Your hours, and using GPS to help remember them

It's the end of the day and you're filling in your hours from memory. Three stops, a parts run in the middle, and you can't remember when you left the second one. My hours in Field is your own time ledger, and it's built for that day as much as for the good ones where you hit start the moment you got out of the truck.

The timer, and adding time afterwards

In My hours you start a timer and stop it, or you add a block of time after the fact with a start and an end. Every entry carries an activity, one of on site, travel, shop, training, break or other, and a note if you want one. Time can be against a job or just against the day, so a parts run or an hour in the shop doesn't need a work order to hang on. If two entries overlap, the ledger shows you the overlap and leaves it alone. Sometimes travel really does run into the next stop and sometimes it's a mistake, and the app can't tell which, so it doesn't try.

The ledger shows up to about three months at a time, and a timer that's still running always shows, even when it started outside the period you're looking at.

Start this job

When you get to a stop, start this job records your arrival and opens your time on that visit in one move. We tied those together on purpose. An arrival with no hours behind it, or hours with no arrival, is the kind of thing that turns into a phone call next week, so either both get recorded or neither does. If you still have a clock running on a different visit, start this job won't record anything until you've dealt with that, and it won't quietly stop the other one for you. Your handoff at the end of the visit can stop that same timer.

Fixing an entry

Once an entry is stopped you can correct its times, activity or note, or void it if it shouldn't exist at all. The job it's tied to stays put, and nothing is deleted. A voided entry stays in the ledger marked as voided, and every correction keeps what the entry looked like before and after, who changed it, when, and the reason if you gave one. So if you fix Tuesday on Thursday, the office sees a corrected entry with its history rather than a mystery. A timer that's still running can't be corrected until it's stopped, which is why you'll sometimes stop, fix, and start again.

Turning on GPS

GPS is off unless you turn it on, and it's there for one job: helping you recall where you were when you sit down to do your hours. In My hours, choose Use GPS to help remember hours, read the disclosure for the workday, and give the phone precise location permission. Starting it is something you do yourself, on the screen, with the app open. On iPhone the system's location indicator shows while it runs, and on Android there's an ongoing notification with a Stop GPS button on it.

It stops when you stop it, when you sign out, when the phone takes the permission away, or after 16 hours. If the phone shuts the app down, GPS doesn't restart on its own.

While you're on site, tap I'm at this job and pick the job. The app needs a fresh, precise fix for that, and the job list shows the site, the work title and the scheduled time so you pick the right one. That confirmation is what ties the location to the site, because sites don't carry coordinates on their own and GPS can't guess where a building is. Once you've confirmed a site, the app can reuse that position for later work there as long as it can safely tell the jobs apart, and two jobs at the same building stay separate.

Reviewing what GPS saw

When you open My hours, move to another period, or stop GPS, the app compares the day's fixes with the hours you recorded. Where it saw you at a job you confirmed and no time was recorded, it shows a count of gaps. Open that and Review GPS time shows the job, when it first and last saw you there, and how it worked that out. You can shorten the interval to take out a break, then add it, and it goes into the ledger as ordinary on-site time against that job. For anything longer or unrelated, use ordinary Add time.

GPS never adds hours by itself; every minute goes through you. Overlap with time you already recorded is normal and just means you'd already written that part down, and vague positions or two sites too close to tell apart don't get counted as work. None of it proves you were working or owed pay for the time.

If the phone was offline, the evidence stays on it and the review you did keeps its date. A suggestion you accept while offline leaves the gap count right away, its row says it was saved on the phone, and it goes up with the rest of your queued time when you're back in range. If the hours have changed by the time it lands, say you'd already recorded that stretch some other way, the suggestion comes back for another look rather than adding the same time twice.

Where the location data goes

Nobody in the office can see where you were. There's no manager screen for it, GPS records stay out of Office entirely, and we don't use them for analytics either. The evidence expires after 30 days, and a review only ever looks at the last 30 days. Time you accept from a suggestion is kept as ordinary ledger history, the same as anything you typed, without the coordinates behind it.

Bolt and GPS

You can ask Bolt to start GPS, stop it, tell you whether it's running, or confirm the job you're at. Start opens the same consent screen as the button, and nothing runs until you've finished that and the phone's own permission prompt; if you ask Bolt for status afterwards, it checks the actual session rather than assuming. Stop ends collection right away. A job confirmed through Bolt is saved on the phone, which isn't the same as the office having received anything or any hours being recorded. Field in a browser doesn't do GPS at all and won't guess what your phone is up to.

What the office sees

The office opens Recorded hours, picks a date range of up to 93 days, and sees your recorded intervals with the history of any corrections. From there they can create a CSV snapshot for payroll. That export is recorded hours and only that: it doesn't mean the hours were approved, accepted by a payroll system, or paid. Break is included as an activity and isn't automatically unpaid, and no rounding or overtime rule is applied. On the schedule, a missing arrival record is a notice about the record, not a claim about where you were.

Updated September 21, 2026.