A single warehouse is easy. One entrance, one rota, one set of hours to approve. The moment you place the same workers across several depots, the model breaks. A picker does Monday and Tuesday at Riverside, covers a sickness gap at Bay Park on Wednesday, and finishes the week back where they started. By Friday, three separate people are emailing you three versions of that worker's hours.
For agencies and multi-site employers this is the norm, not the exception. The challenge is not capturing time at one site — it is producing one accurate record per worker when their week is scattered across locations that each keep their own paperwork.
Why the usual methods fall apart
- Paper sign-in sheets live at the site. To pay the worker you have to collect, read and re-key several sheets, and a missing one means a guessed timesheet.
- Per-site spreadsheets double the work and the errors. The same shift gets entered twice, or a transposed start time quietly changes the pay.
- One clock per site, in isolation tells you who was at that site, but nobody can see the worker's whole week — or spot a double-booking until it is on an invoice.
The underlying problem is that the data is trapped where it was captured. To pay correctly and invoice cleanly, it has to roll up to the worker, not the building.
The principle: one worker, one record, many sites
A multi-site setup works when each location captures attendance locally but feeds a single record for each worker. Three things make that reliable:
- Tie each clock-in to a place. A GPS check against the site boundary stamps the location onto the event, so hours are attributed to the right depot automatically — no manual sorting.
- Tie each clock-in to a person. Face verification means the worker's identity travels with them between sites; there is no separate fob to issue at every gate.
- Roll it up centrally. Every event lands on one timesheet for that worker, with the site and match score attached, ready to approve as a single week.
A worked example
Say James covers three depots in one week. Instead of three sheets, you approve one timesheet that already knows where each block of hours was worked:
| Day | Site | Hours | Distance |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mon | Riverside DC | 8.0 | 50m |
| Tue | Riverside DC | 8.0 | 50m |
| Wed | Bay Park | 7.5 | 40m |
| Thu | Crompton St | 8.0 | 60m |
| Fri | Riverside DC | 8.0 | 50m |
| Total | 39.5 | ||
Now the client at each site can be invoiced for exactly the hours worked at that site, and James is paid once, correctly, for the whole week.
One live register across every depot
TempClock shows who is on site, who is late and which shifts are uncovered across all your locations at once — and every hour rolls up to one worker record, geofenced and ready for payroll and invoicing.
What to look for in a system
If you are moving off paper or spreadsheets, the multi-site question to ask any vendor is simple: does the data roll up to the worker, or stay stuck at the site? Beyond that:
- A single dashboard across all sites, updated live, so coverage gaps surface before the shift, not after.
- Pay and charge rates per site, resolving automatically, since the same worker may be on different rates at different clients.
- One-click payroll export to Sage 50 or Xero from the rolled-up timesheet, not a re-keying exercise per location.
- Pricing that is per site, not per clock-in, so adding workers or shifts never inflates the bill.
Spread across enough locations, manual tracking does not just cost admin time — it costs accuracy, and accuracy is what your clients are paying for. Capture time locally, attribute it to a place and a person, and roll it up to one record, and a scattered week becomes a single clean approval.