Posted August 28th, 2014 by Jackson Parker.

Nothing is more troubling than finding out that you have been losing money for years and didn’t even know it. This is exactly what happened to Carlos Contreras at Sunshine Landscape in Palm Desert, CA. Carlos’ team of 15 employees have been using paper time sheets for years to document their work hours for payroll reporting. In his words, these paper time sheets were based on an “honor system”. The employees would document their work hours and would turn the time sheets in at the end of the week. He always suspected that some things didn’t quite add up with the hours they documented and what actually took place in the field.

Carlos then decided that GPS tracking would help him address these concerns and give him more control over what took place in the field. After researching 5 different GPS fleet tracking systems, he selected FieldLogix due to its user-friendly interface, affordable hardware, and extensive e-mail alerting features.Upon installing FieldLogix, Carlos’ suspicions were immediately confirmed. By using the system’s activity reports, he found that his “honor system” was being abused by his employees. By having an accurate way to measure daily work hours, his overtime costs dropped immediately. In fact, his overtime costs dropped by more than 2 hours per man per day with no change in the workload. Based on his calculations, he paid for the entire first year of the system within the first 18 days.

Carlos stated: “It dropped my labor costs by 35-45 percent.”

Carlos mentioned that he wished that he bought a GPS system years ago, but put it off because it wasn’t a high priority at the time. Carlos is not alone in his discovery. A study by the Aberdeen Group reports that companies that have implemented a GPS tracking system see a 13.4 percent average reduction in overtime costs.