Field employees constitute an important part of sales, repair, and retail businesses. They visit door to door to sell, market, or collect orders and mostly work off-site. As such, all communications between field employees and their managers take place remotely.
This can pose a serious challenge in maintaining transparency and an undisturbed workflow in the organisation. Everything from task allocation to attendance recording has to be managed remotely. This can be accomplished by implementing field employee tracking software.
Or, field managers can continue to employ tools like spreadsheets and DBMS and manually handle field operations. But it’s not feasible to use dated technology or, worse, texts and calls, to manage your field employees in the 21st century.
However, you can’t choose just any field workforce tracking software. You need to look for some essential features that will help you streamline field operations.
Top 10 Features To Look For In Every Field Employee Tracking Software
Here are the 10 must-have features that any good field employee tracking system should have. These features are essential to managing your field executives and improving their work efficiency.
1. Real-time employee visibility
The primary feature in every field employee tracking software is real-time employee visibility. This is to let managers stay aware of their staff’s movement and activity. Real-time visibility ensures:
- Regularly updated task status and employee location on the app dashboard.
- Quick access to workers’ route history.
- Visibility of battery and network status of employees’ devices.
- Offline tracking
2. Attendance management
To manage your mobile workforce, you have to enforce strict attendance guidelines. It’s easier to get away with time theft in field business, and it is quite prevalent too. But an employee tracking solution can take care of this easily. Using it, managers can:
- Assign shift timing to employees.
- Establish geofences to ensure locational verification while attendance logging.
- Demand visual proof with attached location coordinates.
- Automatic mark in/out.
3. Order management
Sales businesses require the creation, processing, and delivery of orders. All the steps need thorough attention as they directly affect customer service. Plus, companies may sell hundreds or thousands of products. In this case, manual order management is not practical. But with field employee tracking software, managers can:
- Maintain extensive order inventories.
- Track order status in real time.
- Create custom categories of orders.
- Adjust prices and offer custom discounts.
4. Expense reporting
Field employees incur various expenses during their work. These can be related to fuel, lodging, stationery, and food. Due to the work-related nature of these expenses, they have to be reimbursed by the organisation. Hence, proper authentication of expenses is a must. Field employee tracking software can:
- Let executives easily upload bills and invoices.
- Record visual proof at the site of expenses.
- Help managers check the location and time of expenses.
- Maintain a record of expenses and put a cap on them.
5. Leave tracking
Employee tracking systems can make the process of leave management hassle-free. Using it, you can:
- Upload a yearly leave calendar.
- Allow employees to schedule leaves in advance.
- Limit the number of leaves per employee.
- Create categories of leaves—full day, half day, maternity, etc.
- Set up the hierarchy of approval.
6. Task allocation
In field-based businesses, planning the daily tasks of employees can be challenging. There isn’t much face-to-face communication between field executives and managers. And remote task allocation requires a lot of factors to consider. However, field employee tracking software can optimise the task management process by:
- Assigning tasks based on employee availability and proximity to clients.
- Creating custom forms for customers or employees.
- Tracking the task status in real-time—pending, completed, rescheduled.
- Link tasks to attendance to ensure better transparency.
- Creating ad-hoc tasks and uploading tasks in bulk.
7. Payroll management
Since field employee tracking software manages attendance and leave data, it only makes sense to integrate a payroll module into it too. It can consolidate all the necessary employee data for automated salary computation. Here are some salient benefits the software offers:
- Add custom allowances and debits
- Auto link leaves, attendance, and expense data to payroll calculation
- Generate accurate salary slips.
8. Data and analytics
Field employee tracking systems store tons of data on their secure cloud servers. This data can be retrieved and analysed in various ways by the managers. Plus, the data also comes in handy during audits. Here are some insightful reports that field service software can generate:
- Target vs. achievement reports
- Distance reports to verify fuel expenses
- Route playback
- Employee efficiency reports
- Task completion rate
The software can also spot trends and identify patterns that manual analysis may miss. This can be used to narrow the skills gaps or rectify errors before they lead to serious downtime.
9. Notifications and reminders
Any software is useless if it fails to communicate to its users activity updates. How can you know what’s happening with your employees? Regularly checking every module for updates seems like a headache.
That’s why you need a system that notifies you of every minor or major update. Employee tracking software can accomplish this. Using the software, both employees and managers are instantly alerted of any changes in task status or orders.
The expense and leave approvals are quick and sent without delay to the appropriate authority. Plus, any pending tasks for employees or missing approval requests for managers result in frequent reminders.
10. Third-party integration
Using multiple apps can be a hassle for field employees and managers. The field staff is always on the go, and time is of the essence in their job. Plus, they may not possess the technical know-how to handle multiple apps. Similarly, managers can face trouble in evaluating data from several platforms.
That is why third-party integration is a much-valued feature of field employee time tracking software. This allows it to be integrated with other software like CRM or ERP, so all the employee data is consolidated onto a single platform. For example, TrackoField supports integration with 200+ apps.
Conclusion
You have now learnt about the 10 must-have features in a field employee tracking system. These features can guarantee you better results and consistent revenue. While it’s rare to find an all-in-one solution to manage field employees, it’s not impossible.
For instance, TrackoField offers all the above mentioned features and more. It can help you streamline your field workforce and substantially boost employee productivity. So without further ado, identify your business objectives and accordingly choose the best employee tracking software.