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The mobile kiosk: clocking in from a phone

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For people who work away from any fixed terminal — field crews, drivers, site staff — the phone is the kiosk. The app starts and stops the same work sessions a wall-mounted tablet would, and the hours land in the same timesheet. The one thing that differs is the location restriction: on a terminal it belongs to the device, on a phone it belongs to the employee.

Animated overview: installing and signing in, using the kiosk in the app, the per-employee login area, and what happens outside it — steps 1 to 4
The whole flow in one place (loops continuously). Each step below explains one part.

1. Install the app and sign in

The app in Google Play or the App Store next to the sign-in screen with email and password
① install from Google Play or the App Store · ② sign in with the same email and password as the web application.
  1. Install the InSync 365 app from Google Play or the App Store.
  2. Sign in with the same email and password you use for the web application. There is no separate mobile account and no separate password to remember.
  3. This is the one real difference from a terminal kiosk: the mobile app needs a user account, not just a PIN. Someone with only a kiosk code cannot use the app.
  4. Don't know your password? Use the reset from the sign-in screen — see Forgot your password?. If your account has no email on it, an administrator has to fix that first.
  5. Allow the app to use your location when it asks. Without that permission it cannot check the allowed area, and clocking in will be refused where a restriction is set.

2. Start and stop work in the app

Three phone screens: the app menu with Kiosk selected, the activity choices with a start button, and a running session with today's total and a stop button
① open Kiosk from the menu · ② pick the activity · ③ start · ④ the running session, with stop.
  1. Open Kiosk from the app menu.
  2. Choose the activity before starting — regular work, a break, field work, and whatever else your company defines as hour types.
  3. Tap start. The screen then shows that you are working, which activity is running, and how much is logged today.
  4. Do the same for a break or a different kind of work: pick the other activity. You are not logging out, you are switching.
  5. Tap stop at the end of the working day. As with a terminal, a session left open past 24 hours has to be closed with an explicit end time — see the kiosk guide.
  6. What you record here is ordinary timesheet data. It appears in the timesheet and in the reports exactly like hours typed on a computer.

3. Set the area a person may clock in from

The mobile kiosk restriction on an employee record: the enable toggle, the map with two drawn polygons, the saved polygons list, and the saved confirmation
① on the employee's record · ② Enable login restriction · ③ draw an area · ④ Add polygon · ⑤ the saved list.
  1. For administrators: the mobile restriction lives on the employee's own record, not on a device. That is the whole point — a phone has no fixed location, so the rule has to follow the person.
  2. Turn on Enable login restriction, find the location, draw the area, and click Add polygon.
  3. You can add several areas. Somebody who works across three sites gets three polygons, not one enormous one that covers half the city.
  4. Each saved polygon is listed and can be deleted individually, so revising one site does not disturb the others.
  5. An area defined at company level is added to the ones you draw here. The employee may clock in from the company area as well as from their own — so a shared head office does not need repeating on every record.
  6. Leave the restriction off for people who genuinely work anywhere. An empty restriction is not the same as an unrestricted employee: enabling it with no area drawn blocks them entirely.

4. What happens outside the area

The phone showing a refused login, next to a map with one pin inside the allowed polygon and one outside it marked with a cross
① the app refuses and says why · ② inside the polygon works, outside it does not.
  1. Outside every allowed area, the app refuses to start work and says so — it does not silently record the hours somewhere else.
  2. The usual causes are simple: the person is genuinely not on site, the polygon was drawn too tightly, or a new site was never added to their record.
  3. Draw areas generously. Phone positioning is accurate to metres, and indoors it is worse, so an outline traced along the building walls will reject somebody standing inside the building.
  4. A refusal can also be a missing permission. If the phone will not give the app its location, there is nothing to compare against the area.
  5. Mobile clock-ins appear on the same Kiosk Dashboard as terminal ones, so you do not need a separate screen to see who is working.
The mobile app is a way in, not a second system: same account, same hour types, same timesheet, same dashboard. Only the location rule is per employee instead of per device.

Related: The mobile kiosk: switching it on and the three location options · Clocking in at a kiosk and the kiosk dashboard · Setting up a kiosk device · Entering hours · Creating a user account · Forgot your password?