Time Tracking for Techs Who Work at Client Sites

In most hourly jobs, the question is simply how many hours someone worked. In IT consulting, the question is usually which client site someone worked at, since that determines which invoice the hours land on. A technician who splits a day between two clients needs those hours split accurately too, not lumped into one daily total that has to be reconstructed from memory at the end of the week.

Buddy Punch's GPS geofencing can restrict a clock-in to a specific radius around a client's address, which is useful for confirming a technician was actually where the invoice says they were. Combined with photo-on-punch, it creates a record that holds up if a client ever questions a billed hour. For a firm that's had a client dispute a timesheet before, that verification is worth more than almost any other feature.

It's less built for juggling which technician gets dispatched where. That dispatch and scheduling layer usually lives in a separate field-service or ticketing tool, with Buddy Punch just capturing the hours once someone's on site.

Deputy is stronger on the scheduling side: assigning technicians to specific client sites or on-call rotations, letting them see their upcoming assignments, and swapping coverage when someone's out. For a firm with a handful of recurring client contracts, each needing a technician on a set day each week, Deputy's shift structure maps naturally onto that pattern.

Its site-level GPS verification isn't as granular as Buddy Punch's geofencing, so a firm mainly worried about proving hours to a skeptical client may still want that feature specifically.

The operational habit that matters most here is requiring a punch out and back in when a technician moves between client sites, rather than one long shift split manually afterward. A single continuous punch covering two client visits forces someone to guess how the hours split, usually after the fact and usually in the technician's favor by rounding. A punch per site removes the guesswork and gives each client an accurate number.

A geofence that's drawn too tight around a client's building creates its own problem: a technician standing in the parking lot or the lobby can't clock in because the app says they're outside the boundary. Set the radius wide enough to cover the whole site, including parking, before rolling it out to the team, and test it from a technician's actual phone rather than trusting the address lookup to be accurate on the first try.

It's also worth deciding upfront how the firm handles a technician who genuinely can't get a GPS lock, a basement server room being the classic case, so there's a fallback that doesn't turn into a fight over whether the hours were real.

Use this sequence for a smooth geofence rollout:

1. Draw each client geofence wide enough to cover the whole site, including the parking lot and lobby, so technicians aren't locked out of clocking in.
2. Test the geofence from a technician's actual phone at the site before rolling it out to the whole team.
3. Require a punch out and back in whenever a technician moves between client sites, instead of splitting one long shift by hand afterward.
4. Confirm with the vendor how punches behave with weak signal, since server rooms and basements are where a missed sync is most likely.
5. Explain the rollout as billing accuracy, since verified punches protect technicians as much as the firm when a client questions an invoice.

Field technicians sometimes read a new geofenced clock-in as a sign of distrust, especially if the firm has never had this level of tracking before. The framing that tends to land better is billing accuracy, not surveillance: explaining that verified punches protect the technician just as much as the firm when a client questions an invoice, since the record shows exactly when work started and ended rather than leaving it to a client's recollection of when the technician arrived.

A short rollout period where technicians can see their own punch history and flag anything wrong, before it's tied to actual payroll, also helps build trust in the system before it starts affecting anyone's paycheck. Pairing that rollout with a plain explanation of how the geofence radius was set, and who to contact if a legitimate punch gets rejected, heads off most of the early complaints before they turn into a wider grievance that lands on the office manager's desk instead of getting resolved on the spot.