While a driver runs a dispatch, the app sends the phone's positions to the server, which works out arrivals and departures from those positions and the address.
The zone
Each stop has a geozone: the union of the drawn areas on the address, see Draw the areas to clear, each with 15 metres of tolerance outside it. The tolerance is there because the vehicle sits at the edge of what it clears as often as in the middle of it, at the mouth of a drive or in the bay beside a yard, and a phone on a dashboard is accurate to about ten metres. It is not drawn anywhere; the map shows the area exactly as it was drawn. A drawn line counts too: a curb or a path drawn with the line tool has no area, so the phone is at the stop when it is within 20 metres of any part of the line, a lane's width plus the usual GPS error. That band is not drawn anywhere; the map shows the line as it was drawn. An address with no drawing at all uses a circle of 40 metres around its pin, enough for a villa frontage plus the usual GPS error, too small for a business park. Points drawn on the map do not count. An address with neither drawing nor pin cannot be checked in by GPS at all.
A visit
- A position inside the zone opens a visit, or extends the one that is open.
- A position outside changes nothing on its own. The visit ends only once the driver has been outside for five minutes without a break, and it ends at the last position inside, not five minutes later.
- A return after five or more minutes away is a new visit.
- Positions the phone itself reports as worse than 75 metres are ignored; they can neither open nor close a visit.
- Only positions count. A zone narrower than the distance between two positions can be driven through unseen, and a parked vehicle sends nothing.
The stop's times
- Check-in is the first arrival by any driver. It is written only when the stop has no check-in yet, so a time the driver entered by hand is never moved.
- Check-out is the end of the latest finished visit. It only moves later, never earlier; a manual check-out further ahead stands.
- Leaving the zone finishes the stop: when the visit closes, the stop is marked Completed under the same conditions as a manual check-out (a check-in if the address is priced hourly, a photo if the address requires one). If a condition is missing, the times are kept and the stop stays open for the driver to settle.
- Unless the route says not to. With Location completion by GPS switched off on the route, see the settings of a route, leaving the zone still records the arrival and the departure but never completes the stop: the driver marks each one done. Routes are switched on by default, and the driver app shows a note on a route that is not.
- A stop that is Completed, Unable, Removed or Cancelled is never rewritten. Driving past afterwards is not a return. Completing a stop from inside the zone closes the visit at the last position inside.
Hourly work is billed on check-out minus check-in, see which price applies. On the web, check-in and check-out can be edited while the stop is open, not once it is completed or unable.
Where you see it
The stop panel shows it all under Drive at the address: the zone, the drive inside it, and a Visit timeline with Arrived and Left per driver. The bar under it is the record of the address: coloured where somebody was inside the zone, grey for the time nobody was. A stop worked in two passes has a gap in the middle. The same trail is what the insurance report prints.
Under the map the ground itself is listed, one line per drawing tool, in the colour it was drawn in: an area with its size, a line with its length, a point tool with how many pins it has. It is the same measurement the address carries, so the stop panel and the address never quote two different figures for the same ground; see Draw the areas to clear.
Still inside is only said while the phone is actually reporting from the zone. If it stops sending, the line reads Last seen 12:17 instead, because that is the last moment anybody knows they were there.
A stop that was settled without the GPS ever seeing it, because an office user completed it or the driver never had the app reporting, says No GPS recorded instead of an arrival and a departure. It is not the same as Not started, which is kept for work that genuinely has not begun. A visit registered with a departure and no arrival names the time it does have rather than hiding it.
A visit that never ended
A visit ends when the phone reports from outside the zone. A driver who drives away is closed automatically five minutes later, whether or not the app is still open. A phone that dies on the property is different: nothing more is coming, and the system will not guess a departure, because silence there can just as easily be a plow still working.
Such a visit stays open, and while it does the stop has no check-out and its hours cannot be counted. There are two ways it ends:
- Close it yourself. On the visit's line, press Set departure, enter when the crew actually left, and save. It settles exactly as it would have if the phone had reported the departure itself. Only while the dispatch is open, and only for the business responsible for the stop.
- Complete the dispatch. Marking the run completed closes any visit still open, each at the last moment its driver was recorded inside the zone. Completing is you saying the work is over, so nobody is left on an address; the time is not invented, it is the last one on record.