Time Tracking

How to Track Lawn Mowing Time Automatically

A manual timer works exactly as well as your memory does, and memory has a bad habit of failing on the busiest days — the ones where the time data matters most. Automatic tracking removes the step that requires you to remember anything at all.

The core idea: a geofence, not a button

Draw a boundary once around a property — a circle or a custom shape traced on a map, takes about ten seconds per job site. From then on, your phone's GPS does the watching. Cross into the boundary, and the clock starts. Cross back out, and it stops. There's no app to open mid-mow, no button to remember with gloves on.

Why it has to be more than "GPS says I'm here"

Raw GPS is noisy — a signal can jump 30 feet for no reason, especially near trees or buildings. A tracker that reacts to every wobble will fracture one visit into three fake ones, or clock you in while you're just driving past. The fix is a few layers of common sense stacked on top of the raw signal:

An accuracy gate — ignore GPS fixes that are too imprecise to trust
A confirm delay — wait a short window after arrival before starting the clock, so a drive-by doesn't trigger a false start
Exit hysteresis — require you to be clearly outside the fence, not just near the edge, before it stops

None of this needs to be visible to you day-to-day. It just needs to work quietly in the background so the number on your report is one you can actually trust.

What "good" looks like

At the end of a route, you should have a clean list: property name, arrival, departure, total minutes — with nothing to review, correct, or fill in from memory. If a job runs long because the mower jammed or a gate was locked, an editable minutes field at confirm time handles the exception without breaking the automatic system for every normal visit.

Geofenced, automatic, works on the phone already in your pocket.

Install MowClock

Where this data goes next

Time tracked per property is the raw input for everything downstream — what a job is really worth per hour, whether a price needs to move, and what goes on the invoice. Tracking it accurately is step one; the rest of the guide covers what to do with it.