The questions people actually ask.
Short, direct answers, written so they can be quoted without the rest of the page around them. If yours is not here, the general enquiry box goes straight to me.
Questions and answers
What is PocketMode?
A rostering, clock-on and timesheet app for Australian crews who work outdoors. Workers get an app on the phone they already carry. Managers get a browser dashboard showing who is on site, how the day ran and what needs a decision. Rosters, timesheets, geofencing, weather alerts and near miss reporting are all included.
What does PocketMode cost?
Seven and a half cents per worker per hour tracked, in Australian dollars. There is no seat fee, no minimum and no platform charge, so a crew of 10 working a full 8-hour day costs $6.00 and a week nobody works costs nothing. Rosters, clock-on, timesheets, geofencing and alerts are all included in that rate rather than sold as modules.
Which industries is PocketMode for?
Australian crews who work outdoors: farms and horticulture, construction, civil, landscaping and bush regeneration, forestry, transport, utilities and vegetation management, local government grounds and parks crews, and mine services. The product does not change between them, because the roster, the timesheet and the duty of care do not change either.
Does it work for indoor work?
Rostering, clock-on and clock-off, timesheets, breaks, incident reporting and the manager dashboard all work indoors exactly as they do outside. Two things degrade. Global positioning system accuracy falls away inside a building, so the geofence is the part you should not rely on. And the phone distraction status is less reliable when a phone is lying flat on a desk or a counter rather than moving in a pocket. Indoor work is not our target market, and we would rather say so.
Does PocketMode work with no mobile reception?
Yes, and that is a design requirement rather than a feature. Classification runs on the smartphone, not in the cloud, and completed sessions are buffered locally until there is a connection. Nothing is lost to a blackspot in a cutting, a shed, a back paddock or an underground drive.
If a phone stops reporting, does that count against the worker?
No. A smartphone can stop reporting for ordinary reasons: a flat battery, a phone switched off, or a phone left in the vehicle. None of that changes the hours, none of it is presented to a manager as a per-person score, and there is nothing in the employer view that ranks named individuals. Losing mobile reception is different again and creates no gap at all, because the app keeps working on the phone and uploads when a connection returns.
Does PocketMode use the camera, the microphone or the screen contents?
No, none of the three, ever. The app reads the accelerometer and the gyroscope, which report how the smartphone moved through three axes, plus whether the screen is powered on. Those sensors are physically incapable of capturing what anyone said, saw or typed, and no app or screen content is collected at any point.
Does it track workers outside their shift?
No. Monitoring starts at clock-in and stops at clock-out, breaks excluded, and that boundary is enforced in the architecture rather than set by a manager in a preferences screen. Outside the shift window the app collects nothing at all, neither location nor motion.
Can a worker refuse to be monitored?
Yes, and they can withdraw in one tap in the middle of a shift. They still clock in and they still get paid normally; the exception is reported to the manager as an exception and it never touches anyone's pay. Every grant and every withdrawal is timestamped, versioned and exportable.
Is any hardware required?
No. There are no beacons, tags, wearables or vehicle units to buy. PocketMode runs as one app on the phone the worker already carries, which means nothing extra to charge overnight and nothing to lose in a paddock.
How is this different from Deputy, Assignar or HammerTech?
Those platforms are, at heart, forms and workflow: compliance means a person filled in a digital form or a certificate has not expired. None of them infer anything from sensors. The closest equivalents are a location stamp at clock-in and a gate reader. PocketMode adds a passive measurement of what the phone was doing during the shift, and prices per hour worked rather than per seat, which suits a workforce that doubles for a shutdown or a harvest and shrinks again afterwards.
Where is the data stored?
In a managed database cluster in an Australian region. What is stored is derived sessions only, meaning a start time, an end time, a state and a duration, alongside the versioned consent log. The raw motion signal never leaves the smartphone, so there is no sensor stream on the server to hand over, lose or subpoena.
Is PocketMode available yet?
Not generally. A small number of 12-week pilots are opening with Australian farms, builders, civil contractors, councils, utilities and mine services companies during 2026. No pilot data has been collected yet, which is why nothing on this site is presented as a customer result.
Where does the research on this site come from?
PocketMode publishes free, ungated research on outdoor work in Australia, and every figure names its primary source and reference period. It is written to be quoted, and the underlying position is that Australian occupational data counts harm extremely well and counts conditions not at all.