Field service tracking nobody has to fill in
Already running Yipii in Malta and Gozo
Where a day on the vans leaks money
Dispatch without tracking runs on the phone. A call comes in, you ring round to find out who is where, and you send whoever picked up. Four things follow from that, and they come up in nearly every conversation we have with a trades business in Malta.
You send the one who answered
A boiler packs up in Mellieħa at 11:20. Two technicians are up a ladder and do not pick up, so the call goes to the one you reached in Birkirkara while a van sits idle in Naxxar.
The hour the customer will not pay for
You bill three hours for an AC install in Sliema. The customer says the van was outside for two. Your technician wrote the times from memory, so you credit the hour to keep the account.
The gap between the third call and the fourth
Six call-outs on the sheet and 140 km on the clock. Somewhere in there is a 40-minute stop that went on no piece of paper, and the fuel bill is the only place it ever shows up.
Friday afternoon, filling in Monday
A technician reconstructs a week of start times, site times and mileage from memory. That is not dishonesty, just memory, and your payroll and your job costing both sit on top of it.
One call-out, from the phone to the invoice
Times are an example. The sequence is the point, and every step below is something you can open in the account.
- 109:12
The call comes in
A tenant in Gżira has no hot water. You open the live map, see where all twelve vans are and what each one is doing, and send the technician already two streets away instead of the one you happened to reach. Positions refresh every 30 seconds while a van is moving.
- 209:20
The customer gets a link
You create a tracking link for that van and send it by SMS or WhatsApp yourself. Nothing goes out on its own unless you build that with the API. The customer opens it in any browser and watches the van come towards them, with no arrival time on the page and nothing else about your business.
- 309:41
The van reaches the address
It crosses the geofence you drew around that site and the arrival is timestamped. A link can close itself on arrival too, on a radius between 50 m and 5,000 m with a wait of 0 to 60 minutes inside it. That radius is a setting on the link, separate from the geofence you drew, so sizing one does not resize the other.
- 411:05
Back on the road
The departure is timestamped too. The point visits report now holds the pair, the time on site between them, the GPS position it happened at, and the travel time on to the next address. Nobody typed a figure.
- 517:40
The van goes home
Link scheduling decides when a shared link works at all. Set Monday to Friday, 07:00 to 18:00, and a customer who opens it at nine in the evening gets a "not available" message rather than a map of where your technician parks.
- 6Friday
In the office
Visits per day, average time on site, and this week against last week, van by van. Driver activity adds total driving time, total on-site time, distance, and the first and last call of the day. Both export to PDF or Excel.
What you pay depends on how many vehicles you run and what you fit to them. Tell our Malta team both and we will quote it.
Ask for a quoteField service tracking in Malta, feature by feature
One account and one map. The visit record and the van service schedule sit next to each other rather than in two systems nobody reconciles.
- GeofencingA zone around every customer site turns crossings into arrival and departure times, including for visits you made before you drew it.Yipii IoT
- Live Share TrackingA link for the call-out. Three run free, and above that the billing counts the vans you share, not the links you make.Yipii IoT add-on
- Driver ScoringA 0 to 100 score from harsh braking, harsh acceleration, harsh cornering and speeding. No fuel and no idling in it.Yipii IoT
- AlertsSpeeding, a van moving outside working hours, a vehicle in or out of a zone. Each one notifies and nothing more.Yipii IoT
- MaintenanceService reminders by date or by mileage, so a van doing 40,000 km a year is not on the same calendar as one doing 8,000.Yipii Mobility
The live map, geofencing, reporting, alerts and driver scoring are part of Yipii IoT, the core tracking account. Sharing links are an IoT add-on, and every account gets three active ones before that starts costing anything. Service reminders are the single item here that comes from Yipii Mobility rather than IoT. Hours against a person rather than against a registration come from the Driver add-on, a separate line again, and both the timesheet row below and the billing question in the FAQ rest on it.
Included with Yipii Mobility, the add-on that extends your IoT account. One subscription covers everything in the app, so no feature here is sold on its own. What Yipii Mobility includes
The phone in the van, or a tracker behind the dash
Most trades businesses in Malta start with Yipii Driver, which turns a technician's phone into the tracker. Nothing to fit, nothing to book in, and a van can be on the map the same afternoon. The honest limit is that it reports while the app is running and the phone has charge, and it follows the person rather than the vehicle. When you want the tracking to stay with the van instead, we fit a hardwired Teltonika unit behind the dash, FMB120 or FMC130 class, wired to permanent power. Plenty of trades fleets run both: phones for the subcontractors, hardwired units in the vans you own.
- Yipii Driver puts a technician on the map with nothing fitted
- Hardwired Teltonika FMB120 and FMC130 class, fitted by our own installers
- iButton or Bluetooth beacon for driver ID where two technicians share a van
- A Yipii multi-network SIM that switches between GO, Melita and Epic
Twelve technicians, and the arithmetic under them
The sum below covers a twelve-technician operation across 46 working weeks, with every assumption showing. One thing to be straight about on the first row: the gain is an extra job, and what Yipii counts is site visits, an arrival and a departure against an address. The job is yours to price.
The four rows added up, for a twelve-technician operation over a year.
The first row is the one we argue about most on a call.
| Lever | Assumption | Over a year |
|---|---|---|
| One more site visit per technician per week | 12 technicians, one extra visit each per week, €60 of margin on it, over 46 working weeks | €33,120 |
| Less driving between call-outs | 10 km a day saved per technician across 12 technicians, at €0.45 a km, over 230 working days | €12,420 |
| The "where is my technician" calls | 6 calls a day at 3 minutes each answered by a link instead of a person, office time at €14 an hour, over 230 working days | €966 |
| Timesheet disputes | 2 hours a month of admin arguing about hours, at €18 an hour | €432 |
The whole table sits on 46 working weeks, or 230 days, so a six-day operation pushes the middle two rows up. The calls row comes out at €966 rather than the €1,050 our own docs carried, because €1,050 needs a 250-day year and this table does not use one. The timesheet row assumes the Driver add-on, which is what puts hours against a person rather than against a registration. Illustrative arithmetic, not a measured customer outcome.
Frequently asked
Most technicians appreciate it once they understand it protects them too. The record that shows where the van went is the same record that shows they were at the site when a customer claims nobody came, and that they were doing 45 km/h when somebody rings in about a white van. Two things make the conversation easier. Tell them before you fit anything rather than after, and use link scheduling so a shared link only works during working hours. Set Monday to Friday, 07:00 to 18:00, and nobody outside the business can watch a van in the evening. The objection is almost always about being watched at home, and that one is a setting you can close.
You can use it as the evidence behind the invoice. A geofence around the customer address turns every crossing into an arrival, a departure, a time on site and a GPS position, and the point visits report exports the lot to PDF or Excel. What it proves is that your van was at that address between those two times. It does not know what happened inside the building and it is not a signed job sheet. Hours against a person, rather than hours against a vehicle, come from the Driver add-on, which is where timesheets live. Most trades businesses we speak to keep invoicing in their own system and use the visit record to settle the argument when one starts.
No, and we would rather say so plainly than let you find out later. A tracking link shows the live position of the van on a map and stops there. There is no arrival estimate on the page, no speed, no driver name and no history. What the customer gets is the van visibly coming towards them, which answers the question they were about to ring you about. If you want to tell somebody you are on the way, that is still a message a person sends, or an API call you write. Nothing goes out automatically.
Only if the account knows who was driving. On its own, a visit and a driver score belong to the vehicle, so a van assigned to one technician gives you the answer and a van two people share does not. Fit an iButton reader or a Bluetooth beacon and the technician identifies themselves at the start of a shift, and from that point the visit record and the score follow the person instead of the registration. It is a small part fitted at the same time as the tracker, and it is worth doing before you start using any of this in a conversation somebody might dispute.
No. Yipii IoT complements dispatching software by adding the live position underneath it. Your scheduler still decides who goes where and still holds the customer, the parts and the price. Yipii IoT has no concept of a job at all. It records vehicles, trips, site visits and times, so nothing in it assigns, opens or closes work. What it adds is the part your scheduler cannot see: where the van actually is, and how long it actually stayed. If you want the two joined up, the API is documented and the join is yours to build.
A service round leans on three of the cross-industry jobs: Proof of service & site hours, Driver ID & auto-assignment and Lone worker safety.
The dispatch sequence, the geofence setup for customer sites and the reports behind the visit record are written out in the field service guide in the Yipii IoT docs.