The deskless rollout playbook.

The sequence

1. 01Before you start

   Decide what you are actually solving

   Most failed attendance rollouts are solving two problems at once — payroll accuracy and trust — and only telling people about one of them. Write down which one is driving this, because it determines what you switch on.

   • ✓List your sites and roughly how many workers clock in at each.
   • ✓Decide whether you need identity proof at the gate (face), location proof (geofence), or just a reliable timestamp (kiosk PIN or app).
   • ✓Agree who approves corrections. Somebody has to, and it cannot be the worker.
   • ✓Decide what you will tell your workforce, and when. Earlier is cheaper.
2. 02Day 1 — about an hour

   Set up the workspace

   This part genuinely is fast. It is the only part that is, and the rest of this page exists because the marketing for products like this tends to stop here.

   • ✓Create the account and add your sites, departments and shift patterns.
   • ✓Import your employee list. A CSV of name, employee ID, phone and department is enough to start.
   • ✓Set your leave policy and holiday calendar.
   • ✓Add the managers who will approve timesheets and leave.
3. 03Day 2–3 — procurement

   Get the hardware to the site

   If you are using kiosks, this is the step with a real-world lead time, and it is the one that determines your go-live date. There is no proprietary hardware and no buyback contract — any of these tablets works.

   • ✓One Android tablet per gate. The tested reference kit is a Lenovo Tab M10, Samsung Galaxy Tab A8 or a Xiaomi/Redmi Pad — all available under ₹15,000.
   • ✓A wall or floor mount, and mains power at the mount point. Tablets stay plugged in; there is no PoE or industrial wiring requirement.
   • ✓Reliable Wi-Fi or a SIM at the gate. Punches queue offline and replay when the connection returns, but setup itself needs a connection.
   • ✓Budget a spare tablet per three gates. Screens get broken on factory floors.
4. 04Day 3–4

   Pair the kiosks and draw the geofences

   Kiosk pairing is per-site and happens once. Geofences are drawn per site and are worth doing carefully — a boundary that is too tight generates rejected punches and a queue of angry corrections on day one.

   • ✓Install the HelloTime Attend app on the tablet and scan the site's pairing QR code. The tablet switches into the kiosk shell on next launch.
   • ✓Lock the tablet down with Android's Device Policy Controller and Single-App Mode so the kiosk cannot be exited.
   • ✓Draw each site boundary on the map. Include the gate and the immediate approach, not just the building footprint.
   • ✓Walk the boundary with a phone and test a punch at the edge before you rely on it.
5. 05Week 1–2 — the long pole

   Enrol your workforce

   This is the step that takes real time, and it scales with headcount rather than with sites. Every worker who will use face clock-in has to physically enrol once, and someone has to be there when they do.

   • ✓Face enrolment (early-access pilot) is a per-worker, in-person step. Budget roughly two minutes per worker plus queue time, and plan it around shift changes.
   • ✓Enrol in batches by shift, not all at once. A single 200-person queue on a Monday morning will make the product the villain.
   • ✓Have a fallback ready from day one. Not every enrolment succeeds — poor lighting, damaged fingerprints on legacy readers, workers who decline. Manager-approved PIN clock-in exists for exactly this.
   • ✓Record who has enrolled and who has not, and chase the gap before go-live rather than after.
6. 06Week 2 — before go-live

   Tell your team, properly

   The single largest cause of attendance-rollout failure is not technical. It is a workforce that finds out it is being monitored rather than being told. This costs one meeting and it is the highest-return step on this page.

   • ✓Send everyone the employee privacy page before the first clock-in, not after.
   • ✓Say plainly what is switched on and what is not. If you are not using screenshots or app tracking, say so — it is a genuinely reassuring sentence and it is free.
   • ✓Explain the correction process. People accept being measured far more readily when they know how to fix a mistake.
   • ✓Name the person who answers questions. An unowned rollout gets rumours instead of questions.
7. 07Week 2–3

   Run one site in parallel first

   Run the new system alongside whatever you use today for one full pay cycle at one site. You are looking for the gap between the two, not for zero exceptions.

   • ✓Pick your most cooperative site, not your worst one. You are testing the process, not stress-testing it.
   • ✓Reconcile the first week manually against your existing register and investigate every difference.
   • ✓Watch the anomaly queue. Repeated flags usually mean a boundary or shift pattern is wrong, not that people are cheating.
   • ✓Only then roll out to the remaining sites, one at a time.

Start with the free plan

You can set up sites, shifts and your employee list, and run a pilot gate, before you pay anything. If your rollout is large enough that the trial window is the constraint, tell us — that is a scheduling problem, not a sales objection.