Field employee tracking: route, visits and time — recorded by themselves

Your people work outside the office — surveyors, sales reps, delivery drivers, maintenance engineers, insurance agents. In the evening the day arrives as a chat message, and there is no way to check it. Taskloc records field trips by itself: the route, the visits, the time at each client. Time entries go to your task tracker.

What happens today

• The daily report arrives in the evening as text: "visited three clients". There's nothing to check it against.
• How many visits actually happened and how long each took is a matter of trust, not data.
• The day's route isn't saved anywhere, so there's nothing to plan tomorrow's trip on.
• Travel time and time at the client merge into one number, and everything gets lost in it.
• Checking in by phone call is bad for both sides: it proves nothing and it annoys people.

How field employee tracking works

1. A client visit is a task in your tracker: a survey, a meeting, a delivery. The employee sees the day's plan in the app.
2. Before leaving, they start a session. From then on route and time are recorded without any taps.
3. At the stop — a check-in, recording the visit with a location, geofence and route.
4. Stop the session and the hours for the task go to the tracker. No report to write in the evening: the day is already recorded.

What managers get

• How many visits were made and how long each took — as numbers, not words.
• The day's route on a map: it's saved, and you can plan the next trip on it.
• Travel time and time at the client — separately.
• Mileage per trip.
• A live team map: who is out in the field right now.

The difference from an evening summary isn't the amount of data but the moment it's recorded. A summary is written from memory at the end of the day, when visits have already blurred together. Here every entry appears when the event happens: arrive — check-in, finish — stop the session. There's nothing to argue about in such numbers, which takes the tension out for both sides.

About surveillance — plainly

This is the main question, so here is a straight answer.

Location is recorded only during a GPS session that the employee starts. Outside a session the app does not collect location at all. Stop the shift and you disappear from the team map. No background tracking after work, no location data outside working hours.

The second layer is team policies: what is recorded and who sees what is configured, not handed out to everyone. A manager sees their team's routes and visits; colleagues don't see each other unless you set it up that way. Policies are part of the Team plan.

It matters to the employee too: their working day is backed by facts with a location and a time, not by someone's opinion.

Rolling it out properly

The question right after "isn't this surveillance" is "are we allowed to do this". Introduce GPS tracking the way you introduce any workplace policy: in writing, under your internal rules and local employment law, with employees informed before it starts.

Your company remains the data controller: you decide who is tracked, what is collected and who sees it. Taskloc is a tool in your hands, not a party collecting data about your people at its own discretion.

The policy text is your lawyer's job; we don't hand out templates. The product closes the technical side: the app simply cannot collect data outside a session started by the employee — that's how it's built, not a promise.

Limitations

• The app is Android-only; the dashboard runs in a browser. There is no iOS version.
• Tasks, the timer and starting or stopping a session work offline. Routes, reports and the map need the internet.
• A check-in only works inside an active shift — outside a shift there is nothing to record a visit with, by definition.
• Route and statistics history: 30 days on Free, all of it on Team.

Which trackers it works with

The one you already use. There are 19 connectors: Redmine, Jira Cloud, Asana, Trello, ClickUp, monday.com, Bitrix24, OpenProject and more — full list. Tasks stay there, and time entries go back there if the tracker accepts them; where it doesn't, the hours stay in Taskloc — what each tracker can do. Connector pages: Redmine, Yandex Tracker, Bitrix24, Kaiten, OpenProject.

Questions from managers

Isn't this surveillance?

No. Recording starts with a session the employee starts and stops with it. Outside a session there is no location, and the employee disappears from the map. Who sees what is decided by team policies.

An employee objects — how do we handle it?

Show the boundaries: recording only during a working session, nothing collected outside it, and after stopping the person is gone from the map.

A surveyor makes one stop a day — is it still worth it?

Yes. A session covers one task, the check-in confirms the visit, and the drive is counted separately from the work on site. The value isn't in the number of stops but in having a fact for each.

How is a visit counted?

By a check-in: location, geofence, route. The visit is tied to the task, the time to the session.

What does the employee see on their own phone?

Their tasks, their shift, their route. Other people's routes and the team map are in the web dashboard, and access to them is governed by policies, not by having the app installed.

How much does it cost?

Free — forever, for one seat, with 30 days of route history. Team adds full history, the team map, reports and policies; the Team trial gives 14 days and 3 seats, once per account. Details are on the pricing page.

Try it for one day

Give one employee a phone with the app and look at their day on the map in the evening. No card is needed at sign-up and nothing is charged after the trial: after 14 days the account moves to Free and keeps working on one seat.

Team payments are currently accepted only with Mir cards issued in Russia and the CIS and via SBP. If you are elsewhere, contact us and we will look at your case — we can't promise a particular payment method in advance.