Crew Site Log: The Complete User Guide

Automatic arrival and departure logging for field crews, explained end to end: what it does, every screen, every option, every way to get the records to the office, and what to do when something looks wrong. Written to be reread; bookmark it on every phone that uses the feature.

Part 1
What it is and how it works

Every job site you save in FieldWatt can carry GPS coordinates and a radius. Together they define an invisible circle called a geofence. The iPhone itself watches those circles using the same low power system Apple uses for "remind me when I get home": the app does not need to be open, the screen does not need to be on, and the phone can sit in a pocket all shift.

The feature running healthy: green permission, 2 of 2 sites watched, events flowing.

Where it lives: open Settings → Crew Site Log, or Site Forms → Crew → Crew Site Log. Both go to the same screen, shown here.

What gets recorded per event: the site name, the technician name from the phone's profile, arrival or departure, and the time. That is the entire record. There is no map, no route, no live tracking, and nothing at all recorded away from saved sites.

Where records go: they stay on the phone until they leave one of two ways, both under your control:

• Daily log email: the tech taps one button and a formatted summary emails to the office and to the tech. Needs nothing to set up.
• Instant alerts: each event posts immediately to an automation address your company owns, which turns it into an email, a Google Sheet row, a Slack message, or all three. Ten minutes to set up, covered in Part 6.

Part 2
What it can do for you

Same feature, six different jobs. Pick the ones that match your operation; the setup is identical, only the delivery choice differs.

Part 3
Setup, step by step

1Fill in the company profile

Open Site Forms → Company, crew, sites, recipients. Fill in at minimum:

• Your name (technician): stamps every event, so the office knows whose phone logged it.
• Company email: where the daily log email goes.
• Your email: the tech gets a copy of their own logs.

2Get coordinates for each site

Each site needs latitude and longitude in decimal form. Anatomy of a valid entry:

From Apple Maps on the iPhone:

1. Search the address or switch to satellite view and find the site.
2. Touch and hold the exact spot the crew actually works from: the gate, the laydown yard, the parking area. A pin drops.
3. Swipe the place card up; the coordinates are listed near the bottom. Tap them and they copy.
4. Paste into a note or text them to whoever is setting up the phones.

From Google Maps (phone or computer):

1. Press and hold the spot (on a computer, right click it).
2. The decimal coordinates appear in the pin card or at the top of the menu; tap or click to copy.

3Set each site's radius

The radius is how far the circle reaches from the pin, in meters. Phones locate themselves within roughly 20 to 50 meters in the open, worse in vehicles, metal buildings, and storms; the radius has to absorb that wobble.

The site editor: coordinates pasted as decimals, radius set below.

Enter both in the app: Site Forms → Company, crew, sites, recipients → tap the site (or Add site).

1. Paste the coordinates into GPS coordinates.
2. Set Geofence radius in meters, per the table above.
3. Repeat for every active site, up to 20 per phone (an iOS limit; the app warns past it).

While here, fill the address and gate code too; the emergency info flows into the safety forms.

4Turn it on and grant the permission (each phone)

First open: the consent screen. Nothing runs until it is accepted.

Open Settings → Crew Site Log. The first visit shows the consent screen laying out exactly what will and will not be recorded. Tap I understand and agree, then flip on Log my site entries and exits.

iOS immediately asks about location. This is the make or break moment of the whole setup, so here is precisely what to do.

The iOS dialog. Note it does not offer Always here; that comes in the next step.

iOS grants Always in two stages, and the dialog never offers Always directly:

1. On the dialog, tap Allow While Using App. (Allow Once and Don't Allow both break the feature.)
2. Then open iPhone Settings → Apps → FieldWatt → Location and change it to Always. Confirm Precise Location is on.
3. Back in FieldWatt, the status row must read Always (correct) in green, as in the earlier screenshot. Amber or red text names exactly what is missing.

5Verify the screen agrees

The Crew Site Log screen self reports. Before calling a phone done, confirm all three:

• Location permission: Always (correct) in green.
• Sites monitored: N of N, where N matches the sites you gave coordinates. A lower first number means some coordinates did not parse; recheck their format.
• No red or amber warning lines. Each warning names its own fix.

6Get the consent form signed

The built in consent form: disclosure, hours, acknowledgments, signatures.

Employee location tracking needs written consent: several states require it outright, and everywhere it turns a surveillance surprise into a documented agreement.

1. Open Site Forms → Location Tracking Consent.
2. It spells out what is recorded and what is not, in the same plain terms as this guide.
3. Set Monitoring hours: pick All hours if your crew works nights, so the paper matches reality.
4. Employee and company representative sign on the phone; generate the PDF and keep it with HR records.

One per employee, signed before their phone starts logging.

Part 4
Every control on the screen, explained

Top to bottom, matching the numbered list.

1. Setup instructions: the in app version of this guide, always available offline, with a link back to this page.
2. Log my site entries and exits: the master switch for this phone. Off means nothing is watched, nothing is logged, period.
3. Location permission: live status. Green Always (correct) is the only healthy value; anything else names the problem.
4. Sites monitored: how many saved sites are actually being watched versus how many have usable coordinates. iOS caps watching at 20 per phone.
5. Instant alerts, automation URL: optional. Paste your company's hook address here (Part 6). Leave empty and nothing is ever sent automatically.
6. Email today's log: builds the daily summary email for the day so far. Grayed out until at least one event exists today.
7. Recent events: the log itself, newest first. Green arrows are arrivals, blue arrows departures. A small orange bolt on an event means it has successfully posted to the automation URL; no bolt means it is still queued (it retries on its own).

Part 5
The daily log email

Zero infrastructure, works from day one. During the day the phone quietly collects events:

Tapping Email today's log opens a prefilled email to the company email and the technician's email, ready to send:

• No signal at quitting time? The log lands in the app's Outbox and sends when coverage returns; nothing is lost.
• Change who receives it by editing the company email and your email in the profile. The email is a normal draft, so the tech can also add recipients before sending.
• Missed a day? The events stay in the list; the button emails the current day, and older days remain visible in Recent Events for manual reference.

Part 6
Instant alerts: the automation URL, your Google account, and more

Phones cannot silently send email; Apple requires a human tap. So for the boss to get mail the moment a crossing happens, the phone instead posts the event to an automation URL: a web address your company owns that reacts by sending the email (or writing a spreadsheet row, or pinging Slack). FieldWatt has no server of its own and never sees these events; the pipeline is entirely yours.

What the phone sends

Each post is a small JSON package. If several events queued up offline, they arrive batched in one post, oldest first:

"enter" is an arrival, "exit" a departure, and the time is universal time (UTC); the recipes below convert it to your local zone.

Set up a company Google account first (recommended)

You can build the automation under any Google account, but a dedicated one is the professional move:

• Create a free account like ops.yourcompany@gmail.com. It becomes the owner of the script, the spreadsheet, and the alert history.
• It survives personnel changes: the automation is not tied to anyone's personal Gmail.
• Its inbox is a permanent archive of every alert, searchable, separate from personal mail.
• Gmail filters on it can fan alerts out: forward everything to the boss's real address, only arrivals to dispatch, and so on, without touching the script.

Everything below takes about ten minutes with that account signed in.

Recipe 1: instant email alerts (Google Apps Script, free)

1. Go to script.google.com and click New project.
2. Delete the placeholder code and paste the script below. Put the boss's real email in the "to" line (a comma separated list works for several people). Adjust the time zone if you are not Central.
3. Click Deploy → New deployment, choose type Web app, set Execute as: Me and Who has access: Anyone, then Deploy. Approve the permission prompts (Google shows a warning because it is your own unverified script; choose Advanced, then Go to project).
4. Copy the Web app URL it produces (it starts with https://script.google.com/macros/).
5. On each crew phone: Crew Site Log → paste it into Company automation URL.

Recipe 2: a Google Sheet timesheet that fills itself in

Same idea, but every event also becomes a spreadsheet row, giving the office a live, sortable, exportable timesheet. This script does both: sheet row always, email too if you keep that section.

1. In Google Drive (same ops account), create a spreadsheet named Crew Site Log. Put headers in row 1: Date, Time, Technician, Event, Site.
2. Copy its ID: the long jumble in the sheet's web address between /d/ and /edit.
3. Create the Apps Script exactly as in Recipe 1, but with this code, pasting your sheet ID in:

What lands in the sheet, one row per crossing:

From there it is ordinary spreadsheet work: filter by technician for payroll, by site for job costing, subtract arrive from depart for hours on site. The whole crew posts to the same URL, so one sheet covers everyone.

Recipe 3: Zapier (no code, point and click)

1. In Zapier, create a Zap with trigger Webhooks by Zapier → Catch Hook. Copy the hook URL into a crew phone's automation field.
2. Create one test event: with the phone's log enabled, drive (or move the pin of a test site onto yourself, save, and step out and back). Zapier's test panel will show the caught event.
3. Remember the payload wraps a list: your fields appear as events 1 event, events 1 site, events 1 technician, events 1 time.
4. Add an action: Email by Zapier (or Gmail, Slack, SMS by Zapier, Google Sheets; anything in their catalog). Map the fields into the subject and body. Turn the Zap on.

Security notes for the automation URL

• The URL must start with https; the app refuses anything else.
• Treat the URL like a key. Anyone who has it could post fake events to your pipeline. Share it only with the crew phones.
• If it leaks, redeploy the Apps Script (or regenerate the Zapier hook) to get a fresh URL, and paste the new one into the phones.
• The bolt icon on each event in the app confirms delivery. Events without a bolt retry automatically whenever a new event fires or the app launches.

Part 7
Rolling it out to a whole crew

Per phone checklist (about five minutes each once you have the coordinates and the URL):

1. FieldWatt installed, Pro active.
2. Profile: technician name and the two emails set. The name is what distinguishes this phone's events.
3. Sites entered with coordinates and radius. Sites do not sync between phones (FieldWatt has no server, by design), so enter them on each phone; texting the crew a list of coordinate pairs makes this a two minute paste job. Setting up all phones at the office before handout is easiest.
4. Consent form signed and filed.
5. Crew Site Log: consent accepted, toggle on, permission Always (correct), sites monitored all green.
6. Automation URL pasted (if using instant alerts).
7. Walk out test if time allows: see Part 8.

Part 8
Day to day use and the first test

The first test, done right

1. Pick one configured site you can drive to. Confirm the screen shows it monitored.
2. Start from at least a half mile away. Starting inside the circle logs nothing; iOS only fires on crossings, so no arrival will fire until you leave and come back.
3. Drive in, park a few minutes, drive out.
4. Expected timing: the arrival notification usually lands within moments of crossing, sometimes two or three minutes; iOS trades a little speed for battery. The departure intentionally fires a bit past the circle's edge so parking near the boundary does not flap.
5. Check: the event list shows the pair; the notification appeared; if the automation URL is set, the bolt icon shows on both events and the email or sheet row arrived.

What a normal day looks like

• The tech does nothing. Arrivals and departures log themselves and each fires a small notification on the tech's own phone, so the logging is never secret from the person being logged.
• End of day, one tap on Email today's log if you use the daily email. With instant alerts, even that is optional.
• The office watches the inbox or the sheet fill in.

Housekeeping

• Finished jobs: clear the coordinates from a site (or delete the site) and it stops being watched, freeing one of the 20 slots.
• Record retention: the phone keeps the most recent 2000 events (a working year or more for most techs). If the records matter, get them off the phone regularly via the daily email or the sheet; the phone is a logger, not an archive.
• Reset to defaults (in Settings) erases the event log along with everything else in the app. Export first.
• New phone: settings do not transfer. Run the per phone checklist again.

Part 9
Troubleshooting

Part 10
FAQ

Can the boss see where a tech is right now? No. There is no live map and no route history anywhere in the system. The only data that exists is the timestamped crossing events of saved site circles.

Does it track after hours? Monitoring runs around the clock (night work was the requirement this was built for), but it still only ever records crossings of saved job sites. Stops at home, stores, anywhere else: invisible, by design. If a tech's home is inside a site circle, fix the radius.

Can an employee turn it off? Yes, always: the in app toggle or revoking location permission. Apple guarantees that and no app can prevent it. The signed consent form is what makes quietly disabling it an HR conversation instead of a mystery.

Phone dead or off? Nothing logs. Airplane mode: crossings usually still log (GPS works offline) and queued posts deliver when signal returns.

Does it drain the battery? A few percent a day. It is the same mechanism as Apple's own location reminders, not navigation grade GPS.

Do sites sync between crew phones? No. FieldWatt keeps all data on device with no server, which is why nobody can breach a FieldWatt cloud: there is none. Enter sites per phone; a texted list of coordinates makes it quick.

Android? No. FieldWatt is iPhone only.

Multiple companies or crews on one automation? Works fine: everyone posts to the same URL and the technician field tells rows apart. If you want separate pipelines per crew, deploy the script twice and give each crew its own URL.

What does FieldWatt's developer see? Nothing. No analytics, no server, no account. Location events exist only on the phone and in whatever pipeline your company points them at.

Is this legal? Employer location tracking of employees on work time with written consent is broadly lawful in the US, but rules vary by state (some require specific notice) and this page is not legal advice. The consent form covers the fundamentals; run it past your counsel or HR provider if in doubt.

Can I use it just for myself? Absolutely. A solo operator gets a personal automatic timesheet: enable it on your own phone, use the sheet recipe, and your billing records write themselves.

Keep handy
Quick reference card

Questions this page does not answer? Reach us through the FieldWatt support page: include what the permission row and Sites monitored show, and what the event list looked like after a test drive, and you will get a fast answer.