Buddy Punch vs Deputy for Field Service Technician Time

Some field service companies pay from the shop, some from the technician's home if a company vehicle is involved, and some only from arrival at the first customer site. There is no universally correct answer, only a decision that has to be made explicitly and applied consistently, since the current situation, where every technician quietly picks their own interpretation, is the actual source of every dispute that reaches a manager.

Before comparing the two tools, settle these points in order:

1. Decide where paid time starts: at the shop, at the technician's home when a company vehicle is involved, or on arrival at the first customer site.
2. Write that definition down as one policy so every technician is paid under the same rule, not a personal interpretation.
3. Check whether Buddy Punch's location confirmed clock in or Deputy's job tracking can enforce that exact rule, including travel between job sites during the day.
4. Announce the rule with a specific start date and explain the reasoning plainly before software begins enforcing it.
5. Put an annual review on the calendar to confirm the policy still matches how the business operates.

Buddy Punch's GPS clock in can confirm a technician started their clock at a specific location, which works well if your policy is simple, paid from the shop, or paid from arrival at the first site. Deputy's location and job tracking goes further, letting a company configure paid travel between job sites during the day, which matters more for a service company running many stops per technician per day rather than a single site assignment.

The technician who has been paid from home for years will not welcome a change to paid from the shop, even if the new policy is more defensible. Roll the definition out with a specific date, explain the reasoning plainly, and expect some friction in the first few weeks. A rule enforced consistently by software is easier to defend than a rule enforced inconsistently by a dispatcher's memory, but that does not make the transition conversation any less uncomfortable.

Once travel time is captured consistently, a genuinely useful side effect appears: you can finally compare technicians by how much of their paid day is spent traveling versus wrenching. A technician who logs far more travel time than peers covering similar territory is either working a poorly optimized route or something in the data is wrong, and either way it is worth a conversation that was impossible to have before the hours were tracked honestly. This comparison only works once the underlying travel policy is applied the same way to everyone, which is exactly why step one has to happen before step four means anything at all.

Dispatchers often build routes around assumed travel times that were set years ago and never revisited, even as territory, traffic patterns and customer density have changed. Once a few months of accurate travel data exist, use it to check whether the assumed drive times still hold, and adjust route assignments where the real numbers show a technician is consistently losing more of the day to travel than the schedule accounts for. This is a genuinely different kind of decision than the pay policy question in steps one through three, and it is only possible once accurate data exists to make it with.

Fuel costs, territory assignments and fleet vehicle policies change over time, and a paid travel definition written once and never revisited eventually stops matching how the business actually operates. Put a specific date on the calendar, once a year is usually enough, to review the policy against current operations and confirm it still reflects both what the law requires and what makes sense for how technicians are actually dispatched today. Treat this review the same way you would treat a rate card review, a routine business discipline rather than a one time project that gets filed away and forgotten as soon as the initial rollout is finished.

A field service company juggling multiple technicians across overlapping service windows benefits from Deputy's ability to see planned versus actual arrival times side by side, which surfaces a technician who is consistently running behind schedule well before a customer complaint forces the issue into the open. That same visibility also helps a dispatcher catch a technician who has been assigned more stops in a day than the travel time between them realistically allows, a scheduling mistake that a simpler tool without route aware planning will not flag on its own.