The working day

The working day starts when the technician taps Start tour and ends when the last stop of that tour is closed. There is no separate clock and no second button.

Why there is no clock

A button that records only the person and not the work is a time clock, and a time clock measures when somebody is present, not what they did. Start tour has a purpose the technician shares: it tells the first customer that somebody is on the way. That the working time follows from it is a by-product, not supervision.

There is also nothing to keep in step. The tour already carried its start, and its end was in the database from the first day and was never written. A second trail of timestamps next to it would be two sources for the same answer, and they drift apart the moment somebody presses one and forgets the other.

What it measures

From the start of the tour to the last closed stop. That includes what was missing from the time at the pools: driving between pools, waiting at a gate, the way to the next customer.

The last stop counts even if it failed. A day whose final stop ended at a locked gate is over too — otherwise it would stay open forever.

What is not in it: the workshop in the morning, picking up material, the drive home after the last pool, and a day with no tour at all. The working day in this sense is the tour day, not the working day of an employment contract.

Why it matters for the money

A monthly salary can only be attributed once the hours are known. Monthly cost divided by the tour hours of that month gives an hourly rate, and that rate is applied to the duration of each visit. Without a single finished tour in the month, profitability leaves the labour cost empty instead of guessing it.

The choice of denominator decides how much of the salary lands on the pools. Tour hours attribute the part that was earned out on the road and leave workshop and administration where they belong — in overhead, not on a pool.

A tour without an end is not invented

A tour that was never closed has no duration. GardyProp does not make one up — not the last visit, not eight hours after the start, not midnight. Such a number would go straight into a wage calculation.

The hours of that day are therefore missing rather than wrong. And because fewer hours produce a higher hourly rate, profitability names anybody whose tour time is below their time at the pools. That is the sign that tours are not being closed.