From signup to your first scan
Five things have to be true before a face scan writes a time log. Miss any one and the scanner refuses the punch — politely, but without telling you which link is missing. Here they are in order.
- 1
Add your employees
Employees live under Employees in the dashboard. Give each one a name and the area they work at. The area matters more than it looks — a scanner only recognises people assigned to its own area.
Open Employees - 2
Register a face for each one
Open an employee and press Register face. This is the step that is most often missed, and nothing else works without it: a person with no registered face is simply not in the system the scanner searches. You can do this from the dashboard on a laptop, or from the app.
Open Employees - 3
Give them a schedule
Build a shift under Schedule Templates and assign it. A scan outside the scheduled window is refused, so an employee with no schedule cannot clock in at all. Set the grace periods here too — how early or late a punch may be and still count.
Open Schedule Templates - 4
Sign the scanner in
Each area has its own username and password, under Areas. Open the scanner on the tablet or phone by the door and sign in once with those. The device stays signed in, so this is a one-time job per device — not per shift, and not per person.
Open Areas - 5
Scan
Anyone whose face is registered, who is assigned to that area, and who is inside their scheduled window can now clock in and out on that device. Their punches appear under Attendance straight away, with the photo and — if the device shares it — the location.
Open Attendance
When the scanner says no
Every refusal names what it checked. This is what each one means in practice.
- Face not recognised.
- No registered face matched. Usually step 2 was never done for this person. It can also happen in poor light, or if their appearance has changed a lot since the reference photo — re-register the face to fix that.
- Not an active employee of this area.
- The face matched someone, but that person is not assigned to the area this device is signed in as — or they are marked resigned. Check the employee's area, or sign the device in as the right one.
- Current time is outside any scheduled period…
- They are trying to clock in outside their shift. The message lists the scheduled periods. Either the schedule is wrong, or the grace period is tighter than how the site really works.
- You already have a TIMEIN for this period.
- That punch is already recorded. They are clocked in — nothing is wrong and nothing is lost.
- Already logged time in a moment ago.
- The same face, twice within five minutes. Almost always someone checking that the first scan worked. It did.
- No face detected. / More than one face in view.
- The camera needs exactly one face. Step back so the face fills the frame, and make sure nobody is standing behind them.
Letting people clock in from their own phone
Separate from the scanner, an employee can be given a login for the employee portal and clock in from their own phone. It is off by default — floor staff should still have to be on site — and is turned on per person, under Self-service time logging on their profile. They get a username and a temporary password to change on first use.
Still stuck?
Tell us what the screen says and we will work it out with you. You do not need to be signed in to ask.
Contact support