trakki
Field sales app with route planner for Austria
By Manuel Ober · · 5 min read
What a field sales app has to do
A field sales app has to know who your customers are and who is due next. Very few do.
Company software knows your customers, but it is built for teams: with administration, reporting and access for the boss. A navigation app takes you from A to B, but it does not know which pharmacy shuts at lunchtime or when you were last there.
trakki sits in between. It is built for one person with their own territory: no team view, no access for a manager.
What trakki does as a field sales app
trakki takes you through the week, from the Excel sheet to the note after the visit.
- Load the customer list. You load your Excel file (.xlsx) into the app. Name and address are enough; you need no coordinates. There is a template in the app.
- Map by due date. Every customer has a cycle, for example every 60 days. Red is overdue, yellow due soon, green fine.
- The week at the tap of a button. trakki lays out the week by due date, with drive times, opening hours and your lunch break. Fixed appointments stay where they are.
- Set off. To navigate, trakki opens Google Maps, Apple Maps or Waze. If you stay overnight, the next day starts at the hotel.
- Note after the visit. Every visit and every phone call is in the customer file with its date. You can dictate notes: on the iPhone with a button of its own, on an Android phone with your keyboard's microphone. What belongs in a good call report is in the guide Field sales call report.
- Excel out. You pass your visits and phone calls on as an Excel file, for your manager or a territory handover, say.
- Several devices. Phone and tablet sync through your own cloud: Google Drive, OneDrive or your NAS.
At launch there are also apps for the Apple Watch and Wear OS watches. Coming soon: a mileage log, and opening hours from OpenStreetMap – trakki fills in your customers’ missing opening hours and marks them for you to check.
A week in practice
What a week with trakki looks like, shown with invented customers from around Wiener Neustadt.
On Monday you load a list of 120 customers. trakki recognises the columns, you confirm. On the map, 9 dots are red and 14 yellow. You tap “Plan week”. Tuesday might then be Neunkirchen with six visits, and the plan has you home again at 16:40.
If a visit on Tuesday falls through, the customer stays due. If that frees up a slot, trakki suggests customers nearby. If you went there for nothing, you tap “Nobody there”: the customer does not count as visited and comes up again after a few working days.
trakki works with road times; it knows nothing about traffic jams. If it cannot find a road time for a leg, it marks it “straight-line estimate”.
See for yourself
You can try the app in the browser first, with invented sample customers. You need no account and no email address.
On the home page you open the map, filter by due date and switch the tours on. With your own customer list you plan in the app on your phone.
Who trakki is built for
trakki is built for everyone who plans their own week: field sales and sales reps with their own territory, pharma reps, manufacturers' reps, medical device sales and field service technicians on a maintenance cycle. What changes from one field to the next is under Who trakki is for.
trakki is not built for teams dispatched by a head office, for parcel rounds, or as a second CRM. There is no team view, and that is deliberate. What exists for teams and delivery routes is in the overview Field sales software: five kinds.
Your data stays with you
There is no trakki server holding your customer list. The list is stored on your device, and trakki does not analyse what you do in the app.
A few services still see something. The main ones:
- Address search: Stadia Maps receives the address (street, postcode, town). If you type a customer name, it receives that name too, so you get the business suggested. Notes never go there.
- Drive times: Stadia Maps receives only pairs of coordinates, no names and no addresses.
- Map: OpenFreeMap serves the map tiles and so sees the map section and your IP address.
- Navigation: When you start navigation, Google Maps, Apple Maps or Waze receives the customer's name and address as the destination.
- Speech recognition: Apple or Google does that. trakki only receives the text.
- Sync: The file sits in your account with Google Drive or OneDrive, or on your NAS. It is signed and end-to-end encrypted with your sync password; the provider only sees gibberish.
Whether company data may go into a tool of your own is for your employer to decide. If in doubt, ask first. More under Your customer list stays with you.
Where trakki stands
trakki launches in Austria: iPhone and iPad on the App Store, Android on Google Play and Windows in the Microsoft Store, plus apps for the Apple Watch and Wear OS watches. I will give the date for each version once it is set.
Who I am and why I build trakki is on the About trakki page.
If you want to hear when it launches, use the form below.
Frequently asked questions
Is trakki a navigation app or a route planner?
A route planner. trakki picks who is due this week and arranges the visits so there is little detour. It does not promise the shortest route. For the individual drive it opens Google Maps, Apple Maps or Waze.
Do I need an account?
No. You install the app and start, with no sign-in and no password. Only for sync do you sign in to your own cloud, and trakki does not see your password.
What makes trakki different from field sales software for companies?
Company software belongs to the company, manages teams, and the data sits with the provider. With trakki the customer list is on your device, and trakki plans your week. If you need both, plan with trakki and pass the visits on to the company system as Excel.
Can I keep working with Excel?
Yes. Your customer list goes in as an Excel file (.xlsx). If you plan with the Excel template for route planning from the guides today, trakki reads that straight in too. The visits come back out as Excel later.