has no geofence set up yet?

The punch is recorded and marked as having no site configured. It is not quietly attributed to the nearest branch and it is never shown as verified at zero metres. A blank you can see beats a number you cannot trust.

Do managers of one branch see other branches?

Only if you let them. Roles carry a scope, so a branch manager can be limited to their own locations and departments while you keep the view across everything. Owners always see the whole business.

Can a security agency use this for guard posts at client sites?

Yes, and it is the case this page was extended to cover. Each client site is a location with its own fence and its own radius, a guard is attached to every post they are rostered to, and the check-in is matched to the post they are standing at rather than to a name they picked off a list. Adding a new client is adding a location, not a new subscription, because locations are not billed per branch on any plan.

How do night shifts that cross midnight get recorded?

As one shift. A guard who starts at 8 in the evening and finishes at 8 the next morning is one session with one set of hours, not two half days split by the calendar. That matters for overtime and it matters more for the invoice, because a night post billed as two days is an argument with a client every month.

Can I give a client a report for just their own site?

Yes. Because minutes are attributed to a site as they happen rather than divided up at month end, you can pull what was worked at one location over a date range and hand it over. It is the same record you use to pay the guard, which is the point: one number, two audiences, nothing to reconcile.

Is there an extra charge per location?

No. Sites are not billed per branch and geofencing is not a premium tier. Every plan includes it, starting at 999 rupees a year.

Every location included. No per-branch charge.

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