Feature Focus: Capture and Verify Employee Locations with GPS Stamps

Increasing Data Accuracy, One GPS Stamp at a Time

When you go paperless with GoCanvas, the benefits of reducing manual data entry and increasing data visibility will be immediately realized. While these are great benefits, there are also other critical parts of your data collection process that you should be mindful of when building out your GoCanvas mobile forms.

The biggest part, no matter if it is a paper or mobile-based data collection process, is how can the data be validated for accuracy. With a typical paper form, you have literally no measures or safeguards that you can put into place to increase the accuracy of the data being collected. The only real action that can be taken is for someone to manually review each paper form and look for glaring mistakes including:

• Missing or blank fields
• Misspellings
• Incorrect calculations
• Illegible hand writing

This extremely tedious process can cost your company 1-2 hours in productivity every single day. With GoCanvas, we leverage the power of your mobile devices so that you don’t have to worry about these mistakes any longer and aren’t forced to review each report by hand.

The Evolution of Data Collection with GoCanvas

The amount and speed of the data you collect are only as good as the accuracy of it. This means that you can implement GoCanvas and increase your data collection times by 5x, but if you don’t implement the proper data validation steps then the data might as well have been collected on paper.

The GoCanvas platform gives you a variety of easy to implement features and settings that can help ensure the data being collected by your employees is valid and accurate. A couple of these features include Reference Data, Auto Calculations, Time & Date Stamps, and Pre-populated Drop Down Menus. But the most essential of all these data validation features is GPS.

The GPS feature of GoCanvas allows for business owners and supervisors to verify not only when reports were captured, but also WHERE the data was collected. This functionality can be easily added to any of your current mobile forms using the drag and drop app builder.  And by marking the field as “required”, you can ensure that every time someone fills out the mobile form, the user will be forced to record their location. Additional field settings for the GPS field include accuracy and selecting how the coordinates collected are displayed on the final PDF report (map, lat/long, web link).

How This Can Impact Your Business

GoCanvas’s GPS functionality is a great compliment to many of the mobile forms and features that you’re already using today.

The GPS functionality gives your team even greater detail and insight into your data, as well as providing you validation of job completion. This data is also great for communicating with customers to verify proof of service or delivery. You can now easily avoid the “he said/she said” scenarios that happen when a customer says a technician didn’t show up on site or didn’t complete the service at the correct location. This alone can save you hours in time, frustration, and headaches! The GPS coordinates that are collected can also help with on-site accident reporting and the creation of custom reports to find out where the most injuries are occurring. This can help your business become more proactive with site safety, and reduce costs when it comes to future employee injury claims.

Overall, the GoCanvas GPS feature is most commonly implemented in mobile forms that are capturing field service data that is both time and location sensitive.

Examples include:

• Crew Daily Time Sheets
• Job Safety Analysis
• Accident Report
• Proof of Delivery Report
• Daily Work Order
• Facility Walkthrough Checklist
• And more!

While these are just a few examples of how the GoCanvas GPS functionality can be integrated with many of the mobile forms you already use today, the ability to increase data accuracy within your business is just a few clicks away!