A construction site is not an office. There is no reception desk, often no stable WiFi, and the workforce arrives at different entry points across a large area. Workers wear gloves. Their hands are dirty. They move between multiple sites in a single day. Any time-tracking method that ignores these conditions will fail within two weeks of deployment.
Methods that work
QR codes at site entrances are the most practical solution for most sites. Print the code on weatherproof laminate and fix it at the gate. Any smartphone with a camera scans it. The check-in runs on mobile data, not site WiFi. Setup takes 10 minutes per site, costs close to nothing, and works in rain and mud. Workers who share smartphones - less common but it happens - can scan sequentially; the system records who checked in, not just that someone did.
GPS check-in removes hardware from the equation entirely. A supervisor or the worker opens the app, taps check-in, and the system records the GPS coordinates alongside the timestamp. Office staff can verify that the coordinates match the site location. This method works for remote sites with no fixed entry point and for workers who drive directly to a location rather than entering through a gate.
Supervisor roll-call via app is the most reliable fallback for crews. The site supervisor opens a crew list on a tablet or phone, marks each worker present or absent, and submits the record. It takes 3 minutes for a crew of 10. The supervisor carries the record-keeping responsibility rather than placing it on each individual worker.
Methods that fail on construction sites
Biometric fingerprint scanners require clean, dry fingers. Construction workers do not have clean, dry fingers. The scanners also fail in cold weather, as the skin surface changes enough to affect recognition rates. Beyond the practicality problem, shared scanners on high-traffic sites create hygiene concerns.
RFID access cards work in controlled environments. On a large construction site, cards get shared, lost, or left in site offices. A worker who forgets their card asks a colleague to badge them in. The resulting attendance record is inaccurate from the start.
Paper timesheets are the default for many construction operations and produce the most errors. Site managers write attendance from memory at the end of the shift. Workers fill in Friday timesheets on Monday morning. The data reflects what people remember, not what happened. Disputes over hours worked become word-against-word.
Multi-site workers
A construction worker who moves between two sites in one day needs to check in and out at each location. The time-tracking system must accommodate multiple location records per worker per day without treating the second check-in as an error. This is a common failure point in systems built for single-site office use.
Compliance in construction
Construction workers in most EU countries fall under sector-specific collective agreements with defined overtime thresholds, shift premiums, and travel time rules. Some agreements count travel between sites as working time. The time-tracking record must capture actual arrival and departure times at each site to support accurate overtime calculation and defend against wage disputes.
Ireland's Construction Industry Federation and similar bodies in Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain have sector agreements that specify record-keeping requirements. An auditable digital record is the only defensible position in an inspection.
Rezano's mobile-first check-in system supports QR, GPS, and supervisor roll-call - with multi-site logging built in, so a worker on two sites in one day generates one clean daily record.