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The Geofence Trade-Off: How Tight Should Your Check-In Radius Be?

Why the default 100-meter check-in radius works for most teams, when to tighten it, when to loosen it, and the real-world failure modes managers see at each extreme.

By Ruxia Team · 2026-04-02 · 6 min read

The geofence radius is one of those settings managers configure once and then never touch — until the day a perfectly good rep gets stuck outside a strip mall in the rain because the GPS reading drifted by 50 meters.

Geofencing is the invisible bouncer of field operations. It decides who's allowed to check in and who isn't. Set it too tight and your reps spend their day fighting the app. Set it too loose and you've quietly turned off the verification you were paying for.

The Default: 100 Meters, and Why

Ruxia ships with a 100-meter default for a reason. Consumer-grade GPS in modern smartphones is typically accurate to 5–10 meters in open environments, but degrades meaningfully in three common situations:

• **Indoors** — Reps standing inside a store can drift 20–30 meters due to roof attenuation
• **Urban canyons** — Tall buildings reflect signals, producing errors of 50+ meters
• **Cold start** — When GPS hasn't been used recently, the first fix can be 100+ meters off until the device acquires more satellites

A 100-meter radius absorbs all of these without forcing the rep to wander around the parking lot waiting for their position to settle.

When to Tighten

There are two scenarios where the default is too loose:

1. Dense retail clusters. If you have two client locations within 200 meters of each other (think mall corridors or strip-mall co-tenants), a 100-meter geofence can let a rep accidentally — or deliberately — check in at the wrong store. Drop these to 30–50 meters and pair with a structured arrival photo. 2. High-trust compliance environments. Healthcare visits, regulated audits, or anywhere a third party will later question whether the rep was actually on-premises. Tighter geofences plus high-resolution timestamps give you a defensible record.

If you tighten, communicate it. A rep who suddenly can't check in where they checked in fine yesterday will assume the app is broken.

When to Loosen

Three situations call for a wider radius:

1. Large outdoor venues — Stadiums, fairgrounds, big-box parking lots. The "location" is half a kilometer across. Use 250–500 meters. 2. Drive-through territories — Reps who service a route of small accounts where the actual visit happens curbside. Loose geofences plus pin-drops give you better data than tight geofences plus failed check-ins. 3. Brand-new locations — When you've just added a store and the geocoded address is off by a block, loosen the geofence temporarily until you can verify the right pin.

The Failure Modes

The most common geofence-related support ticket isn't "the geofence let someone in who shouldn't be there." It's "the geofence is keeping me out and I'm standing right at the door."

Nine times out of ten, the cause is one of: - iOS Precise Location was disabled for the Ruxia app - The rep is in a basement or back room with no clear sky view - The store address was geocoded to the back of the building rather than the front

Walking through these in onboarding eliminates almost all check-in friction.

A Sensible Default Policy

For most teams, the right approach is: 100 meters for stores, 250 meters for territories, 30 meters for offices. Audit your check-in failure rate weekly during the first month. Anything above 5% means a configuration issue, not a rep behavior issue.

The geofence isn't there to catch reps cheating. It's there to make verified check-ins effortless when reps are doing their job correctly.