What they actually do, and where they never touch
You are working out how to manage the people in your service business, and someone tells you to look at Personio. You land on their site and find leave, absences, onboarding, employee records, reviews, payroll connections. An entire HR department inside a browser. Then you come back to the reason you were searching in the first place: the client disputing a job from Thursday, and you opening the system and finding nothing to show him.
Something worth saying out loud: Personio and GeoTapp are not fighting over the same seat. Personio manages people as headcount. GeoTapp documents work as evidence. Calling them competitors suits whoever is selling.
The overlap is thin and sits entirely there: both, in the end, produce hours. But those hours are born in opposite ways.
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Where Personio is stronger
Personio is a mature HR suite: leave and absence without endless email chains, tidy onboarding, clean employee records, payroll integration. If your problem is people administration, it does work we do not do and do not pretend to do.
There is also the value of a flow employees use on their own: leave requests, documents, records that stay current without anybody chasing anybody.
Where GeoTapp is different, not better, different
GeoTapp was not built to manage headcount. It was built around a question HR suites treat as a detail: when the invoice is disputed, what do you have in your hand to show the client?
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In an HR suite, hours arrive declared: someone enters them, someone else approves them. That works right up until somebody doubts them. In GeoTapp the record is built to be evidence: a GPS position and a timestamp that cannot be quietly edited, designed to be shown to the person on the other side of the table.
And there is the legal boundary. Under the UK GDPR monitoring has to be necessary and proportionate to a stated purpose, and the ICO has been consistent that “just in case” is not a purpose. GeoTapp records the start and the end of the job and then stops, because a position running all day tells you where someone had lunch.
When Personio is enough
Personio is enough when your pain sits inside the company: leave to approve, absences to track, contracts and documents to keep in order. If your clients have never once disputed a job, buying anything else would be paying for a problem you do not have.
When you need GeoTapp
You need GeoTapp when the money you lose is not lost in the office but at the client’s door. When a facilities manager says the cleaners skipped a floor, when a main contractor withholds payment because nobody was there on Thursday, when your word against theirs has already cost you an invoice.
How to decide without getting it wrong
Answer one question honestly: in the last twelve months, what cost you more, a people administration problem or a job you could not prove? If it was the first, Personio is the right home. If it was the second, no HR suite closes that gap, however complete it is. And often you need both, because the proof is born on site and ends up inside the administration.
How many disputes would you have closed with geolocated proof at hand?
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