How crew check in and check out of site in Foreman

When your business records hours by checking in and out, your crew tap Check in on the Home screen when they arrive and Check out when they leave. Checking out saves a site diary entry for that shift straight away, with the exact time on site as its hours. There's no timesheet to fill in afterwards.

This is for Site Crew and Site Managers. Admins don't see the check-in card. It only appears once an Admin has switched the business to checking in and out, which is covered in choosing how crew record hours.

How to check in

1. Open Foreman. The check-in card sits at the top of Home.
2. Pick the site under Site. It reads Pick a site until you choose one, and Check in stays greyed out until you do. If you got here by scanning that site's own QR code, the site is already picked.
3. Tap Check in. Your phone's location is read at that moment, and only then.
4. The card changes to show the site, the time you checked in and a running total of time on site, with a Check out button.

The first time at a site, you sign the induction

Every site asks for its induction once per person. The first time you tap Check in at a site, Foreman opens that site's induction instead, with your name and contact number already filled in. Read the documents, fill in the rest, sign, and tap Sign induction & check in. That one tap signs the induction and checks you in. After that, check-ins at that site go straight through. For what's actually in the induction, see what workers see when they scan.

How to check out

1. On Home, tap Check out.
2. Your diary entry is saved first, before anything else is asked. You land on the Checked out screen showing the site, your start and finish times and the hours, for example 6:24 am to 3:02 pm, 8h 38m, with Saved to the site diary.
3. If you've got a minute before you jump in the ute, fill in Add what you did. Write a Description and tap Add photo to take photos.
4. Tap Save to add them to the entry, or Done to leave it as it is. Nothing is lost either way, and you can add a description and photos later from the entry itself.

The hours are worked out from your two taps, to the minute. There's no hours slider on an entry made by checking out, and you can't change those hours yourself. If they're wrong, your Site Manager or an Admin corrects them, and the change shows in the entry's history.

The On site, Off site and Missing geolocation check

If your business has Geolocation turned on, every check-in and every check-out records whether your phone was at the site:

• On site: the phone was within range of the site address.
• Off site: it wasn't. It still saves, and your Site Manager can see it was made away from the site.
• Missing geolocation: no location reading, because permission was denied or there was no fix indoors. It still saves.

Foreman never blocks a check-in for being off site. It records what happened and leaves the call to your Site Manager. That's also why the QR code isn't the proof: a photo of a QR code can be scanned from anywhere, but it would show as Off site. With Geolocation off, check-ins record the time only.

Forgot to check out? The 12-hour auto-close

A shift still open 12 hours after check-in is closed automatically. Foreman doesn't invent a finish time. The diary entry for that shift is marked Auto-closed after 12h and shows "Hours missing: no check-out" instead of a number. It adds nothing to hours totals in Foreman, and its hours cell is blank in the CSV export, until your Site Manager or an Admin sets the real hours. That way a forgotten tap never turns into a 12-hour day on an invoice.

Good to know

• One site at a time. To move to another site, check out of the first one, then check in at the next. You can't check in anywhere else while a shift is open.
• Checked in at the wrong site? Check out, then check in at the right one. Your Site Manager can fix the hours on the wrong entry.
• Forgot to check in at all? Open Site diaries and tap Log site diary to enter the day by hand. That entry is marked No check-in. If you tap it while you're still checked in, you get "Check out first to log this shift." instead of the form, so the same hours aren't counted twice.
• If the site is archived while you're checked in, you're checked out automatically at that moment.
• Times follow the site's timezone, taken from the project address, so crews working across states see the right local times.
• You need signal to check in or out. There's no offline mode.
• Couldn't check in because your phone was dead? Your Site Manager can log the shift for you.

Every checked-out shift lands in Foreman's site diary, so an Admin or the project's Site Manager can export the hours as a CSV for payroll or invoicing.