Technician GPS and Time Tracking App Development

What technician time tracking has to capture

A technician’s day is not one block of work. It starts at the shop or at home, includes drive time between jobs, a supply house stop, lunch, a long diagnostic at one house and a quick fix at another, and sometimes ends with an emergency call at night. Payroll needs total hours and overtime. Operations needs to know what share of the day was spent on site versus on the road. And when a customer says the tech was only there for 20 minutes, someone needs a reliable record. Tepia builds time tracking apps that serve all three needs from the same punches.

Labor law shapes the design. The Fair Labor Standards Act sets weekly overtime after 40 hours, California adds daily overtime and strict meal and rest break rules, and public projects can require prevailing wage reporting with certified payroll. Tepia encodes the rules that apply to your locations so timesheets arrive correct rather than being fixed by hand every Monday.

Trust matters too. Technicians who feel watched will resist any app. Tepia captures location only while they are on the clock, explains what is recorded, and lets them see their own timeline. Some states, including New York and Connecticut, require notice to employees before electronic monitoring, and Tepia builds that notice into onboarding.

Time events and how the app handles each one

Tepia defines every type of time event, how it is captured and where it goes. This is a typical model for a trade contractor:

Because each event has a rule and a destination, Tepia can produce both a payroll ready timesheet and labor hours by job from the same data.

GPS done carefully: accuracy, battery and privacy

Phone GPS is good but not perfect, especially in dense neighborhoods, high rise buildings and basements. Tepia sets geofence sizes per job type and treats location as a prompt for the technician to confirm, not an automatic punch that can be wrong. Location is sampled efficiently using the operating system’s location services, so the app does not drain a phone battery by midafternoon.

If your trucks already carry telematics from Samsara, Geotab or Motive, Tepia can use vehicle location for drive time and keep the phone for on site events, which reduces battery use further. See our telematics integration page for that pattern. Supervisors can see live positions during the workday for dispatch, while historical breadcrumbs are limited to managers who need them for disputes or payroll review. Tepia stores location data encrypted at rest and in transit, with retention periods you set.

Payroll and system integrations

Time data is only useful once it reaches payroll and job records. Tepia exports approved timesheets to ADP, Gusto, Paychex or QuickBooks Payroll with earnings codes for regular, overtime, double time and on call hours. Job labor hours flow to your field service platform, whether ServiceTitan, Jobber or a Tepia built system, so each job shows actual labor. For public works, Tepia can produce certified payroll reports from the same records. The technician scheduling and dispatch software we build uses these same time events to improve future scheduling estimates.

How Tepia approaches GPS and time tracking apps

Tepia runs its six phases on every time tracking build, with a US based project manager responsible for the schedule and for keeping payroll and operations aligned.

1. Discovery: a review of your current timesheets and payroll corrections, the labor rules in each state you operate in, and interviews with technicians, dispatchers and payroll staff. Deliverables are an Investigation Summary, an Interview Summary and User Stories such as a technician correcting a missed punch after a late emergency call.
2. Design: a design questionnaire, moodboards and a style guide, then wireframes of the status bar technicians tap all day, the break reminder and the supervisor approval queue.
3. Development and Testing: an Alpha with a few technicians and a Beta running alongside your old method for a full pay cycle, with functional, user acceptance and non functional tests for battery use, GPS accuracy and overtime math.
4. Training: short in person sessions for technicians focused on the location notice and status buttons, plus a payroll session on approvals and exports.
5. Launch: a clean start date aligned with a pay period, import of employees and pay rules, and support reps available during the first two payroll runs.
6. Support: quick issue response, bug tracking and feature requests such as a new rule when you open a branch in another state.

Discovery typically takes 1 to 3 months, development and QA 2 to 6 months, and launch about a month. Read our process for more.

When a standalone time clock app is enough

If your technicians work in one state, your field service platform already tracks job time, and payroll rarely needs corrections, a standalone time clock app may serve you well, and Tepia will say so. A custom build pays off when you operate across states with different rules, run prevailing wage work, need job level labor hours that match payroll, or want time tracking inside the same app your technicians already use. Browse our work or talk to Tepia about your crews.

Frequently asked questions