A zone is a virtual perimeter around a real-world area of interest. You can use zones to denote locations such as offices, customers, workplaces, airports, gas stations, entire states and provinces, or people's homes. When combined with exception reporting, zones become a critical component for analyzing the behavior of your fleet.

In the picture below, a vehicle trip is shown where the driver stopped inside a zone. When you hover your mouse over the stop, the name of the zone is displayed.

Creating a New Zone

To create a zone, select the Add Zone button from the Map page or the Add button from the Zones page. You can create an unlimited number of zones and they can be created individually or in bulk by importing a list prepared in a spreadsheet application. You can also quickly create a default zone by left-clicking on the map and selecting the option Add square zone here. You can later customize your newly created zone.

To define the boundary of your new zone, first select a starting point on the map. Continue creating the boundary by selecting points along its perimeter. A line will connect the points, showing the perimeter in the order you add them. To finish, close the zone by re-selecting the starting point once again, then select the Save button.

Tip: While the zone is being created, the round markers on the corners of the perimeter lines can be moved. To remove a point, drag the point off the map.

Customizing a Zone

After creating a zone, you will be taken to the Zone Edit page. From here you can give the new zone a name. This name will be used in reports and on the map.

Many of the fields for the new zone will be automatically set to an initial value. However, you may want to specify your own customizations such as which group the zone should belong to. Additionally, you can provide any other details about the zone in the comments field, disable the zone from being displayed on the map, and change the color used to display the zone.

Another important aspect of zones is their type. The zones that you create can belong to different classes such as Customers, Offices or Homes. By using zone types, you can create very specific reports. For example, if you create zones at customers, you can report and filter by the customers’ zone type. This allows you to easily see when drivers arrived and departed from your customers’ location.

Note: You can manage your zone types by selecting Types from the top menu.

By using zones in combination with real-time location tracking, reporting becomes a powerful tool for productivity. Exceptions generated by drivers will include information about which zones they were inside (or outside), or even near. This enables a number of possible scenarios such as:

• Have an email sent out when drivers arrive at customer location

• Sound an in-vehicle alert to a driver who has left work early

• Notify your shipping and receiving department that a truck is about to arrive

The application recognizes stops made within zones, such as customer areas, and can also indicate the amount of time spent at these locations.

Modifying an Existing Zone

To change the shape of a zone, find the zone on the map or search for it in the zones list. Clicking on a zone from the map will open a menu, as in the image below.

Select Change zone shape to modify the boundary of the zone. To add a new point to the boundary, click anywhere along the zone boundary. Remove an existing point by dragging it off the map. When finished, select Save to go to the zone edit screen. Click the Save button again to finalize your changes.

Note: Changing zone properties will affect future data. You can reprocess data to affect data from the past.

Removing Zones

Zones can be removed from the database by selecting a zone and then selecting Remove. Once the zone is removed, it will no longer appear on the map. Any reports that previously displayed the zone name will instead show the zone address, if available.

Making changes to or removing multiple zones at a time is made easy by using the checkbox in the top-right corner to select multiple zones.

Once your zones are selected, select Remove selected zones or Edit selected zones from the top menu to affect all the selected zones.

Note: The zone list displays 500 zones at a time; use Select Visible to select the entire page at once.

Importing Zones

You can use a spreadsheet application to prepare a list of zones to be imported to your account. This saves time when you want to create a large number of zones.

When addresses for your zones are available, use the following format to create a spreadsheet in Excel:

If you are creating zones in a remote area where street addresses are unavailable, you can use the following format which utilizes geographical coordinates instead:

You will notice that:

1. In both examples, the reference column is an incremental number starting from 1 and is used to verify that all zones have been successfully created.

2. The diameter is based on the user’s measurement system, i.e.: 250 metres for metric or 250 yards for US.