How truck tracking works
How the mobile app reports truck positions, what is stored, and what is not.
The VanMan mobile app reports a truck's position to the office. That position appears on Fleet > Live Map and on the Day Plan.
What the app sends
Each update carries the truck's latitude and longitude, and optionally its heading, speed, and GPS accuracy. Every update is tied to a specific truck.
A driver's phone must be bound to a truck. If the app has no truck to report against, the update is rejected outright and nothing appears on the map.
This is the single most common cause of "why isn't my truck showing?" — not permissions, not signal. Check the driver has a truck selected in the app before you check anything else.
Heading, speed, and accuracy are stored but never shown anywhere in the web app. The marker does not rotate to show direction, and the info window does not display speed. Do not promise a customer a speed reading; there is nowhere to read it.
What is stored — and what is not
There is no location history. VanMan keeps exactly one position per truck, and every new update overwrites the previous one.
There is no route replay, no breadcrumb trail, and no way to review where a truck went earlier today. If you need to prove a vehicle's route for a dispute, that data does not exist and never did — the moment the next update arrives, the old position is gone.
What you have is a live view of where each truck is now, which is what dispatch needs. It is not an audit trail.
For evidence of what happened on a job, use the job's Activity tab (delivery started / stopped / completed) and its Attachments — those are recorded and kept.
How the office sees it
Positions arrive in near real time. If the live connection drops, the map falls back to refreshing every 30 seconds, so it keeps working either way.
Staleness is the thing to read:
- Under 5 minutes — the marker is full colour. Trust it.
- Over 5 minutes — the marker greys out and fades. The truck has not reported recently.
- Over 30 minutes — the info window switches from "Updated …" to a red "Last seen …".
Markers grey out on their own without a refresh.
A marker never disappears. Once a truck has reported even once, it stays on the map forever, at its last known position. A driver closing the app does not remove the marker — it just stops updating and goes grey.
So a full-colour marker means "here now". A grey marker means "this is where it was, and nobody knows since". Read the colour, not the pin.
A device with a wrong clock will report a wrong timestamp and can appear permanently stale even while running.
About privacy
Be careful what you tell your drivers here. The app reports position whenever it is running and has permission — VanMan's servers apply no restriction by time of day, shift, or roster. A position sent at 9pm is accepted and stored exactly like one sent at 9am.
If your team needs an assurance about tracking outside work hours, that assurance depends on how the app is configured on the device — not on anything the office can enforce. Have that conversation honestly rather than pointing at a setting that does not exist.
The only position retained is the latest one, so there is no historical record of a driver's movements to disclose — which is worth saying plainly, because it is the strongest privacy fact available.
Tutorial: a truck is not showing on the map
Work through it in the order that actually resolves it.
Open Fleet > Live Map. Is the truck there but faded?
If so it is reporting, just not recently — over five minutes. That is a stale app or lost signal, not a missing truck. Click the marker: if it says "Last seen" in red, it has been over 30 minutes.
If there is no marker at all, this is the first thing to check, not the last. The app must be reporting against a specific truck. If the driver has not selected one — or is on a truck that was deleted — every update is rejected and nothing ever appears.
Location must be allowed, and allowed in the background if you want position while the phone is pocketed. A driver who granted "only while using the app" will drop off the map the moment they switch apps.
If the question is "where was this truck at 11am?", stop. That data does not exist. Only the latest position is kept, and it was overwritten long ago.
Answer the question from the job instead — its Activity tab has delivery started and completed times, which is usually what the person actually wanted.
A deleted truck can leave a nameless marker behind on the map. If you see a marker with no truck name, that is what it is.
Click a healthy marker. It shows the truck name, the driver, when it last updated, and — if there is a job on today — the job's status, the customer, From and To, and a View Job link.
That link is the fastest route from "where is that truck" to "what is it doing".