UK-built · CDM · CIS · MTD
Every punch already carries a place and a time. The map draws them, on every site you have running, coloured by job, so a no-show is visible by eight rather than reported at four.
Site attendance is the record of who was physically on a site, and when. Once a workforce is spread across more than two or three jobs it answers three questions that a weekly plan cannot: whether the people you allocated actually turned up, how many are inside the hoarding at this moment, and who is unaccounted for if the site has to be cleared.
Where is everybody is Unibuild's live map of that record. Operatives scan a QR poster to start their shift, the punch carries a location and a server-written time, and the map plots the day's scans across every project you have running, each in its own colour with a headcount on it. It reads on a laptop and it has a television view for the office wall. It is built from scans and nothing else: no phone is followed between them.
Those are two different numbers, and the gap between them is where the money goes.
Each project running today sits on the map where it actually is, drawn on Google Maps, carrying the number of people who have scanned onto it. Zoom out to the whole company, or in until you are looking at one plot.
Open a site and it lists who scanned onto it today, with the time our server wrote and the photograph taken at the punch. A number on a wall is reassuring. A name is what you can act on.
The labour run holds who should be where this week. The map holds who is. Put side by side, the difference is a short list of names, and it is on screen before the first tea break.
Wind it back to a date and the map redraws as that day stood. Which is what a client asking about last Tuesday needs, and what an investigation asks for after something has happened on a site.
Any system can tell you what you planned, and any turnstile can tell you how many came through it. Holding the two against each other, by name, before the morning is spent, is the part offices do by telephone.
The map is the second number. The labour run is the first. Because both sit on the same records, the subtraction happens without anybody doing it, and what lands in front of the contracts manager is not a dashboard but a short list of people to ring.
Seven names at ten past eight is a morning's problem. The same seven at four o'clock is a day of a gang's time, and on most jobs that is the more expensive number by a distance.
The seven have names on them. That is the entire point of the map.
Bring a Tuesday and we will map it.
The quickest way to judge this is your own headcount on your own sites, laid out the way your office would want to read it at ten past seven, rather than a description of one.Switch to the television view and the map redraws for a screen nobody is standing at. The headcount on each site becomes the largest thing on it, the interface furniture goes away, and the room can answer its own question on the way past.
Type steps up, the counts carry the weight, and everything that exists to be clicked stops competing with everything that exists to be read. A board is not a page with bigger text on it. The two are read from different distances by people with different reasons for looking.
Nobody has to refresh it, because nobody is standing there. The arrivals appear as they happen, which is what makes it worth glancing at twice: a screen showing half past seven at nine o'clock is furniture, and everybody in the office learns to stop reading it within a week.
Access in Unibuild is granted per person and per page, and whether somebody can see hourly rates at all is its own separate setting. So the television is signed into an account that sees sites, names and headcounts, and does not see pay. That is worth deciding before the screen goes up rather than after somebody notices.
The labour week and the project programme already run as TV boards, and a slideshow can rotate this map in alongside them, each one live rather than a captured image. Most offices end up with the map first thing and the week for the rest of the day.
Most of this market is vague about the difference, so it is worth being exact. Everything on the map is a moment the operative created by pointing a camera at a poster. There is nothing else in it.
A place is recorded when somebody scans to start or end a shift. Nothing runs between the two. Close the app, put the phone in a pocket, drive to the merchant, drive home: there is no second reading, because none is ever taken. The map is a set of pins where scans happened, and it cannot be anything more than that.
A punch made away from the site is not rejected and nobody is stopped from working by it. The location is shown to whoever approves the timesheet, as a map link, and the judgement stays with the person who knows why the van was at the other job at seven. Adding a distance check against your own boundaries is straightforward tailoring if you decide you want one. It is not the default, and we would rather you chose it deliberately.
Not read from the handset, so a punch cannot be back-dated by changing a phone clock. The office sees it at the same instant the operative sees the confirm screen, and every entry behind it is append-only, carrying the person, the time, the device and the IP address.
A person points a camera at a poster on the welfare unit door, takes a photograph of themselves and presses a button. There is no version of this that happens without them knowing. Covert monitoring is a different thing entirely, with a far higher legal bar, and this is not it and is not built to become it.
AWS eu-west-2. Data does not leave the UK. AES-256 at rest and TLS 1.3 in transit. Unibuild is ICO registered and holds Cyber Essentials Plus. ISO 27001 is in progress rather than held, and we will not describe it as anything else until we have been audited.
We hold the record. Deciding you have a lawful basis for collecting it, telling your workforce plainly what is collected, and keeping it no longer than you need are yours, and any vendor implying otherwise is selling you a comfort they cannot deliver. What software can honestly do is make each of those easy to evidence when somebody asks. The four steps below are what that looks like.
Location attached to a named person is personal data, so UK GDPR applies to it. These are the four things the Information Commissioner expects a UK employer to have settled before monitoring starts, in the order they are usually settled.
For attendance the usual basis is legitimate interests, which obliges you to write a short assessment weighing what you gain against what the operative gives up. It is a page, not a project.
Consent is rarely the right answer between an employer and a worker, because consent has to be freely given and a job is not a free choice. A supplier who tells you to get everyone to tick a box has not thought about it.
The ICO expects a data protection impact assessment where monitoring is systematic, and location data makes one more likely to be required rather than less. What you collect, why, who can see it, how long you hold it, what could go wrong and what you decided about it. Most firms find the exercise shortens the list of who needs access, which is worth the afternoon on its own.
Transparency is the obligation employers fail most often, and it is the cheapest one to meet. Say what is recorded at a punch, who sees it, and what it will and will not be used for. Say plainly that nothing is recorded between scans, because that is the thing people assume the opposite of.
A paragraph in the site induction they signed is worth more than a clause in a handbook nobody opened, and it is evidence rather than an assertion.
A punch location supports a timesheet, a pay run and any dispute about either. Once those are closed and out of time, it is doing nothing except sitting on your risk register. Set a period, apply it, and be able to state it when a subject access request arrives, which on a workforce of a few hundred is a question of when rather than whether.
A plain summary of the Information Commissioner's published expectations for monitoring at work, not legal advice. The decisions and the records are yours. The ICO's own guidance is at ico.org.uk.
The map is only as good as the scanning.
A map is worth exactly what the punch in behind it is worth. If half the workforce is still on paper timesheets, that is the conversation worth having first, and it is a shorter one than you think.Same platform, same login. These are the modules that plan the work, record it, and hold the evidence it was done properly.
Knowing who turned up is the easy half. What follows is the reading on why the number matters and what it is worth getting right.
