Personal GPS monitoring of staff

As delivery and field service grow in Baku, more and more companies are managing people who spend the whole day away from the office: couriers, sales representatives, service engineers. Running them by phone calls and messaging apps alone is awkward: it is hard to tell who is where, and there is nothing to confirm a disputed visit with.

In short, what monitoring gives you. The dispatcher sees staff on the map during working hours, and in the evening the manager gets a report on the visits: whether the person was at the customer's site, how long they spent there, which photographs and signatures they sent in. That makes it possible to deal with late arrivals and customer complaints on the facts rather than on what people say.

For higher-risk work — guarding sites, patrol rounds, inspecting industrial areas — there are personal trackers with an SOS button, fall detection and a voice link to the dispatcher. They do not depend on a smartphone, but they do have to be charged and signed out.

Working hours. Positions are reported according to the shift schedule, which is set for each employee. Outside the shift there is no data, and that is visible in the report. If someone finished early or stayed late, the dispatcher sees the actual time the reporting started and stopped.

Confirming a job. A visit counts as completed not because someone was nearby, but because of the mark made in the app: the task status, a photograph, the customer's signature. The geofence around the point shows that the person was there; the mark shows that the work was done. Either one on its own gives an incomplete picture.

Access to the data. Who sees what is set by user rights: the supervisor sees their own team, the manager sees everyone, the employee sees their own routes. The history is kept on the platform, and only users with the appropriate rights can export it.

Paperwork. Introducing monitoring is worth formalising with an order that staff sign to say they have read it, and for work on personal phones you should obtain written consent. We provide document templates as a starting point; the final wording, taking the Labour Code and the personal data law into account, should be agreed with your own lawyer.

Staff data is held on GPS.az servers in Azerbaijan: we use Wialon Local, a local installation of the platform. GPS.az is responsible for availability and backups, and the retention period and the terms are set out in the contract.

GPS data is exported to reports and to the working time record: the hours staff work in the field are confirmed by the track, and the reports are produced in a form suitable for bookkeeping and tax accounting. That simplifies the calculation of wages, holiday pay and social contributions, and takes work off the HR department.