Field Operations Software in Kenya: Offline Mobile, Van Stock & Fleets (2026)
For installers, distributors, service crews, and survey teams, the office is wherever the van stopped — the 2026 guide to running field operations on offline mobile workflows, traveling stock, and fleet discipline.
A distributor's van leaves Nairobi at 6am with stock, cash float, a fuel card, and three delivery routes. A solar installer's crew heads to Kajiado with inverters, tools, and a job card. A water company's technicians scatter across a county with meters and spares. By evening, each of these businesses faces the same question: what actually happened out there? For most, the answer arrives as crumpled paperwork, WhatsApp photos, and numbers that reconcile approximately. Field operations is the discipline of making "out there" as visible as the warehouse.
The four field problems
| Problem | What it looks like | The discipline |
|---|---|---|
| Work you cannot verify | Jobs "completed" with no evidence; visits that may not have happened | Mobile job cards with photos, GPS stamps, and customer sign-off |
| Stock that travels | Van inventory that leaves full and returns empty-ish | Van stock as a location: loaded, sold/used, returned — counted at both ends |
| Assets in the wild | Tools, meters, and machines issued to crews and sites | Custody records per person and site, verified on a rhythm |
| The fleet itself | Fuel and repairs eating margins nobody computed | Cost per vehicle from coded spend; fuel-to-distance and service intervals on your own sheet |
Offline-first is the entry requirement
Field software that needs connectivity is office software with a battery. Kenyan field reality — county roads, basements, rural sites — means the system must capture everything offline and sync when the network returns: deliveries, job completions, stock issues, asset checks, payments. The test is simple: put the phone in airplane mode and run a full job. If anything blocks, the field team will revert to paper the first bad-signal Tuesday, and the system becomes a head-office fiction.
Van stock: the warehouse that drives away
- Each van is a stock location — loading is a transfer, not a hand-wave; the driver signs for quantities.
- Sales and deliveries from the van decrement van stock at the point of sale. Selling needs a connection; stock transfers to and from the van do not.
- Evening return: remaining stock counted back; van variance = loaded − sold − returned, attributed to the route and the driver.
- Route profitability becomes computable: revenue minus van stock consumed minus the vehicle's daily running cost — per route, per day. The full treatment is in our van stock guide.
The evidence layer changes everything
A delivery with a photo, a GPS point, and a receiver's signature is not just proof against disputes — it changes field behavior the day it starts. Not because teams were dishonest, but because "the record is made where the work happens" ends the evening reconstruction where honest mistakes and quiet leaks both lived.
Jobs, crews, and the money they carry
- Job cards on the phone: scope, materials allocated, time on site, completion evidence, customer acknowledgment — one record from dispatch to sign-off.
- Materials against jobs: what each job consumed, so job costing is real and van stock reconciles — the same recipe logic manufacturers use, applied to installations and repairs.
- Field payments: cash and M-Pesa collected on-site recorded against the job or invoice at collection time, with the advance-and-liquidation discipline covering crew floats.
- Crew equipment custody: drills, ladders, test kits — issued to named people, returned or re-confirmed per job cycle.
The fleet: your most expensive employees
A van that costs KES 4,000 a day in fuel, wear, and financing needs to earn its route. Fleet discipline — fuel reconciled to distance, service on schedule, cost per vehicle per month — turns "the vehicles are expensive" into "route C doesn't pay and route A needs a second van". That is a management sentence instead of a complaint. Two of those three you will run yourself: cost per vehicle comes off coded spend, but no distance and no service interval is held here, so the reconciliation and the calendar stay on your sheet.
Your field operation is governed when
- Every job has evidence: photos, GPS, sign-off — captured on site, with a connection. Job records are not part of the offline queue.
- Van variances are computed nightly and attributed, not discovered at month-end.
- Every field asset has a named holder and a last-verified date.
- Fuel consumption reconciles to distance per vehicle, monthly.
- Route and job profitability are reports, not debates.
This is the operating pattern AWRA's field operations suite is built around — traveling stock, custody and fleet on the same governed platform as your warehouse and books. On the offline test above, be exact about where we land: four operations queue with no connection — stock transfers, inventory check-out and check-in, and asset movements. Job completions, deliveries, payments and asset checks all need a connection. Stock movement survives the bad-signal Tuesday; the job card does not.
What AWRA OpsHub does today
- Tasks with time entries as job cards, assignable and costed to a project.
- Van and site locations holding their own stock, with transfers in and out.
- Asset custody for tools and equipment issued to a named person.
- Offline capture with a sync queue and conflict detection, across four operations — stock transfers, inventory check-out and check-in, and asset movements.
- Approval thresholds and governed procurement behind the field operation.
More we can add to your workspace
- A route, trip or scheduling engine. Jobs are tasks, not stops on an optimised route.
- A fleet, fuel or odometer tracking of any kind.
- A certified e-signature. A signature can be captured on a movement with the signer's printed name and the time — that shipped in August 2026 — but it is handover evidence rather than a legal signing instrument.
- A dispatch board. Assigning work is task assignment, not a live dispatch view.
- Critical path is finish-to-start in relative day offsets — calendar or resource levelling.
The pattern that works here is a field operation whose difficulty is stock and custody in motion, which we handle well. A field operation whose difficulty is routing, scheduling and vehicles is a different product category, and this article should not be read as a claim on it.
Anything above that you need, we can build for you
Everything listed above as something we can add describes what ships in the standard product today — it is a starting point, not a limit on what AWRA OpsHub can do for your organisation. Kenya's eTIMS integration and its maintained payroll engine are both in the product because clients needed them and commissioned them; neither appeared by itself, and the same door is open for whatever you just read about. One qualification so this is worth what it claims: a small number of things on this blog we deliberately leave to a specialist rather than build — a statutory ledger we will not sign our name to, a rule that would decide a tax question for you, a clinical or member-funds record that belongs in a regulated system — and where that is true the post says so in those words. Everything else is a scope, a timeline and a price.
The operational work, which is what most commissions actually are
An extra approval stage in a chain that does not match the standard one, a custom field set on employees or assets that only your sector needs, an expiry that has to block an order rather than send an email, a report your board asks for in a shape nothing produces, or a scanner or weighbridge feeding the goods-in door. These are the commissions we are asked for most often and the smallest ones we quote — and unlike a revenue-authority pipeline, none of them waits on a regulator.
The module-shaped additions, which are the ones readers ask for most often
A price list with real discount authority, a customer-facing quotation that expires, a bill of materials or recipe costing, a staff advance that is issued, acquitted and chased, a member or unit ledger, a matching rule that holds a payment. Each of these is a build rather than a setting, and each has been quoted before — a bigger piece of work than a custom field, with a written spec and a date instead of a roadmap slide.
The report, document or pack nothing currently produces
The board pack in the shape your board actually asks for, a donor or funder layout, an invoice or receipt template carrying what your regulator or your customer expects, a dataset the report builder cannot reach yet. Usually the fastest thing on this list to deliver, because the data is already in the system.
Systems, rails and hardware you already run
The accounting package, CRM, online store, core banking or custom database you intend to keep — connected through our API so a fact is entered once and appears everywhere it is needed. Plus the physical edge: a scanner, a scale, a weighbridge or a till peripheral feeding the door it belongs to.
How it works: you describe the requirement, we return a written scope, timeline and cost, and once agreed it is built into your environment and maintained as part of the product. Nothing here waits on a regulator or a published specification, which is why operational builds are the ones we quote fastest. Tell us the requirement that would otherwise rule us out — that is a better first conversation than a demo.
Tell us what your operation needsMake "out there" visible
One route, one crew, one week — job cards, van stock and evidence, reconciling nightly, with stock movement captured even where there is no signal.
See AWRA for field operationsFrequently asked questions
Our field staff use basic Android phones. Is that enough?
Yes — the mobile workflows are designed for ordinary Android devices, and photo-plus-GPS evidence needs nothing exotic. The one specification worth checking is the position fix: a handset that reports its location as accurate only to within a hundred metres will have location-carrying operations rejected. The other constraints to plan for are charging and data discipline, not device cost.
How do drivers and crews take to being tracked?
Frame it accurately: the system records work, not people — job evidence protects crews from disputed deliveries and inherited shortages as much as it protects the company. Adoption follows the first time a driver is cleared of a customer dispute by their own GPS-stamped delivery record.
Can it handle cash sales from the van, not just deliveries?
Yes, with a connection, and the qualifier matters for route planning. A van sale is sold from van stock and paid in cash or M-Pesa, and the evening reconciliation covers both stock and money per route, the same way a [shop closes its shift](/blog/retail-daily-close-mpesa). What it will not do is complete a sale in a dead zone — selling requires a connection on both the web app and mobile. Stock transfers to and from the van do work offline, so loading and returning survive an outage while selling does not. If your routes cross genuine dead zones, plan selling around coverage.
What is the realistic rollout order?
Start where the leak is loudest: van stock for distributors, job cards for service businesses, custody for asset-heavy crews. One route or one crew first, two weeks of parallel running, then scale — field teams copy what visibly works for their colleagues.
