We build for the people working outside

The problem we kept running into

Service businesses in India run on field staff — technicians, guards, housekeepers, engineers, representatives. Their work happens on somebody else’s premises, which means the two most basic management questions become surprisingly hard: did they go, and how long were they there?

The existing answers are all unsatisfying. A paper register at each client site proves nothing and arrives at payroll as a photograph. A biometric device is fixed to a wall, which is the one place the work is not happening. A WhatsApp group produces a stream of messages nobody can audit three months later when a client disputes an invoice.

So most companies do the reasonable thing and trust their people, then absorb the cost of the small percentage who take advantage of it — and, more expensively, lose every dispute with a client because they have no evidence.

What we decided to build

Trackrr records three things at the moment work starts: who (a live selfie), where (GPS coordinates), and when (a server-side timestamp). It repeats that at check-out. That is the whole idea, and almost everything else in the product is reporting on top of it.

The constraint we held ourselves to was that a field employee should need no training. If a technician cannot use it correctly on their first day without being taught, we have failed, regardless of how good the dashboard is.

Where we draw the line

There is a version of this product that tracks people continuously through the day, and it would be easy to build. We do not build it, and we turn down the requests. Verification of agreed work at an agreed place is a fair thing to ask of an employee. Watching them between jobs is not, and in our experience it also destroys adoption — a team that feels surveilled finds ways around the tool within a month.