Short answer. Do not start with an ERP, nor payroll, nor HR software. The phone is not your problem; your problem is that three facts exist nowhere but in your supervisors' heads: who works today and where, which job is done or not, and what proof exists of the work done. Start with those three flows. A week of rules without software makes them visible. A three-screen field app, for a pilot team first, makes them reliable. AI comes after, on one very profitable use: the voice report turned into a written summary.
This guide answers a question a manager of a transport company for people with reduced mobility asked us almost as is: "I have to manage about fifty employees". Here is the complete answer, written for any company whose employees work outside.
The five facts nobody owns
Ask yourself five questions at eleven on a Tuesday morning. Who works today and where? Which job is finished, which has not started? What proof do you have of the work done at the eight o'clock customer? How many hours will each employee have done at month end? Does the two o'clock customer know your driver leaves in ten minutes? If the answer goes through a call to a supervisor, you depend on their memory, their availability and their good faith.
This table is the whole guide. Each row is a vital fact. Each column is a tier. You do not need to jump straight to the last column, and you must not do it without going through the first.
«The phone is not the problem. The problem is that the information dies at the end of the call.»
Tier 1 — A week of rules, zero software
Five rules that make the five facts visible from next week, with the tools your teams already have.
- 01One weekly schedule, a shared sheet, published every Thursday for the following week. One row per employee per day: place, job, hours. Changes happen on the sheet, not on the phone.
- 02A start and end of job message in a fixed format, in the team group: "Start · customer · time" and "End · customer · time · remark". Ten seconds, and the job exists.
- 03A named proof photo: the customer and the date in the caption. A photo without a caption is not a proof.
- 04One company number for customers, WhatsApp Business, held by the office. Customers must not have the driver's or technician's personal number.
- 05Ten minutes every morning with each supervisor: absentees, jobs at risk, customers to warn. Standing, not a meeting.
For a single team of fifteen to twenty people, this tier often holds for a year. At fifty employees and several teams, it holds a few months: the day a supervisor goes on leave, you discover what was in their head.
Tier 2 — The field app: what it must do, and nothing more
The signs it is time: more than twenty employees outside, several teams or several cities, customers asking for times and proofs, overtime disputed at month end, and a supervisor whose absence paralyses a day.
A field app is not an ERP. For the employee it fits in three screens, in Arabic or French, with buttons big enough for a gloved hand: my day, my job, my proof. It works without network and syncs when it returns. Everything else, dispatch, alerts, clock-in, payroll export, customers, is for the supervisor and the office.
The design rule is simple: if an employee needs more than an hour of training, the app is badly built. Delivery and distribution companies led the way, we detailed the modules in our guides to fleet management and GPS tracking and delivery and distribution management software. The same base serves passenger transport, maintenance, cleaning and field sales: only the words on the buttons change.
Payroll stays with your accountant. The app exports reliable hours to them, it does not compute them. A payroll module is decided after six months of clean clock-ins, never before.
«A field app fits in three screens: my day, my job, my proof. Everything else is for the office.»
Where AI helps a field team, and where it adds nothing
Your employees will never write a report. They will talk. That is where AI changes something.
The voice report. At the end of the job, the employee presses a button and talks for thirty seconds, in darija, Kabyle or French: what they did, what was missing, what the customer said. The office receives a written, structured summary attached to the job. It is the most profitable use we know for a field team, and it asks nothing of the employee they do not already do on the phone. Route optimisation comes second, as soon as your addresses have a GPS position. The rest waits for months of data.
Cost and timeline
A field app with the three employee screens, dispatch, clock-in, payroll export and customer notifications sits in category 2 of our app price grid for Algeria, with the AI voice report as an option. The timeline fits in twelve weeks, with a pilot team running alongside the phone.
The pilot rule: you do not cut the phone, you wait for the pilot team to stop using it on its own. It usually takes ten days, the time for employees to understand that the app is the proof of their hours and their work, not a surveillance tool. That is how it must be presented, because that is what it is.
The mistakes we see in field companies
- Starting with an ERP. Six months of project, screens nobody outside opens, and the phone goes on.
- An app with fifteen screens for the employee. Three are enough. The rest is for the office.
- Presenting the tool as control. It will be bypassed. Present it as the proof of their hours and bonuses, because it is true.
- Ignoring offline. A job that cannot be logged without network does not get logged.
- Computing payroll in the app from day one. Export reliable hours to the accountant, decide on a payroll module after six months.
Frequently asked questions
- Not all my employees have a smartphone.
- An entry-level Android is enough for a light app that works offline. For roles without a phone, clock-in can go through the supervisor or by SMS. The cost of the phones is far below that of the hours disputed every month.
- My employees will fear being watched.
- They are right to ask. The app must be presented and designed as the proof of their hours, jobs and bonuses. Position is recorded only at the start and end of a job, not continuously, and that must be written down.
- ERP or field app?
- Field app first. It fixes the three vital facts in twelve weeks. An ERP is justified afterwards if you have stock, complex invoicing or several companies, and it plugs into the clean data the app produces.
- How long before it really runs?
- Twelve weeks to the switch-over, including two weeks of pilot with a team of ten. The first reliable payroll export arrives at the end of the first full month.
- I run the company from France, is it possible?
- The product, yes. The field, no: a local supervisor who carries the rule is essential. The app gives them precisely what they lacked, visibility without the calls.