BossCheckin is an employee check-in & payroll ecosystem that lives on your own devices. No server to buy, no UPS to babysit, no internet subscription to depend on — and your business data never leaves your phone unless you decide it should.
Others built their products around their servers — so you pay monthly, you depend on their uptime, and your payroll lives in their database. We built BossCheckin the other way around: everything runs on hardware you already own.
The boss's phone is the office: the database, the payroll engine, even the web dashboard all run on it. There's nothing to rack, patch, license or keep on backup power.
POWER CUT? Phones and the kiosk run on batteries — check-ins keep working.
BossCheckin processes your business data locally. Core databases and managed vault payloads are encrypted; controlled copies go only to paired devices and backup destinations you choose. Stenli Apps keeps no readable copy.
WE COULDN'T READ YOUR PAYROLL EVEN IF WE WANTED TO.
Devices find each other on your WiFi automatically. Want remote workers or reports from the beach? Flip on internet mode — sync travels through a relay as sealed ciphertext. Flip it off; everything still works.
THE RELAY SEES: ciphertext. THE RELAY READS: nothing.
A cloud is just three things: a server that's always on, one home for your data, and sync between devices. You get all three — except the server is the phone in your pocket, not a stranger's datacenter you pay for forever.
Their servers, their copy of your data, their invoice every month.
Your phone is the source of truth; protected copies exist only where you choose.
All the convenience of the cloud. None of the rent, none of the public attack surface.
Every check-in is a cryptographically signed, single-use token verified right there on the kiosk — no internet round-trip, no buddy-punching, no photographed QR codes.
WORKS ON ANY DEVICE WITH A CAMERA AND A SCREEN
BEST WITH AN ANDROID 12+ PHONE OR TABLET AS THE KIOSK
You pick the method per kiosk — we recommend NFC. It's faster, can't be photographed, and the kiosk keeps working locked with the screen off; for best compatibility use an Android 12 or newer phone or tablet as the kiosk. Both methods carry the same Ed25519-signed token and both are verified locally — a worker physically present is the only thing that produces a valid check-in. Devices without NFC simply use the QR path.
As far as we know, we're the only attendance app doing phone-to-phone NFC. Elsewhere “NFC” typically means a passive tag stuck on a wall or a badge card on a dedicated reader — a tag marks a place, can be cloned, and proves nothing about who tapped it. With BossCheckin both ends are ordinary phones, and every tap is a live cryptographic exchange: a signed, single-use token. Nothing static, nothing cloneable, no extra hardware to buy.
It can open your door, gate or barrier too. An integration API connects BossCheckin to your existing access hardware — a valid check-in can trigger an electric door, a gate or a parking barrier to open, right there on your premises. Ask us about your hardware →
Your phone quietly runs a tiny encrypted web server. Open its address in any browser on the office WiFi and you get a complete back office — with the internet cable unplugged.
The whole office in a tab. Employees, sites, check-ins, payments, absences, leave, chat, photos, documents, a recycle bin and settings — manageable from a laptop, in bulk.
Reports your accountant will love. Monthly payroll, payments, absences, leave balances — exported as spreadsheet-ready CSV. Give the accountant a restricted account that sees only Reports.
Handle device changes without accounts or invite links. The worker enters their name, BossCheckin shows the waiting phone on the local network, and the employer matches it to the employee. For kiosk support, a Maintenance role sees exactly which device is misbehaving and can get it back online quickly.
Bring your own AI — even a fully local one. BossCheckin ships a standard MCP endpoint that runs on your own phone. Point your AI assistant at it — any MCP-capable one, even a model running entirely on your own computer, offline. Where competitors offer AI at all, it lives in their cloud and reads their copy of your data — to our knowledge, BossCheckin is the only workforce app where AI access involves no vendor cloud at all. Opt-in, read-only, token-protected; chat is never exposed.
| Employee | Days | Status | Net |
|---|---|---|---|
| M. Petrova | 11 | In · 08:02 | €1,480 |
| G. Ivanov | 10 | In · 07:55 | €1,720 |
| S. Dimitrov | 9 | Paid leave | €1,350 |
| E. Koleva | 11 | Out · 17:04 | €1,560 |
| N. Hristov | 8 | In · 08:10 | €1,290 |
Each employee sees their payslip and a live calendar of their check-ins — today's start and finish included, not last month's news.
Three separate spaces: office ↔ worker (the official channel — visible to the office team, kept in the business records), office ↔ office (private manager DMs), and worker ↔ worker — end-to-end private between colleagues: not even the boss can read it, and it never lands in the office backup. Photos + Sent → Delivered → Seen everywhere.
Attach ID or licence scans to an employee with an expiry date. Both you and the worker get reminded before it lapses — not after the fine.
Yearly allowance that grows with tenure, half-day precision, and a three-colour calendar: absence, paid leave, sick — payroll adjusts itself.
Use BossCheckin on a clean, supervised Android phone or tablet as a dedicated check-in terminal. BossCheckin's in-app exit is protected by a 6-digit PIN; this simpler mode is not Android Device Owner.
For an employer-owned, factory-reset Android device. Android Device Owner locks it to the terminal, and BossCheckin provisions it with a QR code — no computer or USB cable in the normal setup.
Kiosks relay chat between each other over the LAN. Sites with zero coverage? A courier phone physically ferries encrypted data between locations.
Four independent restore paths: backup kiosks, courier phones, your own Google Drive and your own NAS (a network folder — daily, no internet needed). Lost your phone? A 12-word phrase restores everything.
Deleted records can be restored with one tap. Ex-employees' personal data auto-erases after a period you set — while payroll history stays, as the law requires.
Remote worker? Flip the switch: sync flows through a relay as sealed ciphertext the relay cannot read. Messages and sync each get their own toggle.
At day's end workers rate the day 1–5 and can drop an improvement idea; you ask Yes/No questions and watch the result graph. Anonymous by default — so you hear the truth, not what people think you want.
A standard MCP endpoint served by your phone. Point any AI assistant — or a fully local model on your own computer — at your business and ask away. Opt-in, read-only, per-section, token-protected. No vendor cloud touches your data.
The one fair worry about a phone-as-server: what if it's lost, stolen or smashed? That's why protected payroll and file payloads are mirrored — still sealed with your keys — to backups you control. A new phone, a 12-word phrase, and everything comes back.
Backup kiosks, a courier phone, your own Google Drive — and now your own NAS: a network folder on your hardware, no internet needed. As many copies as you like. Lose the phone, keep the business.
Security isn't a feature here; it's the architecture. The system assumes networks are hostile and middlemen are nosy — and works anyway.
BossCheckin and MyCheckin protect their core databases with SQLCipher, and BossCheckin stores managed photos & documents in an encrypted vault. On a clean Trusted or Permanent Kiosk installation, the database, app-managed personal payloads and private kiosk secrets are encrypted with device-local keys protected by AndroidKeyStore. Limited operational metadata and temporary preview/share files may remain inside Android app-private storage.
Every device-to-device channel is sealed with libsodium (X25519 + XSalsa20-Poly1305). Chat is additionally sealed per message and per photo.
Every record is an Ed25519-signed entry in a tamper-evident chain. If anything is altered, the signatures stop matching — quietly editing the books is not a thing.
The optional relay and Cloudflare forward protected frames they cannot decrypt. A kiosk opens only the operational slice required for its role; colleague-private chat and owner-sealed backup payloads remain unreadable to it.
Identity lives in a 12-word recovery phrase only you hold. We can't reset it, recover it — or be compelled to hand over what we never had.
“Others” being the typical cloud workforce suite: a browser login, a monthly invoice, and a quiet dependency on someone else's servers.
| BossCheckin | Others | |
|---|---|---|
| Where your data lives | On your phone, encryptedSQLCipher + encrypted vault, on hardware you own | In their cloudtheir database, their jurisdiction, their breach |
| Internet goes down | Nothing happensoffline is the default mode, not a degraded one | Check-ins stop“couldn't connect — try again later” |
| Servers & infrastructure | Noneno server, no UPS, no IT contractor — got a NAS? It can hold a backup, but nothing requires one | Their SaaS + your ITand an onboarding call to set it up |
| Extra hardware to buy | Noneany old Android phone or tablet becomes the kiosk — NFC needs no cards, fobs or readers | Terminals, readers, badgesdedicated clocks, plus a card or fob per employee — replaced every time one is lost |
| Power cut at the site | Keeps workingphones and kiosk run on batteries | Router's dead — so is ithope you kept paper timesheets |
| Setup | Minutesinstall BossCheckin + MyCheckin; add a Trusted Kiosk over the LAN or provision a Permanent Kiosk by QR | An IT projectsales demo, onboarding sessions, configuration backlog |
| Worker onboarding | Onboard over the LANthe worker enters a name; the employer matches the waiting device — no email, password or activation QR | Email invites + passwordsand the eternal “forgot my password” parade |
| Who can read your payroll | Only youend-to-end encrypted; the vendor holds nothing | You, the vendor, their cloud providerand anyone who breaches any of them |
| Subscription | None — the employer licenses each seat once€10 per employee access seat; MyCheckin is free for the employee and nothing renews | Monthly fee, per user, forevertypically $2–12 per user per month, plus base fees — see the math below |
| Faking a check-in | Cryptographically hardsigned single-use tokens; NFC challenge-response can't be replayed or photographed | Photo of a colleague's QRor sharing a PIN — classic |
| NFC check-in | Phone-to-phone, cryptographica live challenge-response with the worker's phone — the only attendance app we know of that does this | Typically a tag on a wall, or a badge + readera tag marks a place, not a person — and can be cloned |
| Watching your workers | Presence, not surveillancea check-in proves the worker was at the kiosk, that moment — no all-day GPS, no geofences, no face scans | Often all-day GPS trackinggeofences, breadcrumb trails and face checks — on the worker's personal phone and battery |
| Workers' private chat | End-to-end encryptedonly the coworkers in the conversation can read it — not the boss, not the kiosk, not the relay, not even us; never in the office backup | Stored readable on the vendor's serversprivacy from the employer is at best a vendor policy — in some products the owner can export every worker's private messages |
| Connecting an AI | Your AI, no vendor cloudMCP endpoint on your own phone — works even with a fully local model on your own computer | Vendor-cloud AI, at besttheir servers, their copy of your data — even when they let you plug an AI in |
| Remote site with no coverage | Fully supportedoffline kiosks + courier phone syncs by visiting | Unsupportedno signal, no product |
| When a worker leaves | GDPR auto-scrub, built inset a retention period once — personal data of ex-employees erases itself; payroll history stays, as the law requires | Your problemmanual cleanup across their cloud, exports and backups — if anyone remembers |
| If the vendor disappears | App keeps working — it's all localyour data was never hostage | Service off, data export “on request”good luck with that |
That's ≈95% less than a typical cloud suite over three years — and the gap only widens, because one-time employee access seats don't renew. By year five it's ~97%.
BossCheckin is licensed to the employer: €10 per employee access seat, paid once with no subscription. Android employers obtain seats in BossCheckin through Google Play. MyCheckin is the free employee client; employees do not buy access in MyCheckin. The worker enters their name and taps Find BossCheckin; on the same local network, the employer matches the waiting device to the employee and the licensed access is delivered automatically over the live LAN connection — no activation QR is scanned. A replacement device requires the employer to allocate another seat. “Others”: the cheapest adequate paid plan with an attendance kiosk across nine mainstream cloud workforce suites, per-user list prices billed annually (June 2026) — roughly $3–13 per user per month effective (typical ≈$6), base fees included where charged. Some vendors offer free tiers with limits (one kiosk, one location, up to 10 users) — fine until you grow, and your data still lives in their cloud either way.
And this is only the beginning. BossCheckin is in active development — new capabilities ship steadily, so expect this table to keep growing in one direction.
BossCheckin ships continuously. If phones aren't allowed where your people actually work, don't worry — these are already on the way.
Your team can now check in, see payslips and chat on iPhone, not just Android.
Phones banned on the floor? Your people will open doors and clock in by tapping an unclonable NFC wristband or key fob on the kiosk — no phone needed, nothing to fumble for.
A cheap, unclonable NFC sticker by the door. A worker taps it with their phone to open the door — no expensive terminal to mount or steal at that spot.
Open a door over the internet, straight from the worker's app — enabled only for the specific employees you choose. Let the right people in, even when you're not there.
For drivers and field crews: a live map showing where each vehicle or mobile team is right now — so you always know who's where, without a single phone call.
A dedicated screen for your security guard: watch the access doors and open any of them with a tap — straight from the browser, a proper front-desk console.
The employer licenses and runs the workplace with BossCheckin. MyCheckin is the free employee client: the worker enters their name, the employer matches the waiting device, and access is delivered over the same local network.
License your workspace and employee access seats, manage check-ins and payroll, and keep control of every device and backup.
Download the free employee client, receive workplace access from your employer, then check in securely, view your calendar and payslips, request leave and chat with colleagues.
Need a dedicated terminal? Trusted Kiosk is built into BossCheckin. The separate Permanent Kiosk is installed and provisioned from BossCheckin, so it does not need its own Google Play download.
Google Play availability may vary by country and device.