Mobile App

Communicator Pro is the part of Communicator-Cloud that most of your workforce will actually touch. For an employee it is the clock-in, the roster, the leave request and the payslip. For a manager it is a live answer to the question of who is on site right now, without walking the floor.

The app is not a separate system with its own data. A punch made on a phone is the same punch as one made on the terminal at the door: it lands in Attendance, it is reviewed in the same screens, and it feeds the same payroll. The difference is GPS, which is what makes a phone trustworthy as a clock-in device.

Communicator Pro installs from the App Store and Google Play. Employees sign in with the account you created for them in Company, so there is no separate invitation flow to manage and no second set of credentials to reset.

Roll it out to one team first. The questions that come up in the first week are almost always about geo-fencing rather than the app itself, and it is easier to adjust a fence for ten people than for two hundred.

A geo-fence is a boundary drawn around a site. A clock-in made inside it is accepted normally. One made outside is still captured, but held for review rather than silently applied, so you see the exception instead of losing the punch.

Draw fences slightly larger than the building. GPS on a phone is accurate to a few metres at best, and a fence drawn tight to the walls will reject people standing at the front door.

Fences are created once and then assigned: to a site, to a team, or to individual employees. Someone who works across three sites is assigned all three, and a clock-in inside any of them is valid.

Mobile Reports shows where punches were made and flags the ones that fell outside a fence. Read it as a pattern rather than a list of individual incidents. One person outside the fence once is a bad GPS fix. The same person every morning is a fence drawn in the wrong place, or a genuine question worth asking.

The portal gives employees their own shifts, their recent clock-ins and their leave balances without anybody in HR being asked. Most of the routine questions a small HR team fields every week are answered here, which is the main reason to switch it on early.

Leave is requested from the app and arrives in the approvals queue with the employee's balance attached. The decision notifies them straight away, and an approval writes the leave into the schedule so the day stops reading as an unexplained absence.

When a punch is missed, the employee says what time they actually started or finished and sends it for review. The supervisor accepts or rejects it. Nothing is edited silently, and the original record stays in place next to the correction.

Notifications cover the things an employee would otherwise have to check for: a published roster, a changed shift, an approved or rejected request. They can be delivered by push, email or WhatsApp, configured in Data & Insight.