We received a request today from a Government customer which I think is both a great idea, as well as something worth documenting in the blog.
At first glance, it’s a “simple” request:
“We want to report on driver take-home miles since that benefit is taxable to the driver.”
Here is a diagram of how “complicated” that request really is:
Personal Usage Report Complexity
Here’s why it gets so complicated quickly:
- Need to define work sites
- Need to define homes
- Need to assign homes to each vehicle
- Need to specify what hours are “allowable” for work
- Need to specify how long a vehicle must be at a work landmark for it to be part of the “workday”
- Need to allow for automated or manual “personal or business” status for each trip
- Need to Schedule on a semi-monthly basis to correspond to payroll for tax withholding to be made
Thankfully, we have all of these capabilities built already — just not 100% integrated for the purposes of this report.
Taking seemingly unrelated aspects of a GPS Tracking product and combining them is the way to succeed — both for our customers as well as for us against other products — and a core aspect of how we approach our product and custom requests.
Taking these separately:
- Need to define work sites
- Need to define homes
You can both import spreadsheets as well as organize landmarks into meaningful groups and hierarchical structures in GPS Insight:
Grouping and Import of Landmarks in GPS Insight
- Need to assign homes to each vehicle
- Need to allow for automated or manual “personal or business” status for each trip
We recently launched user-specified, highly customizable attributes and categories. All we need to do is add support for two things — a landmark to be assigned to a vehicle or driver, etc. to specify their “home” (and to keep it highly flexible, we will generically support any GPS Insight object of any sort, such as vehicle, group, hierarchy node, etc.), as well the ability to categorize trips and stops (currently announced, just not yet officially supported).
- Need to specify what hours are “allowable” for work
- Need to specify how long a vehicle must be at a work landmark for it to be part of the “workday”
These parts of this new report already exist in other standard report parameters, shown here in our Drive Time Summary Report and Begin/End of Day Reports, which already partially solve the problem this customer has:
Time Restriction on vehicle activity
Exclude first and last trip from payroll report based on stop time
- Need to Schedule on a semi-monthly basis to correspond to payroll for tax withholding to be made
Our Schedule creation tool for Scheduled Reports allows you to be highly custom in the dates for which a custom report is run. Plus you can always combine two separate schedules (e.g. the first Monday of every week plus every 15th and last date of the month) when scheduling a report:
Defining a custom report schedule within GPS Insight
So, the pieces are all there! There is a little bit of new development necessary, and then a fair amount of integration in order to complete this report for production usage. It is really helpful to be able to draw on prior capabilities in order to create highly custom reports which help not only this one customer’s needs, but many current and future customers’ needs.
I’ll keep you posted on the progress of this GPS tracking report, and aspects we develop for it will then become pieces of future development efforts.
Rob.
