How is GPS Used In Landscaping? Benefits, Tips, & Limits

Written By: Lucy C.
Last Updated July 1, 2026

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Running a growing landscape business with multiple crews working across multiple sites is no simple feat.

Your mobile crew regularly drives between customer sites, sharing equipment across jobs. Without regular check-ins, it can be difficult to know what’s happening on the ground: Have the crew arrived on site yet? Where is the scarifier located? Does anyone have capacity for an additional client this afternoon?

Add in delays caused by traffic, customer change requests, snags, or access issues, and your crew can end up idle between jobs or waiting for updates.

GPS tracking can help combat these challenges by providing real-time visibility of your crew, vehicles, and equipment. With a clearer perspective, you can make better scheduling decisions and make the most of each day.

In this guide, you’ll learn about the operational benefits, limitations, and best practices for implementing GPS tracking, with real tips and experiences from landscaping businesses.

How GPS tracking can improve visibility

Landscaping businesses can use GPS to track employees, vehicles, and equipment, helping improve visibility of mobile teams.

Crew location and time tracking

Your landscaping crew spends much of its day on the road. They drive to and from customer sites, collect materials, pick up shared equipment, visit depots, and drop off waste. Without constant phone calls and check-ins, it can be difficult to manage their attendance when customers call for an update.

By collecting real-time employee location data, GPS tracking can help:

• Verify attendance — showing when your crew arrives and leaves a customer site.
• Monitor travel time — highlighting travel time between locations visited.
• Track overtime — when crew members stay on site longer than scheduled.
• Reassign teams — responding to urgent requests based on your crews’ location.
• Provide customer updates — including expected arrival times when the crew are delayed on route.

Loren Taylor, owner of Outdoor Fountain Pros, explains how location oversight helped her landscaping business make better decisions:

“The main reason I decided to use GPS tracking was that I didn’t always know where the rest of the team was out in the field. There were times when the job wasn’t completed on time, and I didn’t know why. When you are working with many people and teams in the field across multiple locations, without GPS tracking, you are simply flying blind”.

An employee’s GPS records can highlight time lost between jobs, whether that’s due to poor route planning or unplanned stops to refuel or collect equipment.

It can also highlight the tasks that regularly cause schedules to slip, helping plan future job estimates without impacting profitability.

Vehicle tracking

In addition to transporting crews, landscaping businesses rely on vehicles such as flatbeds and trailers to move equipment between sites, collect materials such as paving, topsoil, and turf, and remove waste once projects are complete.

If your vehicles get delayed, sent to the wrong location, or are used inefficiently, projects can quickly fall behind schedule, with crews waiting for equipment or materials to arrive.

Vehicle location data can provide insight into how vehicles are used, helping reduce unnecessary travel, support planning, and enable quick responses to change.

Vehicle location data can help:

• Identify vehicle idle time — before, during, or in between appointments.
• Monitor vehicle usage — which vehicles are used most frequently and where demand is highest.
• Review routes and job sequencing — highlighting inefficient travel, delays, and unnecessary mileage.
• Track materials collections and deliveries such as plants, paving, gravel, or waste removal.
• Improve coordination between crews — so that resources arrive at the right time.

Taylor explains:

“The biggest improvement that surprised me was how much we saved on fuel. When you see the actual routes your drivers are using, you realize there may be miles that weren’t even necessary. Route optimization brought significant savings”.

Equipment and asset GPS tracking

Landscaping equipment such as ride-on mowers, compact loaders, and aerators can be expensive and are often shared across multiple crews, locations, and customers. Without clear visibility of where your assets are located, crews can lose valuable time searching for essential equipment, contacting colleagues, or making unnecessary return trips to collect missing items.

If equipment is unavailable, at the wrong site, or even misplaced, it can cause avoidable downtime, and your jobs may run behind schedule.

Equipment and asset location data can help:

• View the assets’ current location — whether that’s a storage depot, a customer site, or in transit between locations.
• Monitor equipment movement and view historical usage — to identify where equipment has been over time.
• Support maintenance planning — highlighting heavily used tools or machinery that may require servicing.
• Detect unplanned movements — sending alerts for potential theft or unauthorized movement, supporting faster recovery.

Erik Collado Vidal, CEO of Growbarato.net, shares,

“Tools and equipment are in various vans, crews drive throughout the day from one garden to another, and customers are interested in knowing when the crew will arrive. Lack of timely irrigation, pruning, and issue treatment can cause plant damage, so GPS assists in that”.

How landscapers can maximize the benefits of GPS tracking

Knowing where your crew, vehicles, and equipment are is only part of the picture. Here’s how to turn that location data into operational decisions that save time, reduce costs, and keep customers informed.

As Vidal highlights, “Some companies gather the data and never use it for improvement. It’s like purchasing a thermometer for your greenhouse and then ignoring the temperature”.

Here’s how GPS tracking data can improve efficiency, support decision-making, and reduce unnecessary costs.

More accurate records for payroll and customer billing

When your crew travels between multiple sites in a day, juggling one-off visits, larger projects, and scheduled landscaping maintenance, some errors are inevitable. Your employees may forget to log their start time, estimate job duration from memory, or fail to account for travel time, leaving you to resolve discrepancies between timesheets and customer records.

A GPS time clock app helps landscaping businesses create more accurate records of where crews were and how long they worked, even when crews are spread across multiple client sites.

You’ll be able to see:

• When crew members arrive and leave each site.
• How much time is spent traveling between sites.
• Whether the crew stays longer than scheduled to deal with snags or finish a project.

Instead of relying on paper timesheets, GPS-backed attendance makes it easier to verify hours worked, improve job costing, and reduce payroll errors. You can also be transparent with your customers by showing the hours worked on their project.

For example, Buddy Punch combines GPS tracking with time and attendance data, producing a reliable record of the exact hours your employees have worked across multiple locations. Buddy Punch integrates with payroll tools including QuickBooks, Gusto, and Paychex, so time data flows directly into your existing payroll process.

Crew members can only clock in when they reach a defined geofence, with late, missing, or unexpected clock-ins flagged for a manager’s attention. Thanks to features like Face ID and QR code clock-in, you can prevent buddy punching and minimize time theft.

Improved scheduling

When juggling multiple clients, even small delays can have a big impact on schedules. Access issues, hold-ups in collecting materials, or unexpected complications during maintenance trips can all cause jobs to take longer than planned. If schedules are too tight, these delays can quickly have knock-on effects for future customers, but build in too much time, and your team will sit idle between jobs.

With location visibility, you can see at a glance which teams are still on site, which jobs are taking longer than expected, and which crew members are closest if an urgent visit is required. If equipment is held up on another project, or the weather prevents part of a job from being completed, managers can respond by reassigning crews or reshuffling visits. Location data can also indicate whether certain equipment is in constant demand and when it might be wise to purchase another.

GPS location data can also help you:

• Improve dispatch times — allocating crew or equipment to new customers based on their existing locations.
• Prevent idle time — assigning crew members to new projects if work finishes early.
• Keep schedules on track — sending extra resources to a team that is falling behind.

Over time, managers can use GPS location data to support job estimates and create more realistic schedules. You can observe tasks that regularly take longer than expected, routes that are often subject to traffic delays, and gain a clearer picture of travel time between locations.

Lower travel/fuel costs

Whether they’re traveling from the depot to customer sites, suppliers, waste facilities, or storage locations, GPS tracking highlights the routes your crew takes during their working day.

More than simply highlighting their journey, reviewing this data can highlight travel inefficiencies that may otherwise be missed.

For example, a crew member may travel a significant distance to one customer, double back to another site, and then return to an area they were already working in earlier that day. This unproductive travel time can increase fuel costs and wear and tear on your trailers and flat beds.

By reviewing location history, managers can plan more effectively, schedule customer visits appropriately, group nearby visits, and reduce unnecessary mileage. Even reducing unnecessary mileage by 10–15% across a fleet of five vehicles can add up quickly over a season.

Essentially, your crew can spend more time on billable work and less time sitting in their car.

Improved transparency with customers

GPS location data can provide a clear record of visits from vehicles and crew, including when they arrived on site, how long they spent there, and any delays that occurred when traveling between jobs or suppliers.

If traffic is bad or crew members are delayed or running late, managers can proactively communicate with the client to improve confidence and build trust.

In the event of a customer dispute, you can easily pull a timestamped location report, including arrival times, time spent on site, and any recorded explanations for delays. This can be exported and shared with the customer to verify your crew’s attendance.

What GPS tracking can’t tell you

There are pros and cons to GPS tracking, and for the best results, you need to use it alongside wider operational processes, communication, and on-site updates.

It’s worth considering the following limitations when implementing GPS tracking in your landscaping business.

GPS data isn’t always perfect

GPS isn’t foolproof. Depending on the surrounding environment, signal strength, mobile coverage, device battery life, or even the hardware being used, GPS location records may be delayed, incomplete, or inaccurate.

For example:

• A crew member working on a landscaping project in a rural, wooded, or remote location may have poor mobile reception, causing their device to appear offline or inactive despite working on site.
• A vehicle traveling through areas with weak signal coverage may show ‘jumps’ in its route history or gaps in its journey data.

The takeaway: GPS tracking can occasionally have gaps or anomalies, so phone communication, manual checks, or follow-ups may still be required to confirm the true version of events.

Location data doesn’t provide context

Location data can show you where your crew, vehicles, and equipment are, but it can’t tell you why they’re there or explain exactly what is happening on-site.

For example:

• A crew member appears to have stopped unexpectedly by a shopping center en route. In reality, they are stuck in queuing traffic.
• A crew member may show as present on a customer site, but they may be waiting to gain access, dealing with an unexpected issue, or be unable to start work immediately.

The takeaway: GPS location data is not a complete record of job activity. To understand performance, delays, and productivity, you’ll need to combine these insights with supervisor updates, task progress reports, and customer communication.

GPS can’t replace direct communication

While GPS location data can minimize constant phone calls, manual check-ins, and the back-and-forth locating equipment, it shouldn’t replace communication entirely.

Landscaping projects can be affected by weather, access issues, equipment breakdowns, and customer change requests, and crews, managers, and customers’ expectations must all be aligned.

The takeaway: GPS can support your communication methods, not replace them.

GPS can support asset recovery, but it does not guarantee it

Tracking your vehicles and equipment can help managers locate lost or stolen assets more quickly, but it doesn’t guarantee recovery.

If the device is removed, damaged, loses power, or is simply lost in a poor-reception area, GPS location data may be limited or unavailable.

The takeaway: GPS location tracking should be part of a wider asset management process.

Best practices for implementing GPS tracking

Before introducing GPS tracking in your landscaping business, consider the following:

What is the best type of GPS tracking for your business?

The right tracking tool will depend on your business needs.

You may choose to:

• Use employee GPS tracking — via your crew’s GPS-enabled phone and a location tracking app to track their movements directly.
• Use indirect tracking — collecting location data based on company-owned assets such as Bluetooth tags.
• Use location verification — collecting GPS data only at specific moments, typically when employees clock in or out, start a job, or end a job.

The table below highlights which options are the best fit.

Getting early buy-in from your crews

When implementing any form of GPS tracking, you’ll likely be met with questions from your crew around privacy, trust, and how the data will be used.

Being transparent about what’s being tracked, why it’s being considered, and how it benefits the business and crews will make rollout much easier and gain buy-in for its use.

You should:

• Arrange two-way communication with your crews before implementation begins.
• Highlight the benefits they will personally experience from GPS location data, including more accurate payroll processing, faster dispatch times, less time chasing down equipment, and eliminating unnecessary travel.
• Demonstrate what you’re tracking — including clock-ins, working time on each site, journeys throughout the working day, and confirmation that location won’t be tracked outside working hours.
• Open the floor to questions and concerns — including offering one-on-one sessions to discuss individual concerns in more detail.
• Involve crew in a pilot — look for volunteers to test GPS tracking in a real-world setting, gathering their feedback before a wider rollout.

Taylor from Outdoor Fountain Pros shares her experience:

“From day one, I have always been very transparent with my team — I explained exactly why we would be using GPS. This is not a tool for spying on people; it is a tool for better organization of work. When employees understand it as a tool that will help them, the resistance toward it simply disappears”.

Vidal of Growbarato.net agrees, stating,

“Staff should always be aware of the tracking, what is being tracked, and the reason for the company using it in the first place”.

Create a tracking policy and train managers on its use

Once you’ve decided how your landscaping business is going to use GPS tracking, it’s important to document your use in a clear policy. This will ensure your crew, supervisors, managers, and any new recruits will have a clear understanding of how it works, what it will be used for, and any restrictions.

You can download our free GPS tracking policy template and customize it for your business, however, at a minimum, your policy should cover:

• What is being tracked — employees, shared equipment, vehicles, or a combination.
• How it’s being tracked — via mobile phones, vehicle or asset trackers.
• How it will be used — tracking movement, locating equipment, verifying attendance, supporting payroll.
• When tracking applies — work hours, equipment transport, or company vehicle use.
• Who can access the data — which supervisors or managers are approved.
• How data is stored — security measures and retention period.

Your policy should be reviewed regularly to ensure it’s relevant, accurate, and continues to support business needs.

Start to reap the rewards of GPS

As we’ve shown, GPS tracking can improve the visibility of your workforce, but the true value comes from how this information is used. Reviewed regularly and applied to day-to-day decisions, it can reduce unnecessary travel, improve asset oversight, and support better planning, helping you run a more efficient, profitable business while maintaining customer and crew satisfaction.

Contributors

• Erik Collado Vidal, Growbarato.net, CEO – Growbarato.net
• Loren Taylor, Outdoor Fountain Pros, Owner – Outdoor Fountain Pros

About the Author

Lucy is an HR and workforce-management specialist with over 20 years of experience across HR, recruitment, and resourcing. Holding an MSc in Human Resource Management and Business, she brings deep practical insight into how organizations plan, manage, and support their workforces. Lucy’s writing draws on hands-on experience with HR software, helping teams understand which tools and features genuinely support accurate timekeeping, scheduling, and day-to-day people operations.