Field service billing arguments come down to one question: were you there, and for how long. A geofence around each property answers it automatically, because arrival and departure record themselves when the vehicle crosses the line.
Why does manual check-in fail?
Because it asks someone working in bad weather, at 4am, to open an app. Crews that are perfectly diligent about the work are not diligent about the paperwork surrounding it, and a check-in step that is skipped half the time produces a record you cannot bill from.
A geofence removes the step. The record is a by-product of the truck arriving.
What does snow removal need specifically?
Seasonal contracts are billed on visits, and visits are disputed months later when nobody remembers the night. The record that survives that conversation has three parts:
- Arrival and departure per property, timestamped, not typed in afterwards.
- Time on site, which is what separates a pass from a full clear.
- Route history, so a night's work can be reconstructed in the order it happened.
The seasonal shape matters too: equipment that sits for eight months should be tracked with something that does not depend on the vehicle's battery, which is the case for battery-powered asset trackers.
What about the tools and the equipment?
The second recurring cost in field work is not the vehicle, it is what came off it. Attachments, blowers and specialty gear move between trucks and sites, and the end-of-season count is where the losses appear. Tool tracking ties equipment to the truck it left with.
How does this land with crews?
Better than expected, when it is introduced as billing evidence rather than as monitoring. The first time a crew is backed against a customer who claimed the visit never happened, the argument about tracking is usually over. The framing in the first week decides which of those two things it becomes.
More on the workflow in field service.