Staff check-in gives teachers and admins a simple clock-in / clock-out for their own work day, recorded against your school’s location. It is off by default — you switch it on and set the campus location before anyone sees it.
This is separate from child attendance, which lives under Attendance.
Turning it on
- Open Admin Dashboard → School Settings → Staff Check-In
- Switch on Enable staff check-in (“When on, teachers and admins can check in and out from the app”)
- Set your campus location:
- Latitude and Longitude of the school
- Radius (meters) — how far from that point counts as “at school”. Default 150m, which covers a building plus its entrance and parking without covering the neighbourhood.
- Accuracy ceiling (meters) — how precise the device’s location fix must be. Default 100m. This rejects vague fixes (cell-tower or stale wifi positions) while comfortably passing a normal phone GPS reading.
Until you set a location, the feature stays hidden from staff — you can’t accidentally half-enable it.
If your school genuinely can’t use GPS, you can turn the location requirement off; check-ins will then be recorded from anywhere.
What staff see
Once enabled, teachers and admins get a check-in screen with four actions:
- Check in — starts the work day
- Break start / Break end
- Check out — ends the shift
The order is enforced: you can’t start a break before checking in, can’t check out while on a break, and can’t check in twice. A check-in after a check-out simply opens a second shift on the same day — split shifts are normal and fully supported.
Every event records the time on the server, not the device clock, so a staff member changing their phone’s time changes nothing.
The location gate
The action only goes through if the device reports a position inside your radius, at or better than your accuracy ceiling. If location permission is off, the device can’t get a fix, or the fix is too vague, the action is blocked with a clear message. This applies on iOS, Android, and web alike — turning location off doesn’t get you a free pass.
Staff can only ever see and record their own events. There is no “who’s in today” view for peers.
Reviewing and fixing a staff member’s record
People forget to check out, double-tap break, or arrive before their phone gets a signal. You can fix all of it.
- Open Admin Dashboard → Staff
- Tap the staff member
- Open their Attendance
From here you can, for any day:
- Edit an event’s time — for a check-in recorded a few minutes late
- Add an event with an explicit time — for a forgotten check-out
- Delete an event — for a duplicate tap
Events you add as an admin skip the GPS check (you’re fixing a record, not clocking in) and are marked as admin-entered. Every edit records who made it and when, and deletes are soft — the audit trail stays intact.
Open shifts
A shift with no check-out is left open, not auto-closed at midnight. The day is flagged as incomplete in the drill-down so you can see it and enter the real time. This is deliberate: a guessed check-out time is worse than a visible gap.
One rule to know: you can’t edit your own record
An admin can edit any other staff member’s events, but is blocked from editing their own — the same guard that stops an admin deactivating their own account. It keeps the record meaningful.
Practical consequence: if your school has only one admin, there’s no in-school way to correct that admin’s own attendance. A second admin solves it; otherwise the super admin is the escape hatch. Worth knowing before you roll this out school-wide.
What’s not in v1
- No notifications — nobody is alerted about a late arrival, and staff aren’t notified when you edit their record.
- No school-wide daily grid — you review one staff member at a time from the staff roster.
Both are natural additions later; neither needs the data to be recorded differently, so anything you capture now stays useful.
Rolling it out
A sequence that works well:
- Enable it and set the location, but tell staff it’s a trial for the first week.
- Check the drill-downs after a few days — you’ll quickly see whether your radius is too tight (people blocked at the gate) or too loose.
- Widen the radius rather than dropping the accuracy ceiling if there’s trouble; the ceiling is what keeps the record honest.