A small employer looking at a GPS time clock app usually has one real question: did the visit happen. That question is answered by a location captured at the punch, and almost everything else these products offer answers a question a business of fifteen people does not have. Collecting less is both cheaper and easier to defend.
Switch on the punch location only
Arrival and departure points confirm that somebody reached a customer, which is genuinely hard to establish otherwise for mobile work. Continuous breadcrumb tracking answers a few more questions and creates a record you must justify, secure and eventually delete. For a small business the first is almost always sufficient and the second is rarely worth the conversation it starts.
Write the notice and hand it over
What is collected, when, why, how long it is kept and who sees it. In a business of fifteen people this is a single page and it takes half an hour, and doing it at the start removes most of the heat from the subject. Most of the resistance employers meet in this area comes from having skipped this step rather than from the tracking itself.
Give people their own record
Anybody being located should be able to see their own data without asking. It costs nothing to configure and it converts the tool from something done to people into something they use, which shows up directly in how many punches get missed. It also protects the worker whose shift ran long.
Questions people ask about time clock app with gps for small business
Is GPS worth it for a small team?
Where work happens at customer sites, yes. Where everybody comes to one place, it adds a conversation and answers nothing you did not know.
Can we require an app on a personal phone?
It is contentious and often refused. Offering a shared device removes the objection for less than the cost of the argument.
Does tracking stop at clock out?
It must. Test it on a real phone and look at what the evening shows before you roll it out.