Where a punch was made

A punch records where it happened when the device it was made on can say. The time log at /time has a column headed Where, next to Method, and it answers one question: was that person here.

Both ends of a shift are recorded, and the column shows both on their own lines, labelled In and Out to match the two timestamp columns beside them. A shift that has not ended yet shows an em dash against Out, because it has not been closed anywhere.

The three answers, and the fourth reading

They were here

At the shop. A position arrived and it is within 150 metres of the shop's own point.

They were somewhere else

A position arrived and it is further out: 300 m from the shop below a kilometre, rounded to the nearest ten metres, and 4.2 km from the shop above it.

Nothing arrived

Location not shared. No position came with the punch. This is the ordinary answer and it is said neutrally on purpose.

Nothing to measure from

Location shared. A position arrived but the shop has never set a point of its own. Set one on the Shop location card below the log.

Hovering a value gives the coordinates to six decimal places, the error bar the device reported — accurate to about 12 m — and, when the shop has no point, the sentence saying so. A ten-minute-old fix accurate to half a kilometre is different evidence from a fresh one accurate to eight metres, and an owner about to have a conversation about somebody's Tuesday should be able to see which they are holding.

Setting where the shop is

Distances are measured from a point on the shop's own record, and until one is saved every shared position reads as Location shared with no distance. Open /time on a device standing in the shop and press Set the shop's location from this device. Once it is set, the card prints the coordinates so you can check the shop is where you think it is, and Move the shop here replaces them.

The address on your record is not turned into a coordinate. Doing that means handing a business's address to an outside geocoder, and a distance label does not get to make that decision on a shop's behalf. A phone standing in the building is already in the room and is more accurate than a guess from a street number.

Setting the point needs the settings key rather than the time-clock key. It is shop configuration that the clock happens to read, and moving it would silently reclassify every punch in the log, so a shift lead who fixes other people's timesheets does not thereby get to move the shop.

What the person pressing the button sees

The device is asked for its position when the signed-in workspace loads, not when a punch button is pressed, so the answer has time to arrive before somebody uses a clock screen or opens the command palette. Whatever has arrived rides along on the punch itself; nothing is submitted twice and nothing is fetched afterwards.

When a position is in hand, the screen says so before the press: This device knows where it is; the punch will record it. on the clock screen, and This device knows where it is; a punch from here will record it. at the top of /my-day, where the punch controls are spread across a row per job. The global Punch the clock command uses that same reading from any screen. When there is none, nothing is said at all.

Switching jobs closes one entry and opens another, so the one position is written to both: it is where the first job was left and where the second was taken up, which is the same moment seen from two rows.