"Well, if we were to have the hours entered digitally in, for example, an hour entry app, then we would only solve part of the problems with the time registration," notes my CEO Bjorn.

We have been consulting together for some time now and I am sharing my ideas with the MT that I believe could lead to significant cost savings on our time registration.

"Well", I continue, "I think we only solve 3 problems: in any case the recorded hours are then clearly legible, and the forms no longer have to be placed in Joke's tray, because they are automatically inserted immediately in the hours portal. And finally, Joke no longer has to enter them by hand, which saves a lot of time.  

But what it doesn't solve is that it still costs a lot of time and therefore money to manually enter working times in the field. And what we do not solve with this is that start and end times are rounded. But the most important thing we don't solve in my opinion is that the hours are still entered by our field staff. And those guys are techies, not administrators!”  

I tell my colleagues that I myself ran into this problem and that I therefore started looking for a way in which the entire process can be carried out not only digitally, but even fully automatically. I start to say enthusiastically:

"The solutions that try to do it automatically were based on vehicle tracking systems. They then install a device in every van and car that registers the GPS location of the vehicle. They use that for the journey registration and from there they try to calculate the hours of the journey. distract employees.  

But yes, there are often several employees in one van. And sometimes a bus is used by one employee during the working day to run an errand or something, while the rest are still working on location.”  

So I guess that's not ideal. After which I continue my speech.

“So we need to track the locations of the people, not the vehicles.”

“Okay”, said Bjorn, “that actually makes sense when you put it that way. And how exactly does that work?”

I explain it to him.

“If we let every field employee install an app on their smartphone, the GPS location of our employees can always be traced. If we also demarcate the locations of the projects we are working on with a geofence.”

“A what?!” Bjorn yells.

“A geofence,” I reply. “That is a kind of digital GPS fence. A geographical area that you define on a map on your computer screen.  

As soon as an employee enters the project site with his smartphone, in other words, as soon as he enters the GPS-defined area, the time and location are registered fully automatically. And when he or she leaves the area again.  

Then you have the start and end time accurate to the second. And, don't worry, this data comes directly into our time portal via the cloud. in real time.

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