Time theft and geofenced clock-on, plainly explained

"Time theft" is a harsh name for something that's usually casual rather than criminal: paid minutes that weren't worked. Nobody plans it. It accumulates anyway, a few minutes at a time, multiplied by every shift of every week.

Where the minutes go

• Early clock-ons. Rostered at 9:00, bus arrives 8:43, clocks on, has a coffee. Seventeen paid minutes, every shift. One person doing this five shifts a week is over an hour of paid non-work.
• Late clock-offs. Shift ends 5:00, chat till 5:20, clock off on the way out.
• Buddy punching. "Clock me on, I'm five minutes away." On a shared terminal or a paper sheet, there is nothing to stop it.
• Generous memory. Paper timesheets filled in at week's end drift in the writer's favour — not dishonesty, just how memory works.

Run your own number: minutes per shift you think leak, times shifts per week, times the loaded hourly rate, times 52. For most venues the result is a wage rise nobody agreed to.

What a geofenced time clock actually does

A geofence is a circle drawn on a map around the venue. A geofenced time clock checks, at the moment someone taps "clock on", whether their phone is inside that circle. In Rostru's case: the check happens once at clock-on and once at clock-off, nothing runs in the background, and the system keeps one point, never a trail. The server stamps the time with its own clock, so the record doesn't depend on the phone's.

That one mechanism closes most of the list:

• Buddy punching dies — you can't clock on from the bus, and you can't clock on as someone else from your own phone.
• Early arrivals can clock on, but the record shows the rostered start and the actual tap, so pay follows policy ("paid from rostered time") instead of following the bus timetable.
• Late clock-offs become visible exceptions for a manager to approve or query, rather than silent payroll.
• Memory stops being the source — the record was made at the moment, at the place.

What it doesn't fix, and what it must respect

A geofence can't tell whether someone inside the fence is working. Slow afternoons, long smoke breaks, phones behind the bar — still management's job. And location is personal information: staff should be told exactly what's collected, when, and for how long, before the first clock-on. Australian workplace surveillance rules expect notice and purpose; a system that checks position only at the tap, keeps it briefly, and says so plainly, is the respectful shape of this. (Ours keeps the point for 90 days and the policy is on our security page.)

The payoff isn't catching anyone — after the first week, there's rarely anything to catch. It's that labour cost becomes a number you can trust, because the hours behind it were real.