Site managers and construction contractors

GPS alerts for construction sites

Track plant, tools, and deliveries across a site that changes shape every month — with zones you can redraw in seconds.

Suggested setup

Zones
One polygon per site compound, plus a wider zone covering the whole plot. Redraw them as the site develops rather than leaving stale boundaries in place.
Schedule
Out-of-hours for plant security — 18:00–07:00 plus weekends. Working hours for delivery and subcontractor arrival records.
Devices
Magnetic battery trackers on plant and towable equipment, vehicle trackers in site vehicles, phones for supervisors moving between sites.
Alerts
Push for out-of-hours movement, in-app for daytime arrival records.

Construction sites are an awkward fit for most tracking software, for a reason that has nothing to do with technology: the site changes. The compound moves, access roads shift, and the boundary in month six is not the boundary in month one.

Systems built around fixed customer sites handle this badly. Zones drawn at mobilisation quietly become wrong, and wrong zones generate alerts nobody trusts.

Draw zones you expect to redraw

Treat site zones as temporary. Trace the current compound with the geofence builder, and redraw when the site layout changes rather than stretching one zone to cover every eventuality.

A pattern that survives site changes better than a single boundary:

The wide zone keeps working even when the compound one is stale, which means a forgotten update degrades the setup rather than breaking it.

Plant security is the main return

Plant and tool theft from sites is common, high-value, and time-sensitive. Equipment taken overnight is usually moved on within hours.

The setup that works is out-of-hours only: the site zone active from 18:00 to 07:00 plus weekends. Daytime movement — plant going out on jobs, deliveries arriving — generates nothing. An excavator leaving at 2am produces an immediate alert, and because that zone sends nothing else, it gets read.

This is covered in more depth on the equipment and trailers page, including tracker choice and why motion-triggered reporting matters for battery life.

Delivery and subcontractor records

The same zones, given a working-hours schedule, produce an automatic log of arrivals and departures. When a delivery is disputed, or a subcontractor’s hours are queried, the record already exists — nobody had to remember to write it down.

Keep this in-app rather than pushed. Nobody wants a notification for every one of thirty daily arrivals; they want something searchable afterwards. Position history is 24 hours on Pro and 30 days on Business — see pricing.

Accuracy on a live site

Construction sites are genuinely difficult ground for GPS, and it is worth expecting rather than debugging:

Draw zones with generous margin — 50 metres minimum beyond the fence line, more where structures are dense. See GPS accuracy.

If a piece of plant is permanently inside a structure, geofencing will not work reliably for it. That is physics rather than configuration, and better known up front.

Zones that outlive the site

One piece of housekeeping worth building into demobilisation: delete site zones when the job ends. A completed site with a live out-of-hours zone will alert every time a stranger’s van parks nearby, and stale zones are how a system that worked becomes a system everyone mutes.

See how it works or start a free trial.

Terms used on this page

Exit alert GPS accuracy GeoJSON polygon LBS positioning

Similar setups

GPS alerts for equipment and trailers

Know within minutes if a trailer, generator, or machine leaves the yard — the window that decides whether it is recovered or gone.

GPS alerts for lone workers

Know if someone working alone leaves their assigned site, or is somewhere they should not be at the end of a shift.

GPS alerts for rental and hire assets

Know when hired equipment leaves the area it was hired for, or fails to come back — before the hire period quietly turns into a loss.

See all use cases →

Set this up in a few minutes

Draw the zone, add the device, choose the hours. Seven-day free trial, cancel any time.

Start free trial → See how it works