VisitsTracker › FMCG and distribution
Beat coverage you did not have to take on trust
A beat plan is only worth having if you can tell which outlets were actually worked. Time inside the outlet becomes the call, so coverage, productive call rate and the list of outlets nobody reached all come out of the day itself.
No card needed. Set up in an afternoon.
Nineteen of twenty-four is the headline. The four short calls and the two off-beat stops are what the conversation should actually be about.
The beat
Coverage that came from the day, not the claim
A beat report written on Friday for a Tuesday is roughly right and completely unusable. The call records itself, so the coverage number means something.
- Outlet boundaries drawn once from your list; every call after that is automatic.
- Off-beat stops are kept as unlisted rather than discarded, because some of them are new accounts.
- A salesman who never opens the app still has a complete, accurate beat on the record.
Productive or not
Duration separates a call from a drive-by
Counting calls rewards whoever makes the most stops. Counting time inside the outlet rewards whoever actually had the conversation, and costs nobody a form.
- Every call carries a duration, so a two-minute stop and a twenty-minute one are different lines.
- Short calls are flagged, not judged: at a small outlet two minutes is sometimes the whole job.
- Patterns show up across weeks rather than being argued about in a single review.
Four short calls is not misconduct. It is a question worth asking, and now it can be asked from a record rather than a suspicion.
What it costs to run
Conveyance that matches the beat
Distance comes from the same readings as the calls, so the claim and the coverage report describe the same day. They cannot drift apart.
- Kilometres per beat per day, measured, with jitter while parked excluded.
- Claimed against recorded, side by side, with the difference raised only past your threshold.
- One export carries the calls and the distance together, into whatever order system you run.
Also in the box
Beat coverage measured from the day, not the claim
Off-beat stops are kept
A stop at an outlet not on the beat is recorded as unlisted rather than discarded. Sometimes that is a new account and sometimes it is a detour, and both are worth knowing.
It works where signal does not
Markets, basements and rural beats are where phones lose signal and where the calls happen. Everything queues and syncs later with the real time on it.
Salesmen see their own beat
The same coverage number, in their app, on the day. A figure used in a review should be readable by the person it describes before the review.
Where a distributor management system still wins
This is not a DMS and does not try to be. It does not take orders, hold stock, manage schemes, price a bill or handle secondary sales data, and if that is your problem you need a distributor management system rather than us. What we do is the layer almost every DMS takes on trust: whether the salesman was actually at the outlet, and for how long. Most teams run this alongside whatever order system they already have.
Straight answers
Questions people ask
Does this take orders?
No. It records the call, not the order. Teams run it alongside their DMS or order-taking app, and export the visit data into it.
Can we load our beat plans?
Yes, by CSV with outlet addresses. Boundaries are drawn automatically and coverage is measured against the beat from then on.
How do you tell a real call from a drive-by?
By duration. A call carries the time in and the time out, and short calls are flagged rather than judged, because sometimes a two-minute stop is legitimately the whole job.
What stops a salesman faking a location?
Mock-location apps are detected on the handset at the point of capture. The reading is kept and shown, flagged, and never counted toward a call or a distance.
Will salesmen accept it?
More often than expected, on two conditions that are settings rather than promises: collection runs only inside the working hours you set, and they can see their own record.
Also part of VisitsTracker
The rest of the product
Try it on one beat for a week.
Put it on one phone, run a normal week, and see what comes out the other end.