When business owners research GPS tracking for field crews, most assume "GPS tracking" means a constant stream of location data — a dot moving across a map every few seconds. That model exists. It's used for fleet telematics, package delivery, and vehicle compliance. But it's rarely the right model for service businesses with skilled field technicians, and understanding the difference between continuous GPS and geofence-based tracking will affect which system you buy, how your crew reacts to it, and whether it actually solves your payroll problem.
How continuous GPS works
Continuous GPS polling wakes up the phone's GPS hardware on a fixed interval — every 5 seconds, 30 seconds, or 2 minutes depending on the system — captures a coordinate, and sends it to the server. This produces a dense trail of location breadcrumbs across the day. You can see exactly where someone drove, how long they spent at a red light, and whether they took the highway or the surface streets. For a delivery driver or a long-haul trucker where route compliance matters, this granularity is useful. For an HVAC technician whose value to you is getting to the job and completing the work, it's mostly noise.
How geofence tracking works
Geofencing defines a radius around a specific location — your shop, a job site, a client address. The phone's operating system monitors those virtual boundaries passively, using low-power cell tower and Wi-Fi triangulation rather than active GPS hardware polling. When the device crosses a boundary, the OS wakes up the app to record the event. The event has a timestamp, a location, and an entry or exit direction. The phone then goes back to low-power monitoring mode. The result: you capture the data that matters (when someone arrived and left) without continuously running the GPS hardware.
Battery impact
Continuous GPS polling can use 15–25% of daily battery. Geofence monitoring typically adds 8–15% over a full work shift — roughly comparable to having a navigation app open occasionally.
What you lose with geofencing (and why it usually doesn't matter)
Geofencing doesn't give you a second-by-second movement trail. If a technician drives from job A to job B, you know when they left A and when they arrived at B, but not the specific route they took. For most service businesses, this is fine — route optimization is a dispatch and scheduling problem, not a timecard problem. If route compliance is important for your business (e.g., you have insurance or regulatory reasons to document specific roads), continuous GPS is the better choice.
The adoption problem with continuous GPS
Here's the practical reality that GPS tracking vendors don't usually lead with: technicians resist continuous tracking. When employees feel they're being watched every minute of the workday, morale declines, retention suffers, and in some cases candidates decline job offers when they learn about the tracking policy. A 2023 Pew Research survey found that 56% of workers whose employers monitor their movements continuously report feeling that the monitoring negatively affects their wellbeing.
Geofence tracking is much easier to explain and accept. "We record when you arrive and leave job sites" is a defensible, understandable use of GPS. "We track your exact location every 30 seconds all day" is harder to justify to someone who just wants to do their job. The payroll problem you're trying to solve is about arrival and departure times — you don't need the second-by-second data to solve it.
Side-by-side comparison
| Continuous GPS | Geofence tracking | |
|---|---|---|
| What's captured | Every location, every N seconds | Arrivals and departures at registered locations |
| Battery use (full shift) | 15–25% additional | 8–15% additional |
| Privacy exposure | High — full movement log all day | Low — events only at work locations |
| Employee reception | Often resisted | Generally accepted with clear disclosure |
| Best for | Fleet compliance, delivery routing | Field service timecard accuracy |
| Data volume | High — thousands of points per day | Low — typically 4–10 events per day |
| Dispute resolution | Excellent — full trail | Good — timestamped arrival/departure records |
Which should you use?
If your primary problem is accurate timecards and payroll verification, geofence tracking solves it with less employee friction, lower battery impact, and simpler data to manage. If you also need to optimize routes, verify vehicle usage, or meet insurance/compliance requirements around specific road usage, a hybrid — geofencing for payroll, periodic GPS breadcrumbs for routing — may be worth the added complexity.
For field service
Geofence tracking solves the payroll accuracy problem at a fraction of the privacy cost of continuous GPS. For most HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and landscaping companies, it's the right choice.