Appearance
What Trackapt is
Trackapt keeps track of things, and of what people record about them.
That sounds broad because it is. The same app runs a fuel bay, a weighbridge, a block of flats and a shop floor, and it does so without being reconfigured into a different product for each — because underneath all of them sit the same few ideas. Learn those and the rest of the app explains itself.
The shape of it
Everything in Trackapt hangs off one structure:
- You keep tracked items — pumps, vehicles, flats, products, generators. The things you care about.
- Items are held in tracker groups — a category of items that belong together and are described the same way.
- Facts arrive about those items in one of two ways: somebody takes a reading, or somebody files a document. Trackapt calls the first a monitored parameter and the second a form.
- What arrives is turned into reports, a dashboard, and alerts when something crosses a line you drew.
That is the whole of it. The optional modules — retail, maintenance, fleet, weighbridge, property, procurement, attendance and mining — are specialised screens built on top of those same items, not separate systems with their own data.
Two ways of knowing something
This distinction runs through the entire app, so it is worth getting straight on day one.
| Counting the paperwork | Looking at the thing | |
|---|---|---|
| Trackapt calls it | a balance | a monitored parameter |
| It answers | what should be there | what somebody found |
| It comes from | netting documents — deliveries in, issues out | a person reading a value and recording it |
| Nobody has to | look | file anything |
The everyday version: you know there should be seven eggs, because you bought a dozen and used five. Nobody opened the box — that is a balance. You open the box and count six. That is a reading.
Most of the time you want one or the other. Occasionally you want both, and the gap between them is the figure your operation actually cares about: the dipstick says 1,640 litres and the paperwork says 1,800, and that 160-litre difference is the thing worth a conversation. Neither number means anything on its own.
TIP
If you are setting Trackapt up rather than using it, Tracker groups explains which of the two a group should use, and which of its settings can never be changed afterwards.
What Trackapt does not do
Knowing the edges saves a great deal of hunting for a screen that was never built.
- It is not an accounts package. Several modules record money — what stock cost, what rent is owed, what a supplier invoiced — so that the operational picture is complete. None of them post to a ledger, and none of them are a substitute for one.
- It does not pay anybody. The attendance module produces hours and holds no rates at all; your payroll applies them.
- It does not decide your policy. You set the service interval, the reorder level, the tolerance and the deduction rate. Trackapt applies them and shows its working.
Who this documentation is for
The people who use the app: the operator recording a reading, the supervisor checking one, and the account holder who set the whole thing up. It is written in the order you will actually need things rather than in the order the software was built.
It is not a developer reference and does not describe the code.
Where to go next
| If you are | Read |
|---|---|
| About to sign in for the first time | Signing in |
| Wondering what all the menu items are | Finding your way around |
| Unable to see something a colleague can see | Who can do what |
| Setting Trackapt up for an organisation | Tracker groups |
| Operating one of the modules | The module list |