Geofencing for fleets. Know when a vehicle reaches the site.
Draw a zone once, use it everywhere
A geofence is a shape on the map. What makes it worth drawing is everything that reads it afterwards.
Circle or polygon
A circle needs a pin and a radius. A polygon needs three or more corners, for a site whose edges matter, like a quarry or an industrial estate.
Three alert triggers
Inside geozone, outside geozone, and nearest geopoint. Pair any of them with quiet hours so the depot stays silent when the fleet legitimately leaves.
Arrival and departure reports
Per site, exported to PDF or Excel. Attach one to an invoice when a customer asks what time your van was actually there.
One zone, reused
A saved geofence works in alerts, in reports and as a route stop, and it can end a public tracking link when the vehicle arrives.
Sizing is where geofencing for fleets goes wrong
Too small and GPS drift pushes a parked vehicle in and out of the zone, raising an alert each time. Too large and it catches vehicles that were only driving past. These are the numbers that hold up on Maltese sites.
- A circle needs a pin and a radius, and covers most cases
- A polygon needs three or more corners, for an irregular site
- A yard or a school gate sits right at 100 to 250 m
- An industrial estate or a port wants 800 to 1,000 m
A geofence does nothing on its own
The zone is a shape. An alert is what turns a boundary crossing into a message on your phone. Three alert types read a geofence, and each one can be scoped to a single vehicle or to a whole group. Put one on quiet hours and a sleeping depot becomes a theft alarm: nothing should leave the yard at 02:00 on a Sunday.
- Inside geozone fires while the asset is inside the shape
- Outside geozone fires while it is outside
- Nearest geopoint fires when an asset comes within range of a point
- Quiet hours keep the 06:00 depot exodus off your phone
What geofences will not tell you
There is no dwell-time alert
You cannot ask Yipii to message you when a vehicle has been somewhere for 40 minutes. Saved geofences do carry dwell settings, 120 seconds on arrival and 30 seconds on departure by default, but those only debounce detection so a van pausing at the gate is not counted as a visit.
For how long a vehicle stayed, the answer lives in the stops and point-visits reports.
A crossing is only as prompt as the tracker
Crossings are evaluated on incoming tracker data. An asset that reports infrequently, or one sitting in a dead spot, crosses the line before we hear about it. The arrival still lands, it just lands late.
Nothing happens at all while a device is offline. That is expected behaviour, and the crossing surfaces once the tracker reconnects.
Proof of arrival, without a phone call
Every crossing is logged against the site that produced it. Arrival and departure export to PDF or Excel, which settles the 'your van never came' conversation in about ten seconds. The same saved zone can end a customer's public tracking link automatically when the vehicle pulls in, so nobody keeps watching a driver after the job is done.
- Arrival and departure per site, exported to PDF or Excel
- Timestamps you can attach to an invoice or a job sheet
- A public tracking link that expires on arrival
- The same saved zone doubles as a route stop
Depots, yards and rooms, mapped once
Sites, locations and rooms live in Yipii Mobility. Build the hierarchy your operation already has, from Main Depot down to a building, a floor and a room, then switch the table to map view to see every location with coordinates plotted as a marker. Each site takes an optional radius in metres, which time tracking uses to check whether a clock-in came from the expected place. A clock-in outside the radius is flagged for review, never blocked.
- Depots, warehouses, offices, job sites and individual rooms
- Parent and child locations, with the parent shown in the table
- Map view of every location that has coordinates
- 50 m for one building, 150 m for a depot with parking, 500 m for a loose construction site
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
Frequently asked
A geofence is exactly as accurate as the position that crosses it. Yipii evaluates crossings on the positions your tracker sends, so accuracy comes down to the GPS fix and how often the device reports. In practice the thing that decides whether a zone behaves is its size, not the hardware. A circle drawn tight around a single parking bay will flip a parked van in and out all afternoon as the fix drifts. Fenced at the sizes in the shapes and sizing section, the same site stays quiet.
There is no hard limit. The practical ceiling is how many zones you can keep meaningful. Name each one the way your team already says it out loud, "Marsa Depot" rather than "Zone 1", because that name appears in every alert and every report. Categories are available for grouping, and a geofence with no category still works everywhere.
Yes. Zones are drawn on the map, so anywhere you can see is somewhere you can fence, in Malta, in Gozo, or on a site abroad. One honest caveat for Gozo work: on the ferry crossing a tracker can lose signal for a few minutes. Positions are only evaluated when they arrive, so a crossing that happened in the gap surfaces once the device reconnects rather than at the moment it occurred.
No, and we would rather say so than let you find out later. Yipii has no dwell-time alert, so no rule fires once a vehicle has been parked somewhere for a set number of minutes. Run the stops report or the point-visits report instead: both give you an arrival time, a departure time and how long the vehicle stayed. The dwell settings on a geofence itself do a different job, explained further up this page.
Two things fix almost every noisy zone. First, look at the shape: a circle drawn tight to the building is the usual culprit, and a site on a busy road wants a polygon that follows the boundary rather than a circle overlapping the carriageway. Second, put the alert on quiet hours, so the depot says nothing while the fleet leaves at 06:00 and speaks up when something moves at 02:00 on a Sunday.
The rest of the picture
Setting one up step by step, including the sizing table and the troubleshooting list, is written out in the geofencing guide in the Yipii IoT docs.