Check-in that rides the sign already at the gate.

Crew identify with a four-digit PIN they set themselves from their phone portal, stored hashed. Once the PIN is known, the check-in form never asks for their name or phone number again — those fields are skipped entirely for employees, because the company already knows them. That one decision is most of why the thing gets used.

Subcontractors are the harder half. They have no account and never will, so the first check-in takes phone number, name, company and a selfie, and the phone remembers them for next time. Phone numbers are normalised to the last ten digits, so the same person typing it three different ways is still one person. Crews are asked for a headcount, so six guys arriving in one truck count as six people on site, not one. The company picker offers only real subcontractors — the vendor list stays out of it.

What's required is configurable per job, over a company-wide default: a selfie on one job and not another, a phone number for subs but not crew, whatever the site or the general contractor demands. A busy renovation and a secured municipal site don't need the same paperwork.

One quiet detail worth naming, because it's the kind of thing that goes wrong elsewhere: check-in photos are stored under their own namespace, and the submit path refuses any image that didn't come from it. A receipt photo can never be passed off as a check-in selfie.

Each job can carry a geofence — a point and a radius, geocoded from the job's address when you save it. Nothing is polled in the background and nothing tracks anyone's phone between check-ins; the location is read at the moment someone presses the button.

Three ways the right job gets picked, in order of confidence:

• The sign says so. The QR code at the gate belongs to that job. No ambiguity to resolve.
• GPS ranks the jobs. Open the page cold and the nearest jobs are offered first, closest at the top, with the distance shown. On a site that's a few metres out, the first row is right.
• Nearest fence wins. Where fences overlap — two phases of the same development, a yard next door to a job — the closest fence takes it rather than the first one found.

The yard is a geofence too, which is what makes the first drive of the morning classifiable: see travel pay, where a trip ending inside a job's fence pays everyone who checked in there.

The office view is the question a project manager actually asks: who was on which site yesterday, and for how long? A day view lays each person out as segments — time on a job from their in and out pairs, gaps between sites — so a disputed timesheet is answered by scrolling, not by phoning three foremen.

Because check-in wrote the clock, the same day feeds the timesheets the office already approves and the payroll workbook it already exports. And the crew list from a day's check-ins pre-fills the end-of-day daily log, which syncs to Autodesk as a Daily Report — the foreman confirms a crew list that's already there instead of reconstructing one at 6pm.

Both languages are first-class throughout, and the phone screen carries a back bar on every step, because the fastest way to lose a check-in is a dead end. If you run counter locations as well as sites, the same time clock and scheduling engine drives workforce and store ops; the construction shape of it is on the construction page, and receipts ride the very same QR — see receipt capture.