Live check-in alerts: a Telegram toggle for owners who want every clock-in
You can already get Telegram notifications for leave requests, shift changes, closures, and the daily summary. Now there's one more: live check-in/out pings, the moment they happen.
It's off by default. Here's why — and why you might still want it on.
Why off by default
A 5-person café with normal opening and closing shifts sees about 10 punches a day. Add lunch breaks (some workspaces clock those too) and you're at 20. That's 20 Telegram messages a day, just from one shop, on top of whatever else lives in your inbox.
For most owners that's too much signal-shaped noise. The daily summary at 6pm tells you who showed up, who was late, who's still on a long shift — without 20 individual pings.
But if you're not at the shop, or if you're scaling to a second location and want to feel the pulse of the place from across town, the live pings turn that into a steady, low-resolution sense of "yes, the morning crew is in" without staring at the dashboard.
What an alert looks like
🟢 Sokha Sun checked in at 06:32
🟠 Lyhour Huy checked out at 14:05
Two channels in parallel: your workspace Telegram group (if you've set one up under Settings → Telegram notifications), and your personal Telegram DM (if you've linked it on your profile). Same message, two destinations.
How to turn it on
- Go to Settings → Telegram notifications
- Make sure the master "Enable Telegram notifications" toggle is on (it gates the workspace group send)
- Below the group chat setup, flip the new Live check-in/out alerts toggle
- Save
That's the whole flow. Espresso plan and up — same plan tier as the rest of Telegram notifications.
How this pairs with other alerts
DailyBrew already sends:
- Daily summary at 6pm (Telegram + email) — the digest that doesn't depend on this toggle
- New-device alert (Telegram + push + email) — fires when an employee uses a phone they've never used before, which is the alert you actually care about most of the time. Covered in the new-device alert post.
- Leave / shift / closure (Telegram + push + email) — administrative changes
The live check-in pings sit alongside these. Most owners turn them on for a week, get a feel for the rhythm of their shop, then either keep them or turn them off. There's no wrong answer.
What this doesn't do
This isn't device verification. The toggle just decides whether you hear about each check-in — it doesn't change which check-ins are allowed. DailyBrew's device verification (a separate Espresso feature) enforces same-day consistency: within a single day, one device per employee, and the check-out has to come from the same device as the check-in. Tomorrow that same employee can use a different phone — no problem, the constraint is per-day, not per-lifetime. That keeps active buddy punching from succeeding silently. The live alerts let you watch it work.
A note on noise
If you turn this on and find yourself ignoring the pings, that's a signal to turn it off. Notifications you ignore train your brain to ignore the channel, which means the actually-urgent things (new-device alerts, leave requests) blend in. We left it off by default for that reason. Use it when the live feedback matters, mute it when it doesn't.