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.
Hire businesses lose money in two quiet ways. Equipment goes somewhere it was not hired to go — across a border, onto a site the insurance does not cover, or sub-hired to someone you have no contract with. And equipment simply does not come back, with the overdue hire noticed weeks later during a stock check.
Both are boundary questions, and both are visible the day they happen if anything is watching.
Hire agreements usually specify where an item may be used, and that clause is routinely ignored because nothing enforces it.
A wide zone covering the permitted region, active for the hire period, turns that clause into something you learn about. Draw it around the county, the country, or a radius from the customer’s site — whatever the agreement says. Trace it with the geofence builder.
These zones are large, which makes them forgiving of GPS accuracy problems. Precision is not the concern here; coverage is.
A zone around your own yard, running continuously, logs every return automatically. Cross that against expected return dates and overdue items become visible immediately rather than at the next stock count.
This is the less dramatic of the two setups and usually the more valuable. Theft is rare; hires that quietly overrun are constant, and each one is revenue that was never invoiced.
Position history — 24 hours on Pro, 30 days on Business — lets you answer where an item has been across a hire rather than only where it is now. See pricing.
Powered plant: hardwire it. No charging, no flat batteries, and it survives being parked for a month between hires.
Towable and non-powered: long-life magnetic units with motion-triggered reporting. They sleep while stationary and wake on movement, which is exactly the pattern of a hire item — long idle periods, then a journey that matters.
Mount it where a customer will not casually remove it. Not hidden from your own staff, who need to service it, but not sitting on an obvious surface either.
Test before every hire. A tracker with a misconfigured APN looks completely healthy — LEDs on, SMS commands answered — and silently never reports. Discovering that after an item goes missing is the worst possible time. A quick check that the last position is recent, at the point of despatch, catches it.
Record each item’s IMEI against the asset in your own system, not only in the tracking platform.
Two reasons, and the second is the practical one.
Covertly tracking a customer’s use of hired equipment is legally fragile in most jurisdictions, particularly where the operator is an individual rather than a company. Disclosure in the hire agreement removes that problem.
It is also a deterrent. A visible “this asset is GPS tracked” sticker prevents more losses than a hidden tracker recovers, because the categories of person who steal hire equipment mostly avoid tracked items. The hidden second unit is for the ones who do not.
Sub-hire and unauthorised use within the permitted territory are invisible to a geofence — the item is exactly where the agreement allows. Territory zones catch movement, not misuse.
Determined thieves also remove or jam trackers. GSM jammers are cheap and defeat any unit regardless of price. Treat this as one layer alongside contracts, deposits, and insurance rather than a replacement for them.
See equipment and trailers for the security-focused version of this setup, and alert debouncing for why an asset parked on a boundary will not produce repeated alerts.
Know within minutes if a trailer, generator, or machine leaves the yard — the window that decides whether it is recovered or gone.
Track plant, tools, and deliveries across a site that changes shape every month — with zones you can redraw in seconds.
Arrival and departure alerts for a handful of vehicles, without the per-vehicle pricing and compliance features built for hundred-truck operations.
Draw the zone, add the device, choose the hours. Seven-day free trial, cancel any time.