Anyone with a mobile, co-located, or field team will know: it’s not easy to keep track of hours and client jobs when your team is on-the-go.
Whether you’re running a delivery company, field service team, or simply have team members that frequently visit client sites, knowing where everyone is and how long they are there can be difficult to track.
Well, it used to be.
Hubstaff introduced a new feature that automates time tracking based on location for better accuracy and reporting: geofenced job sites.
The goal is to streamline time tracking based on location data so there’s no question about where your team is or how much time they’ve been working at a job site.
What are geofences?
Geofences are virtual barriers around physical locations that trigger an action on a mobile device.
The act of geofencing uses GPS location to automate processes, with the goal of making things easier or more accurate. In this case, issuing reminders or automatically starting and stopping your mobile time tracking app.
How can my business grow with Hubstaff’s new feature?
- Save money by keeping your employees accountable as you’ll get detailed and accurate timesheets with location data and routes
- Increase productivity as you’ll see literal and figurative roadblocks that hold up projects
- Reduce payroll costs as you’ll be cutting down on paying for non-working hours
- Better manage your mobile and remote teams by knowing where everyone is throughout the day with a clear map view
Try geofences for better tracking
Smarter location-based time tracking
Who should use it?
In short, any business that has a mobile team. 
Landscaping businesses with crews that travel from site to site
Add recurring job sites so billing is quick and easy.
Construction crews and contractors
Create geofences around job sites so that your crew is only tracking time while they’re on-site working. You can also set reminders at job sites instead of auto-start so that the timer can track trips for materials and supplies.
Cleaning companies
Add your client locations so that cleaning crews can automatically track time while they’re there.
Companies with field sales and service teams
Businesses with sales teams can track time spent at client offices, which can be used to determine how profitable certain relationships are and which ones are drawing too many resources from your team.
Property managers and real estate agencies
Add properties to Hubstaff and schedule team members so you’re alerted if shifts are started late or missed. Keep track of who is on-site to help with resident requests or tours at any time.
Health care companies, especially home health care
For health care teams that travel to patients, time tracking with geofences can take one more thing off their plate so they can focus on care.
Delivery and dispatch companies
See routes as they happen and add repeat job sites so that time is tracked automatically. It’s one less thing for your delivery teams to worry about, and more accurate data for you.
Event staff
Many event companies work with the same venues so GPS time tracking can save you from recurring headaches. Add your geofences for venues so that you can see how much time setup and teardown take, and bill easily to the right client.
Now that you know all the ways to use geofences to your advantage, here’s how to get started.
How to create geofences for job site time tracking
Adding and editing job sites is a snap. When you’re setting up your job sites, you can decide:
- What the radius around a job site should be
- What to do upon arrival and departure, such as:
- Send a reminder to start and stop the timer
- Automatically start and stop the timer
- Do nothing (but track location for reporting)
- Limit time tracking only to job sites
- Which team members belong to that site
Being able to customize this geofence feature gives you a level of automation that is uncommon among other time tracking tools.
Once you create your job sites, it gets really fun.
Click on a job site to get the full details, or click on a member of your team through the map view to see how far they’ve traveled, or how many sites they’ve visited that day.
However, that’s not everything GPS time tracking with geofences can do.
Dig deeper into time and location data
Log into your Hubstaff dashboard, and you’ll see real-time insight on your team’s work. Know more about how your business operates and find areas for improvement.
View team members
See your whole team in one place, sorted by when they last worked. You decide who gets added to each job site, and settings are based on each individual team member.
Bonus: When you click a team member in the map view, you’ll see the route they’ve taken.
View job sites and routes
In the map view, you can:
- Click on sites
- Zoom to a job site
- See who’s near it at that time
- Get timestamps for each location
Schedule teams
When time tracking automatically starts at a geofenced location, scheduling and attendance get even easier.
Add schedules for your team in Hubstaff, and you’ll get alerts if shifts are started late, missed, or abandoned based on whether or not that person has entered or exited the geofence.
Change your settings so you only get the email notifications you want.
Try this time-saving feature today
Hubstaff’s location tracking includes a 14-day free trial, so your team can download the apps and try it out right away.
After that, it’s only $10/user per month to get all of Hubstaff’s time-saving features.
