Services · Mobile app development · Employee attendance apps
We take on employee attendance app development Manchester businesses need when their people work across Trafford Park units, Salford studios, airport shifts and city centre bars. One app records when each person starts and stops, applies your break and overtime rules, and passes approved hours to payroll. It is designed around UK working time law, right to work duties and ICO guidance on monitoring staff, so the data is fair to workers and usable as evidence.
Codeeo does not have a Manchester office. Our 80+ people in Dubai, Riyadh and Karachi work remotely with Greater Manchester clients, and every workshop, review and handover takes place by video call. Sites in Bolton, Wigan, Oldham or Stockport are planned and launched the same way as those in the city centre, with no extra travel in the plan.
200+ companies servedFrom a first store to an ADX listed developer
Features we build
Greater Manchester is ten boroughs with very different employers. A logistics firm in Trafford Park counts pallets and agency shifts; a production company at MediaCityUK in Salford books freelance crews by the day; a restaurant group in the Northern Quarter runs late finishes and student staff. Many Manchester employers run sites in several boroughs at once, with managers moving between them. The attendance app has to cope with all of that without becoming three separate products. We begin by mapping each worker type, how they arrive, what device they carry and what their manager needs to approve. From there we choose capture methods and rules group by group, and they all report into one dashboard for HR and finance. The features below are the ones Manchester employers ask for most. You will not need all of them in the first release, and discovery is where we decide the order.
Each site gets its own geofence, kiosk or QR point, and staff who work at two or three locations in a week clock in wherever they are. Managers see hours split by site, which is useful when venues or depots in Stockport, Bolton and the city centre carry their own labour budgets.
Labour cost lands against the right site automatically.
Manchester's universities supply a large part of the city's hospitality and retail staff. Many international students on a Student visa may only work a limited number of hours a week during term time. The app stores each worker's cap and term dates and warns the rota planner before a shift would push them over it.
Visa conditions are respected before the rota is published.
Bars, clubs and kitchens close late, and some staff count as night workers under the Working Time Regulations. The app tracks night hours, offers health assessment reminders where they apply, and flags rotas that leave too little rest before an early start the next day. Weekly averages are shown per worker.
Night work is visible to managers rather than buried in totals.
Production companies record call times, wrap times and meal breaks for daily crew, with a manager sign off at the end of each shoot day. The log can feed invoices for self-employed crew and payroll for employees from one record. Overtime and turnaround breaches are flagged to the production manager on the day.
Shoot days are recorded accurately and paid without chasing.
When a tram line or bus route is disrupted, staff can tag a late arrival with a reason the manager reviews. Your policy decides whether the time is paid, but the record shows what happened instead of a bare late mark. Patterns by route help managers adjust start times for whole teams.
Lateness disputes are settled on facts, not memory.
Contractors at Manchester Airport often cannot rely on personal phones in restricted zones. We design clocking points at the staff entrance or supervisor check in on a managed device, keeping the airport operator's own security rules intact. Records can be grouped by employer, contract and terminal for reporting.
Attendance works within the site's security restrictions.
Hours worked, unpaid breaks and paid breaks shown per pay period, with export fields your payroll or tips allocation process can use. Staff see their own totals in the app before payday, which cuts the number of queries in the first week of each month. Queries raised in the app go straight to the manager who approved the hours.
Staff check their own hours before pay is calculated.
Workers offer a shift, a qualified colleague accepts, and the manager approves in one tap. The rota, the attendance expectation and the pay record all update together, so a swapped shift does not show up later as an absence. Swaps that would break rest rules or a student cap are blocked automatically.
Swaps happen in the app instead of in group chats.
Professional firms in Spinningfields and around St Peter's Square often care about office attendance rather than clocking. Staff confirm their office days from their phone or by tapping in at reception, and managers see weekly patterns by team without anyone filling in a separate spreadsheet. Desk booking tools can be linked if you already use one.
Office attendance is clear without turning it into surveillance.
Connections to your rota planner, HR system and payroll package through their APIs or scheduled file exchange. We map pay codes, site codes and cost centres during discovery and test them against a real payroll run before go live. Failed transfers alert finance straight away.
Approved hours reach payroll without a single retyped figure.
Who this is for
Manchester businesses that come to us usually have one of two problems: hours recorded in too many places, or hours that nobody trusts. The four situations below are the most common, and each leads to a different first release. In every case we try to replace a manual step that someone dreads each week, because that is what gets an app adopted on the floor. We also look at who will champion the app at each site, because a respected supervisor using it from day one matters more than any feature.
A group running restaurants in Spinningfields, bars in the Northern Quarter and a venue near the Etihad Campus on event nights needs one view of staff hours. We build clocking per venue, student hour caps, night work tracking and a weekly hours report each general manager signs off before payroll closes. Event day surges can be rostered and checked against who actually turned up. Managers who cover two venues on the same night can clock in at each, and the hours split automatically between them.
Most groups start with two venues, then add the rest.
Large industrial estates mean big shift changes and heavy use of agency labour. The first release normally covers kiosk clocking at the gatehouse, agency timesheets, overtime rules and a live list of who is on site for safety. Supervisors approve exceptions from a tablet on the warehouse floor. Because many Trafford Park workers commute in from across the region, shift start rules and grace periods are agreed up front, so a few minutes of traffic on the motorway does not trigger an automatic deduction that HR later has to reverse.
Production work runs on call sheets and day rates rather than fixed shifts. We build day logs for crews, sign off by the producer, meal break tracking and exports for both employed and freelance staff. The same app can show which crew members are booked, checked in and wrapped across several shoots. Kit hire and location contacts stay in your production tools; the app focuses on people and hours, and connects where a link genuinely saves work.
We keep employed and self-employed records clearly separate.
Cleaning, catering and ground handling contractors work round the clock in areas with strict access rules. Clocking points sit where staff are permitted to use them, and supervisors can record attendance on managed devices. Reports by contract and terminal help with client billing, and the same data shows the client that agreed staffing levels were met on each shift. Where staff hold airside passes with expiry dates, the app can remind HR before a pass lapses so nobody is rostered into an area they can no longer enter.
Ways to engage
A fixed scope first release suits most Manchester clients, because it gives a clear deliverable and a clear decision point after the parallel run. Ongoing changes, new sites and seasonal rules then move to a retainer. Larger employers with continuous product plans sometimes keep a dedicated team. Discovery, sign offs and training sessions for managers all run by video call, with recordings your new managers can watch later when they join. Whichever model you pick, the code, data and accounts stay yours, so changing supplier later never means rebuilding from nothing.
A defined build with a deadline
We agree what the product has to do, write it down with a price and a date, and build exactly that. Changes are priced before they are made, not discovered on the invoice.
A product that keeps evolving
Named engineers who work your hours, join your standups and stay on the codebase. You direct the backlog; we own the quality of what ships.
Something live that needs looking after
A monthly block of hours for improvements, fixes and the small requests that otherwise wait months. Unused hours carry for a quarter.
Technology
We pick the mobile framework, cloud hosting and database to suit your payroll and HR systems, your security requirements and whoever will maintain the platform once it is live. Kitchens, loading bays and production sets are tough on hardware, so we confirm early which devices will be used and test on them.
01Mobile
02Data and cloud
03Marketing and tracking
Clocking at every site, one set of rules, and one feed into payroll.
For a business with locations in several boroughs, the core is site specific clocking, approvals by the right manager, hours split by site and a clean payroll export. Around that we add whatever your sites need: student caps for hospitality, gatehouse kiosks for warehouses, day logs for production crews. Discovery decides which pieces go into the first release and which follow once the core is proven at one or two locations.
Schedule a free consultation and get a written recommendation, with costs, before you commit to anything.
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