Logistics and storage
Fleet attendance when the drivers are never in
The first thing a fleet owner wants to know is whether an attendance app can follow a driver on the highway. It cannot. This page covers what a transport business can actually record, and what belongs somewhere else.
Last reviewed: September 2026
What the team looks like
A fleet of twenty to sixty vehicles keeps a small fixed team and a large moving one. Fixed at the depot: the owner, a transport manager on the phone all day, a booking clerk who writes the parcel dockets, an accounts person, two or three mechanics and a helper in the workshop shed, a washing hand, and the loaders who work the loading bay. Moving: the drivers, with a cleaner riding along on the long-haul vehicles. Local delivery drivers usually draw a monthly salary. Long-haul drivers are settled trip by trip with cash handed over at departure, so their pay and their attendance have never lived in the same book. Part of the fleet is often attached rather than owned: somebody else's vehicle, his own driver, running under your booking. That man is not on your payroll and his pay is not yours to work out.
What a day looks like
Local delivery drivers reach the depot around five, get the loading done, take the weighbridge slip and are out before the city traffic builds. The workshop opens at nine and keeps a fixed day: greasing, brake work, a tyre change and whatever came off the road overnight. The transport manager spends his morning on the phone with three drivers somewhere between here and another state.
The road side has no shift end. A driver who pulled out on Monday is back on Thursday, sometimes at two in the morning after a night halt short of the checkpost, and he sleeps in the cabin until the yard opens. He signs nothing. The depot register has him absent for four days, the trip sheet has him working all four, and accounts picks whichever paper is in front of her.
Where attendance goes wrong
The depot register only knows the people who came to the depot
Four drivers are on the road today and the book has them down as absent. Everyone in the office understands that a blank line means a running trip, so the book gets ignored. Once a register is ignored, the workshop and the loading bay stop being watched either.
Cash given at departure comes back as a payday negotiation
The driver takes money for diesel, tolls and food when he pulls out of the yard. Part of it is trip expense and part of it is against his own pay. Nobody separates the two at the gate, so the settlement three weeks later is an argument between two memories.
A trip that crosses the month lands in whichever month is convenient
He pulls out on the twenty-eighth with a load for another state and is back on the second. Salary closes on the thirty-first. Four of those days belong to one month and two to the next, and which sheet they land on depends on whether accounts had the docket in hand when she totalled the column.
Nobody watches the twenty people who never leave the yard
Mechanics, the washing hand, the loading bay crew and the booking clerk all work fixed hours in a fixed place. Because the owner's attention is on the vehicles, their timings are checked by nobody, and a mechanic who comes in at eleven has been doing it for years.
The cleaner rides on the vehicle and appears on no list
The cleaner ties the tarpaulin, checks tyre pressure and greases the vehicle, and he is paid partly from the driver's settlement and partly at the office counter. Neither record carries him properly. Two months later he stops coming, asks for his dues, and there is no column anywhere to work the figure out from.
Which modules to switch on first
01 Attendance
Begin with the depot as the office and the people who are actually there. Check-in works only inside that geofence, which is exactly why the workshop, loading bay and office side get honest timings first.
02 Advance salary
Money given against pay becomes a recorded advance with recovery spread over the following months, and the balance shows on every slip until it clears. Trip running expenses stay in your own book.
03 Salary
Local delivery drivers, the transport manager, the booking clerk and the whole workshop draw a monthly figure. It builds from days present, weekly offs, holidays and approved leave, off the same record the yard punches into, so payday stops depending on which register the clerk trusts.
04 Salary slips
A driver who has been settled in cash for years can finally see earnings, the days counted and his advance balance on one printed page, in the same figures the office is holding.
05 Daily wages
Loading bay hands are engaged by the day and paid by the day. In the harvest months you take on four more of them for a fortnight, and their wage builds from the days they worked at the yard, without a parallel sheet living in the accounts room.
Rolling it out
Set the depot as the office and draw the radius wide enough to take in the parking yard, the washing point and the workshop shed along with the office block. Put the fixed team on it in the first week: workshop, loading bay, booking and accounts. Begin in a quiet month rather than during the festival parcel rush, because the week you take on twelve extra hands is the wrong week to teach anybody a new habit. Decide separately how you will record long-haul days, because a check-in away from the depot is blocked outright. Tell the drivers in plain words that this is not following them on the highway. It takes a punch at the yard and records nothing in between.
A worked example
For example, a local delivery driver draws INR 21,500 a month against 26 payable days. INR 21,500 / 26 = INR 826.92 a day, rounded to two decimals. He was off three days that month: 3 x INR 826.92 = INR 2,480.76 in loss of pay. He had also taken INR 9,000 in March for school fees, recovered over six months at INR 1,500 a month. INR 21,500 minus INR 2,480.76 minus INR 1,500 = INR 17,519.24 payable, and the slip carries all three lines so he can follow the working himself.
Not for you if
- Almost your whole strength is long-haul drivers who see the depot twice a month. You would be buying attendance for the workshop and leaving the drivers out.
- You want to know where a vehicle is between punches. There is no live location, no route history and no trip tracking here; your GPS unit still answers that.
- You pay drivers per trip against a lorry receipt rather than per day. Pay builds from days recorded at an office, and a trip sheet is not one of those.
Frequently asked questions
A driver is out for four days on one trip. How do those days get recorded?
He cannot punch from the road, because a check-in is accepted only inside the geofence around your depot. The workable pattern is a check-in as he pulls out of the yard, another when he returns, and an admin correction for the days between, entered against the trip sheet you already keep. That correction is a manual step, and you should know it before you buy.
Will this tell me where my truck is right now?
No. There is no live location, no route history and no trip tracking of any kind between one punch and the next. What gets recorded is a check-in with a location pin at the moment it happens, inside the geofence you drew around the yard. If you need vehicle movement, keep the GPS unit already fitted on the vehicle. The two things do not overlap.
The money I hand a driver for diesel and tolls at departure, is that an advance?
Only the part of it that is against his salary. The advance module records money given against pay and recovers it over the following months, with the balance showing on every slip until it clears. Trip running expenses are not salary, and there is no expense claim or reimbursement feature here, so those stay in whatever book you keep them in today.
Our booking counter is in the city, ten kilometres from the depot. Where does the clerk check in?
Add the counter as a second office with its own radius, and assign the clerk to it. His check-in registers there and is blocked at the depot, which is the whole point of the geofence. Each person belongs to one office at a time, so on a week when you pull him to the depot, change his assignment first or you will be correcting his attendance from the admin desk every evening.
My workshop staff come in on a Sunday when a vehicle has to go back on the road. What shows up?
A check-in on a day you have marked as the weekly off. Weekly offs and holidays are part of how the month is set up, so the monthly figure already accounts for them, and a punch on that day sits in the record with its time against it. How you settle it, extra pay or a day off later, stays your call. Nothing is worked out automatically for it.
Drivers change phones every few months. Does their record go with the phone?
No. The record belongs to the employee rather than the handset. Staff sign in with a login code on an app that runs on phone and desktop, so a driver with a new phone signs in again with the same code and his history is intact. None of his past attendance, salary or advance balance is stored on the device he lost.
Similar businesses
- WarehousesPickers, loaders and forklift operators come through one gate on shifts that overlap by an hour, and half of them are paid by the day.
- ContractorsFifteen men on the slab this week and nine of them were somewhere else last week.
- Facility services companiesA facility management company sells deployed headcount, then spends the last week of every month proving it.
- Manufacturing unitsYour shift in-charge is the only person who knows who stayed back on Tuesday, and by the third of next month nobody can check him.
- Security agenciesYou deploy guards at client gates you do not own, on day and night reliefs, and the muster sits in thirty registers.
Modules to look at
- AttendanceGeofenced check-in and check-out near assigned offices, with shift grace, late marks and overnight shifts handled for you.
- Advance salaryGive an advance when staff need one. Recovery spreads over the following months and shows up on every slip.
- SalaryMonthly pay builds from attendance fractions, holidays, weekly offs and approved leave, so there are no side calculations.
- Salary slipsBranded, printable slips with earnings, an attendance summary and advance recovery. Staff see the same figures you print.
- Daily wagesPay wage-based staff per day worked, straight from the attendance record. Built for crews and site work.
Terms worth knowing
- GPS attendanceGPS attendance is marking a working day from a phone, where the app reads the device's satellite position at the instant of the punch and stores it alongside the check-in time.
- Salary advanceA salary advance is money handed to an employee before the pay it belongs to falls due, taken back from later salaries.
- Advance recoveryAdvance recovery is the taking back of a salary advance through fixed deductions from later pay.
- Payable daysPayable days are the number of days a monthly salary is spread across, and the number of days in a given month the employee is actually paid for.
See VTClock set up for transport fleets
Tell us your headcount, your shifts and how you pay people today. We will walk through the modules that fit and the ones you can leave off.