App to track employee hours and location in one daily view

What is employee time and location tracking?

Employee time and location tracking combines a time clock with GPS, so each working day shows both the hours an employee put in and the places they worked. AutoDial CRM joins the two on one web screen as part of its employee location tracking app.

Most businesses track hours in one tool and whereabouts in another, or not at all, and the two never quite line up. A timesheet says eight hours; nobody knows whether two of them were spent in traffic or at a customer. AutoDial CRM builds the day from the same events. The punch in starts the clock once the camera and position checks pass. Every pause is a separate Break, closed by Resume work, so breaks are timed individually. For staff who switch on live location from its consent screen, the phone records positions only between the two punches, and pauses them during breaks. On the web, the manager opens one employee and one date and sees it all together: worked time, breaks, idle time, time in the office, the route with numbered stops, distance and the phone’s battery. Desk staff can use the hours side alone; the route side is opt-in per person.

Employee time and location tracking benefits

• Hours and places agree

  Time and route come from the same punches, so they never contradict each other.

• Every pause on record

  Breaks are logged one by one, each with its own length.

• Visits you can see

  Stops of 5 minutes or more appear on the map with arrival and departure times.

• Office time measured

  The day view shows how much of the day was spent at the office.

• Gaps explained

  Battery level helps tell a dead phone apart from a missing person.

• Staff see their own hours

  Each employee can check their own totals on the phone.

Employee hours and location: how a day is built

A working day in AutoDial CRM is assembled from a handful of events, in order:

1. Punch in. A camera liveness step and a position test open the day and start worked time.
2. Live location. If the employee has allowed it, the phone logs positions until the day closes.
3. Breaks. Break stops the clock for that pause and halts location; Resume work restarts both.
4. Stops. Standing still for 5 minutes or longer creates a numbered stop, labelled with the area.
5. Punch out. The day closes. If someone forgets, recording still ends at the branch’s closing time.

The result reads like a diary rather than a spreadsheet: left the office at 9:40, 25 minutes at the first customer, lunch from 13:00 to 13:40, back at the office by 16:30.

Employee time and location tracking day view

Employee hours and location: reading the day view fairly

A day view is evidence, not a verdict. Idle time can mean a technician waiting for a client to open a gate, and a long stop can be a difficult job rather than a long lunch. Before raising anything with an employee, look at the whole picture: the stop’s area name, the minutes there, whether breaks were logged, and the battery line. Then ask an open question. Patterns over several weeks say far more than one odd afternoon.

Two habits keep the record useful. Agree what counts as a normal day for each role, so office staff are not judged by field standards. And let employees see the same numbers you do; the phone report shows their own hours and breaks, which makes conversations shorter and calmer.

App to track employee hours and location: setup

1. Create branches with their working hours, days off and late cut-off.
2. Get each employee signed in on their Android phone or iPhone.
3. Show everyone the punch, Break and Resume work buttons on day one.
4. For staff who travel, explain the policy and let them allow live location from its consent screen.
5. Review a few day views each week, and export the monthly report to Excel for hours.

Employee time and location tracking limits

AutoDial CRM tracks the working day, not individual tasks or projects, so it cannot bill hours to clients or approve timesheets, and it has no payroll or overtime pay. It does not monitor computer activity. Location depends on phone GPS and is opt-in per person, so an employee who has not allowed it will show hours without a route. For desk-heavy teams that live in calls rather than cars, the call time tracking app page may suit better, and the dialing tools are on the auto dialer app page.

App to track employee hours and location: example

An illustration, not a named customer. An alarm installation company in Pretoria, South Africa, has 4 office staff and 10 technicians who service about 40 sites a day between them. Overtime disputes were common because technicians wrote their own finish times. The operations manager sets up a “Pretoria East” branch with hours of 7:30 to 16:30, and technicians allow live location after a briefing. Within two weeks the day views settle most questions: one technician’s late finish is backed by a 90-minute stop at a shopping centre fault, and a route that ends at 14:00 lines up with a battery reading of 2%. The office staff use punches and breaks only. At month end the manager exports hours and kilometres to Excel.