GPS time tracking, in a construction context, means a worker clocks in and out from their phone, and the app records the location at that moment alongside the timestamp. The location isn’t continuous surveillance — it’s a single verification point at clock-in and clock-out, confirming the worker was actually at the jobsite when the hours started and ended.
The reason contractors adopt it is almost never about catching someone cheating a timesheet. It’s about the much more common problem: a crew working two jobs in a day, and the hours getting split from memory at the end of the week, roughly, because nobody wrote down exactly when they left the first site.
What it actually solves
Two problems, mainly. First, payroll accuracy — hours attached to a specific clock-in and clock-out are harder to dispute than a Friday-afternoon estimate, for the worker and the office both. Second, job costing: labor cost only means something if it’s attached to the job that generated it, and a crew moving between two properties in a day needs their hours split accurately between them for the job-cost numbers on either job to mean anything.
A secondary benefit shows up on jobs with a client portal: a client who can see "crew on site" reflects the real schedule tends to call the office less, because the information that used to require a phone call is already visible.
What it doesn’t do
It doesn’t track a worker’s location between clock-in and clock-out — most systems, Bricklark included, only capture the location at those two verification points, not a continuous trail through the day. It also isn’t a substitute for trusting your crew; a system built around catching people is a system your crew will resent, and resentment shows up as turnover faster than it shows up as savings.
What to check before adopting it
Three things worth confirming with any provider: whether clock-ins work with a weak or no signal on site (they should queue and sync when the connection returns, not fail silently), whether the location capture is limited to the clock-in/out moment rather than continuous tracking, and whether the hours flow into job costing automatically or need to be re-entered somewhere else. That last one is the one that determines whether the whole thing saves the office time or just adds a second system to maintain.