ClocDot
Everything you need to decide how your distributed team should clock in — the five common methods compared honestly, what an attendance record actually needs to contain, and where a tool like ClocDot fits.
Why remote attendance
Attendance used to be simple: people badged in on arrival, badged out on the way home, and HR pulled a report at month-end. Once remote and hybrid work became normal, that arrangement broke in three specific places:
Most teams patch this with a chat-group routine: post when you start, post when you finish. It works for a while. It stops working somewhere around thirty people, or the first month someone has to calculate overtime from it — the messages are scattered through a conversation, awkward to total up, and they do not amount to a proper attendance record.
The point of a remote attendance system is not surveillance. It is making the hours data automatic, trustworthy and traceable. Employees stop announcing themselves in a channel, managers stop chasing, HR stops reconciling by hand. For the remote employee it cuts both ways too — the time they actually worked is on the record, rather than depending on a manager happening to notice.
Comparison
Before choosing a system, it helps to see the whole field. None of these is universally better — the deciding factor is usually just whether your people report to the same place every day.
| Criterion | Punch card clock | Fingerprint / face | Chat message | App + GPS | WiFi / IP |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Equipment cost | Device plus ongoing consumables | Expensive per unit, one per site | None — uses existing tools | None — uses employees' own phones | None — uses existing network |
| Works from home | ✗ On-site only | ✗ On-site only | ✓ But on the honour system | ✓ Anywhere, with location tagged | ✗ Fails off the company network |
| Field work / multiple sites | ✗ One device per location | ✗ One device per location | △ Possible, but unverifiable | ✓ Multiple sites, adjustable radius | △ Each site needs its own range |
| Resistance to buddy punching | Low — hard to detect | High — biometrics are hard to fake | Low — anyone can post | Medium — coordinates and time cross-check | Medium — requires being on site |
| Completeness of the record | Paper — hard to search or back up | Depends on the device software | Scattered through conversations | Per-minute entries, exportable | Per-minute entries, exportable |
| Rollout effort | Low, but month-end is manual | Medium — install and enrol | Lowest, but the cleanup is worst | Low — employees open a link | Low, needs stable IPs |
| Best suited to | One site, small team, everyone on site | Facilities with strict access control | Very small, high-trust teams | Remote, hybrid, field and multi-site | Confirming attendance on office days |
And the honest limits of GPS: continuous positioning drains battery; accuracy degrades to tens of metres in basements, inside industrial buildings or among high-rises; and some employees are legitimately uneasy about their employer knowing where they are. So ClocDot takes a single reading at the moment of the punch rather than tracking through the day, and when positioning fails it flags the punch instead of blocking it — the record still gets made, and a human decides what it means. In practice, combining GPS with WiFi verification (network on office days, coordinates on remote days) tends to be the most balanced setup.
Compliance
One of the most common questions we get from overseas HR teams: "our staff work from home and we measure output, so do we still need to track hours?" Under Taiwan's Labor Standards Act, yes — record-keeping obligations do not disappear because the work happens off-site. Working from home, working remotely and working in the field all still need records.
As a buying checklist, that is three questions: is the record granular enough, does it survive long enough, and can the employee retrieve it?
This is a general summary for orientation only and is not legal advice. Actual obligations and how they apply to your company are determined by the Ministry of Labor and your local labor authority. For your specific situation, please consult a qualified professional or your local labor bureau.
How it works
Each punch carries a timestamp and coordinates, compared against your registered office sites, and is tagged Office, Remote or field automatically. The goal is not monitoring people — it is that Office and Remote hours separate themselves, so nobody has to self-report at month-end.
You do not. ClocDot is a PWA — employees open a link and add it to the home screen. No app store, no MDM, no IT project. It works on phones, tablets and desktops, keeps working offline, and syncs the queued punches when the connection comes back.
Hours, break deductions and leave balances are calculated as punches come in, not reconstructed at month-end. The monthly CSV carries daily detail and the Office / Remote split, and opens cleanly in Excel without encoding problems.
Who it's for
One-line test: if anyone on your team is not in the same place every day, remote attendance is relevant. Whether that is fully distributed, two days a week in the office, or a sales team permanently on the road, the underlying problem is the same — no single device can be next to everybody.
No physical office, or staff spread across cities. Punch locations are recorded so distributed attendance stays manageable, and people working from home never have to report in manually.
Some days in the office, some days at home. The split is detected and counted separately without asking anyone to label their own days.
Staff in different countries and time zones. Punches record in the employee's local time, and exports can be presented in either local or headquarters time.
People who go straight to a client site instead of the office. GPS records where and when, so there is no badge to come back and press.
Free for 5 people or fewer, without the configuration burden of a full HR suite. Once approved, the whole team can start the same day.
Get started
Company name and a contact email. No credit card. We notify you once the account is approved.
Enter your office addresses (geocoded automatically), working hours, break times and leave rules.
Staff open the link on their phone and add it to the home screen. The first punch asks for location permission.
Pricing
Attendance tooling is normally billed one of three ways, and the cost structures differ a lot:
Time clocks and biometric readers. Buying outright looks cheap until you add consumables, servicing, a unit per site, and the hidden labour of month-end totalling.
How most cloud HR platforms charge, usually with a minimum seat count. Comprehensive, but small teams often end up paying for modules they never open.
Free forever for teams of 5 or fewer — no time limit, no credit card. Apply now and once approved, your first 6 months are free.
For remote and hybrid teams the maths is simpler, because there is no hardware to buy at all. The number actually worth calculating is the time someone spends every month tidying up hours — chasing missing punches, working out overtime, assembling the report. That usually costs more than the software, and unlike hardware, it recurs every month.
Larger headcount or an unusual setup? Tell us about your team and we will work it out together.
FAQ
A traditional time clock is tied to a physical device or the company network, so employees have to be on site. Remote clock-in runs on the employee's own phone or laptop, so it works from home, from a client site or from another country — and each punch is tagged with where it came from.
Yes. Obligations do not disappear because the work happens off-site — records still need to be logged daily and to the minute, and retained for a number of years. Reporting in a chat group is generally not enough, because those messages are scattered through a conversation rather than kept as a reviewable record. See the compliance section. General information only, not legal advice.
Yes — employees see their complete punch history and hours after logging in, without filing a request with HR. Records live in the cloud, so they survive a replaced laptop, a broken time clock or a lost paper card, and HR can export the full history as CSV whenever it is needed.
Yes, and nothing needs replacing, because remote clock-in runs on devices your staff already own. Setup means registering office locations and working hours, then asking employees to add the PWA to their home screen. Most teams start the same day, and you can run one team in parallel before switching everyone.
Yes, and it is the most common hybrid setup: on office days require a connection to the company network, so the punch confirms someone is on site; on remote days use GPS to record the location and tag the punch as Remote. Both sources are stored per punch, and Office and Remote hours stay separate in the export.
Teams of 5 or fewer are free forever, with no time limit and no credit card required. Apply now and once your account is approved, your first 6 months are free.
Free for teams of 5 or fewer. No credit card, no spam.
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