Guard attendance for security agencies: proving the guard was at the post

For a security agency, attendance is the product. Clients pay for a guard at the gate for every hour of every shift. When a client asks "was someone at the gate at 3 a.m.?", the agency needs an answer it can show, not a register entry.

Why guard attendance is harder than office attendance

• Many sites, few supervisors. Guards are spread across client locations, and a field officer can visit each one only now and then.
• Night shifts. Most missed hours happen between midnight and morning, when nobody is checking.
• Reliefs and doubles. One guard covering two posts, or leaving early when the relief is late, is common and rarely recorded.
• Registers at the gate. The book stays at the post, and it can be filled in by anyone.
• Billing disputes. Clients deduct from invoices when they can't verify deployment. Without proof, the agency loses the argument.

What a verifiable guard punch looks like

A punch a client will accept answers four things: who punched, where, when, and whether it could have been faked.

1. Each client site is its own geofence. Set a radius around the gate, or draw the boundary for large campuses and factories. A check-in from outside the site is blocked or flagged.
2. The guard's own registered phone. A guard can't sign in on a colleague's phone, and the phone signs every punch with a key in its secure hardware.
3. Live face check. Two random liveness steps plus a server-side face match stop photos and stand-ins.
4. Server time, not phone time. The time on the punch is the server's, so changing the phone clock does nothing.

Guards without smartphones

Not every guard has a suitable phone. For fixed posts with several guards, a shared kiosk tablet at the post works better: guards punch by face, no personal phone needed, and the kiosk itself is bound to that site. Kiosk punches can be marked for review so a supervisor sees them separately.

Night shifts and dead zones

Remote sites often have weak networks at night. The app should save the punch on the phone, with the face check already done and the punch signed, and sync it when the network returns. Mark these offline punches for review by default, so they're accepted only after someone has looked at them.

Reports clients actually want

Clients rarely want raw data. What helps in a monthly review:

• Deployment by site and shift: guards scheduled versus guards present
• Late check-ins and early check-outs per post
• Flagged punches and how each was resolved
• Hours by guard for the billing period, matching the invoice

When the invoice and the attendance report come from the same data, deductions become rare.

A setup that works in a week

1. Add every client site as an office with its own geofence.
2. Add guards and assign each one to their usual site and shift.
3. Turn on device binding and the face check for all guards; put kiosks at posts with shared duty.
4. Set "outside geofence" to block and "offline punch" to review.
5. Have field officers check the review queue every morning.

PunchMe is built for exactly this: per-site geofences, face-verified phone punches, kiosks for shared posts and payroll from the same attendance. See the setup for security agencies.