While employee location tracking may seem like something that came out of Orwell’s 1984, it really isn’t that bad.
These apps and services are perfect for owners of small businesses, or those owning transport or delivery businesses, where you must know where your employees are. Also, by using these apps owners, as well as workers, have increased security, which is especially important for delivery services where employees can get into all kinds of situations (some of them dangerous) and always knowing their location could help them in great ways.
Knowing where your workers are is also important if you own a construction company or are in the real-estate market where your agents are mostly on the field. And using an employee location tracking service is way better than installing surveillance cameras in your offices.
While you might not hear about it, the employee location sharing market is thriving. There are more and more services and they offer more and more features. Most of them are smartphone-based and rely on workers having apps installed on their mobile devices. We searched all over the web to show you the best choices available; stay with us and discover the top 10 employee location tracking apps.
StreetSmart
StreetSmart is an all-around employee location tracking service. The platform offers a huge number of features that should make your workers visible, more productive and safe. You can see the location of each and every employee on Google Maps, showing their movement and assignment. The platform comes with multiple services, from location tracking to expenses, to job assignments and more.
With locations, you can open the map and see where every worker is along with their assignment. Aside from current location, you can access location history of every employee and see where they’ve been, how long they stayed on each address and what actions they are taking. But that’s just the start.
The platform also offers you a window to mileage information with SmartView Trips. See mileage of every employee, expense information, and compare details from GPS and Google suggested miles. You can view all routes driven by your workers along with mileage details of each and every trip. You can also integrate all data about trips and mileage into payroll and reimbursements systems.
Timesheets allow you to track overtime hours and receive notifications when a worker is late to the job, or late arriving at the job location. Also, you can integrate timesheets with your payroll system. Forms can be used for updating your stock in real time and collecting data from mobile forms and uploading them to cloud storage.
As you can see, StreetSmart allows business owners not just to track their workforce but also to manage their whole business online. The platform can be accessed via a web portal or via the mobile app.
Turtler
Turtler is an upcoming GPS tracking and location sharing application showing a lot of promise and potential owing to their absolute focus on personal data privacy and security.
They go farther than other apps in trying to keep employees aware and in control of the location sharing their companies request from them, allowing tracking and timekeeping to only turn on with clear notifications and opt-in permission being granted.
Turtler includes the whole range of employee location tracking and sharing, including time on job sites, driving behaviour, live updating of target sites for the workers to go to, and sharing employee locations with customers even if they do not have the application.
Turtler is also useful for school or public bus tracking, with riders able to check bus locations and ETA’s of arrivals at public online links.
Turtler aims to provide all the business essentials while affording the employees being GPS tracked with the utmost respect and control over their coverage.
allGeo
allGeo is another powerful workforce management app. It offers real-time employee location tracking and lots of other features. You can view the current location of all of your workers via map, and even decide to track individual employees. The app allows you to set up custom notifications regarding attendance, places, and time. In other words, you can see when a worker is late, how many workers and present on the work site, and see when someone works overtime.
Managers can set custom routes and send them to individual employees, can see their location history and track mileage. The location tracking works both indoors and outdoors, and with the mobile app managers and business owners can be informed about every single worker at all times.
Other features include setting up custom workflow rules, gathering any type of data (pictures, forms, notes, tasks), and generating automatic reports. Allow different work teams to group communicate and share location with other team members. Managers also can set custom tracking schedules (if your employees work in shifts) and assign tasks to individual workers.
The platform includes a powerful analytics engine allowing owners and managers to receive reports regarding mileage, location history, payrolls, customer visits per day, and see when their workers are not using the app. Last but not least,
allGeo integrates with all leading payroll systems.
TSheets
TSheets is one of the most popular workforce tracking service offering a wide range of services. The main one is employee GPS tracking. With it, managers can locate employees in real time, see their routes and location history and make sure they are present in office. Timesheets allow quick and automated attendance check ins and with the GPS Time Clock owners and managers can track time of all workers and see details about individual employees.
In case your employees work on the field, Tsheets Kiosk mobile app allows them to track their time against jobs, departments and more. Also, if workers don’t use a smartphone they can clock in and out with SMS, making sure that everyone is covered and can use Tsheets. Managers can see the entire workday of every employee, their work hours, locations, routes taken, and more. If a worker is on sick leave, you can manage their PTO quick and easy with TSheets, and also can approve or deny requests for paid time off.
If you have lots of work teams in your company you can track group work time instead of tracking individual workers, just further simplifying your workforce management.
On top of live tracking and time tracking, TSheets also offers a job scheduling services that can notify workers about their work shifts, help you create and assign jobs, and quickly send your employees to new field assignments. Workers can now know when they have a shift change as soon as the change is made, they can be informed if running late to the job, allowing them to notify their manager, and much more.
TSheets offers a free trial and if you decide to use the platform a monthly subscription is $4 plus $16 base fee per month for small businesses (2-99 users), or $4 plus $80 base fee per month for large companies (more than 100 users). Scheduling services are $1 per month per one employee.
Track My Workforce
Instead of trying to offer as many features as possible, Track My Workforce focuses just on workforce tracking. The platform offers real-time tracking of your employees, along with checking their routes. You can access locations via the web portal that shows you a map with locations. Managers can see route history, and set live updates for customers, great for delivery companies.
As for the mileage, you can receive daily/weekly/monthly reports containing miles driven by every employee, compare expenses with mileage, and export them as Microsoft Excel sheets.
Of course, with Track My Workforce you can get notified when someone’s running late, leaves the office or make changes to their planned route. Owners can set multiple geo-zones for all their work locations.
There’s a free two-weeks trial in case you want to try out Track My Workforce platform, with monthly subscription price being $5 per one device.
Labor Sync
With Labor Sync you’ll get a powerful employee location tracking service capable of doing much more than just tracking your workers. The platform offers real-time tracking of your workforce along with interactive maps that allow you to select each worker and see their location history along with routes they have taken. On top of that, you can select any employee and see details about them containing their mileage, location history, attendance and more. The mobile app is needed for employee tracking.
Time attendance feature allows managers to monitor arrival times, to see who’s late to work, to add overtime hours to monthly wages, to see job costing details and more. With real time reporting, you can see all info regarding attendance, wages, work hours, and you can produce customised reports that can include each type of data.
Managing payrolls is easy with Labor Sync. You can instantly export data into Quickbooks, and use reports with most payroll software. Also, Labor Sync contains spreadsheets that can ease up the process of complying with the State and Federal Department of Labor (DOL) wage and hour laws by keeping accurate activity records and assuring your compliance to wage and hour laws at all times.
Finally, with Labor Sync your workers can communicate, take field notes and receive notifications regarding meetings, schedule changes via SMS meaning they will be informed even if not using a smartphone. Also, to ensure your records are up to date and accurate, the platform offers foremen and managers the ability to log activity for their entire team. The best of all, Labor Sync offers a free 14-day trial so you can try it out before deciding to subscribe.
Nivaata Verayu
Verayu is a powerful employee location sharing system offering a wide range of services. Managers can track employees, select individual workers and check out their location and route history, all that via a nice web portal that includes an interactive map as well as many tools to work with.
You can dispatch individual employees to new tasks, organise routes and optimise them, schedule future routes, and monitor all current ones. Automatically track attendance and see who’s late. Also, workers can inform you when finished with a delivery and you can see all their completed tasks in a spreadsheet. Automatic reports can inform owners and managers about all details such as performance analytics, attendance, spatial analytics and more.
On top of that, workers can capture field data (photos, surveys, questioners, and reports). The platform doesn’t integrate with payroll services and doesn’t offer any payroll-related tools, but other than that it is a powerful tool for business owners (especially for delivery businesses) and managers. You can try out the service free for one whole month.
Hubstaff
With Hubstaff you can run a whole company, and this system is perfect for any small business. As of late, the platform introduced real time GPS employee tracking, adding another feature to its already huge list of services.
With Hubstaff time tracking app you can monitor all of your workers in real time. Check out their routes, their location history, compare time spent driving and work hours, and much more. You can see how long each employee spent at all destinations, see when they leave their work location, calculate and analyse job costs, create automatic timesheets and customisable reports.
With mobile time tracking your workers can track their work time while on the field very accurately. They can stop the tracking during breaks, or while they are traveling to the job site.
Other features Hubstaff offers include automatic payroll system, creating time and cost budgets for every project, and monitoring what employees do during their work hours by looking sites they visit and automatic screenshots of their desktop.
Owners and managers can schedule shifts and manage attendance from the web portal and can create alerts that are sent to workers who are running late to the job as well as notifications for owners and managers informing them if a worker is late or if they miss a day or two. Overall, with Hubstaff you can manage every aspect of your business with ease, and the platform is especially handy for those who work with freelance workforce and those who own a delivery or construction businesses. Hubstaff offers a 14-day free trial so you can check out all available services before deciding to subscribe.
Timr
Timr is a cloud-based time tracking solution that also offers some GPS employee tracking features. The platform’s primary focus is on accurate and effective work hours tracking. Managers can track employees’ work hours, sick leaves and compensatory leaves. They can also track individual projects and can manage all administration and workers via Timr web app.
Aside from tracking work hours, Timr gives business owners and managers an ability to create new projects, to make time and cost budgets, and construct reports and sheets which can be easily accessed on the web or via a mobile app. Detailed analytics tools allow you to see project reports, and reports detailing every employee’s work hours, attendance, and absences. Reports can be exported for easy payroll management.
The platform is also capable of tracking all your employees via GPS when they are on field assignments. You can see their route and location, see mileage and calculate costs, as well as see where your employees are. The platform doesn’t feature GPS tracking for office workers, but GPS tracking of the field employees will be enough for most employers. As most other services features on this list, Timr offers a free trial.
Timesheet Mobile
Timesheet Mobile is a simple to use employee location tracking service that comes with a few extra goodies. It offers time tracking timesheets based on GPS geofencing. Just create all your work places and track employees, their arrivals, see if someone’s running late, and more. Workers will automatically be monitored and the owner and managers will be alerted if an employee leaves the workplace. Follow workers while they are on the road, their routes and location history.
Other features offered by Timesheet mobile include a powerful employee scheduling tool giving you means to create recurring calendar events, and automatic notifications for employees reminding them when their shift starts and ends, as well alerting them if they are running late.
With the GPS-enabled Punch Prompt technology, your workforce can quickly clock in and out. If they leave the job site the app will remind them to clock off, and you will be able to see automatic reports containing records of arrival and departure times of all your workers. The service works in offline mode, and when the network is back, it will automatically upload all data to cloud storage. Your managers can run online timesheet reports and track regular and overtime hours to quickly manage payroll. These reports are able to integrate with QuickBooks Desktop, QuickBooks Online, Xero, or FreshBooks, making payroll management easy, simple, and hassle-free.
Create projects, checklists, and communicate with your employees via mobile app, always ensuring effective two-way communication. You can message work teams or individual workers and can always be in the know about current projects. Timesheet Mobile is a powerful platform that offers lots of features along with mobile app support and if you want to check it out, a 30-day free trial is available for all potential clients.
StaySafe
StaySafe is an employee location tracking solution specifically designed for businesses that rely on field work. If you own a construction, property, retail, field services, or delivery company StaySafe may be a perfect choice for your business. The platform offers a mobile app that tracks workers at all times, see their routes, and check out where are they at the moment.
Employees can check in, and if in emergency they can request assistance by sending messages to managers. This way they are always safe while on the field, and you can also be safe knowing where your workers are. The solution doesn’t offer additional services, such as timesheets, payroll integration, attendance records, analytics, and reports but is an excellent way to track your workers if you own a company that provides field services and want to know where your workforce is.
The platform offers a small and simple wearable device able to track an employee, giving it means to check in and inform employer if they are in danger. The device automatically sends alerts if a worker gets injured (by falling or impacting the ground), making StaySafe an excellent choice for tracking workers if you own a construction company. StaySafe also offers an SMS communication hub allowing you to send messages and notification to workers who don’t use smartphones.
Further reading on apps
