Delivery and courier operations

GPS alerts for delivery and courier work

Automatic arrival and departure records for every drop, without drivers stopping to tap a button on a phone.

Suggested setup

Zones
One zone per regular delivery point — depots, distribution centres, and any customer you visit often. Ad-hoc residential drops are not worth a zone each.
Schedule
Working hours, typically 06:00–20:00. A depot zone active out of hours doubles as a vehicle-security alert.
Devices
Vehicle trackers for the van, or driver phones running the Geoblip app if drivers use their own vehicles.
Alerts
In-app for the record, email for exceptions. Most operations want a searchable log rather than a notification for every one of forty drops.

Proof of arrival in courier work usually depends on the driver doing something — tapping an app, scanning a barcode, sending a message. That works until it is raining, the drop is rushed, or the phone is in a pocket. Then the record has a hole in it, and the hole is always at the delivery someone later disputes.

Geofencing produces the same record without asking the driver for anything.

Arrival and departure, automatically

A zone around each regular delivery point logs an arrival when the vehicle enters and a departure when it leaves. Nobody taps anything. The record exists because the van was there.

Combined with position history you get time on site as well — useful for both billing and for working out why a route is running late.

Which drops deserve a zone

Not all of them. A zone per residential address across hundreds of daily drops is unmanageable, and the alerts would be meaningless.

Zones earn their place at points you visit repeatedly:

Somewhere between five and twenty zones covers most small operations. Past that, maintaining them becomes its own job — and you likely want a routing platform with automatic site creation instead. Worth saying plainly.

The drive-past problem

Delivery zones sit on busy roads, which makes this the use case where a vehicle clipping a zone in traffic causes the most noise. A depot on a main road can log an arrival every time any van drives past.

The fix is geometric rather than configurable: draw the zone to cover the yard and entrance without reaching the through road. Most sites have room. Trace it with the geofence builder rather than dropping a circle, because a circle almost always swallows the road.

Where that is impossible, treat brief entries as noise when reading the log — see dwell time for why filtering them automatically costs you latency on every genuine arrival.

Alerts versus records

Most courier operations do not want forty push notifications a day. They want a log they can search when a customer asks.

Geoblip lets you choose the channel per device and per zone. A sensible pattern is in-app only for routine drops — recorded, not interrupting — with email reserved for exceptions like the depot zone firing out of hours.

Depot security comes free

The same zone that logs daytime arrivals becomes a security alert when you give it a second schedule covering nights and weekends. A van leaving the yard at 3am produces an immediate alert; the same movement at 3pm produces nothing.

This is usually the setup that justifies the subscription on its own. See equipment for the same pattern applied to trailers and plant.

Accuracy in loading bays

Vehicles in loading bays, under canopies, or between buildings get poor GPS — often 30–50 metres out. A tightly-drawn zone will report a van as outside while it is backed onto the dock.

Extend the zone at least 50 metres past the physical boundary, and include the entrance road. See GPS accuracy for realistic figures, and alert debouncing for why a van parked on a boundary will not generate repeated events.

See how it works or start a free trial.

Terms used on this page

Dwell time Exit alert GPS accuracy Recovery alert

Similar setups

GPS alerts for small fleets

Arrival and departure alerts for a handful of vehicles, without the per-vehicle pricing and compliance features built for hundred-truck operations.

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 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.

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