Jeff Soch's phone rang just before 7 on a spring morning in Calgary.
He'd been on a job site, heading to the office, when his service manager Daniel got on the line with news that was anything but routine.
"Hey, I just got a call from Max," Daniel said. "Somebody just stole his truck."
Soch is the general manager of Naiad Irrigation Systems, a company he's helped grow from two vans to more than 30 vehicles over 15 years. He knew what a stolen truck meant. He'd been through it before — five times. File a report, contact the insurance broker, wait. Maybe he'd hear something in a week. Maybe he wouldn't.
This time was different.
"I very quickly looked at my phone to check for any alerts," Soch says.
Four days earlier, his team had installed ServiceTitan's Fleet Pro GPS device, a small green unit plugged into the truck's OBD2 port. Soch's first thought wasn't about recovering the truck. It was about whether the thieves had found the device and yanked it.
They hadn't.
Step by step, turn by turn
Soch told Daniel to pull up the Fleet Pro dashboard and get the police on the phone.
Fleet Pro pings every 10 seconds, feeding live location, speed, and direction into ServiceTitan, the same platform Naiad already used to run their shop. Geofencing had already defined the boundaries of where Naiad's trucks were supposed to be and when. The moment that truck moved outside those boundaries — wrong location, wrong time of day — the alerts started firing automatically. There was no lag, no waiting for someone to notice. The system already knew something was wrong.
Daniel was on the phone with Calgary police, reading the map like a play-by-play. The truck was heading north. Turning east. Moving at this speed, through this intersection. The police didn't have to guess. They just had to drive.
For 20 minutes, Daniel guided them in real time.
The truck pulled into a gas station. Police surrounded it. They said they'd take it from here, and the call ended. Soch started an incident report and fired off a note to his insurance broker, who told him it was the strangest email he'd ever received.
"They'd never gotten an email about a vehicle being stolen that was actively being recovered at the same time."
But, as he'd find out, it wasn't over yet.
Not just for emergencies
Most days, nobody steals a truck.
Most days, fleet management is quieter work — knowing where your vehicles are, how they're being driven, whether the brakes on Unit 7 are due for service before that little problem becomes a big one. For contractors managing five vehicles or 50, that everyday visibility is where Fleet Pro earns its place.
Lawrence Riley found that out after one of his technicians rolled a Riley Plumbing and Heating truck in Gardnerville, Nev.
The technician said he'd hit a deer.
Riley pulled up the front- and rear-facing dashcam footage in Fleet Pro. There was no deer.
"You could watch the guy picking his nose and wiping it on his shirt as the truck rolled over. The GPS and the video don't freakin' lie."
The technician was fine and has since moved on. The $200,000 truck did not fare as well. But the dashcam told Riley what actually happened, which mattered for insurance, for liability, and for a lingering question about a separate incident a few years prior.
"We had a deer accident a few years before," Riley says. "And now we're kind of wondering if that was a deer."
AI-monitored cameras are one piece of what Fleet Pro does. Real-time alerts notify owners and managers of risky driving behavior — hard braking, rapid acceleration, route deviation — by text, email, or in-app notification. That visibility can change behavior before an accident happens, not just document it after.
But for Riley, the bigger value was somewhere else entirely.
"(Fleet Pro) makes our job costing perfect."
Fleet Pro's GPS timesheet integration automatically updates technician timesheets based on location data — when they arrived, how long they were on site, when they left. No manual clock-ins. No rounding. No guesswork.
"We can see exactly how long they were on the job, working," Riley says.
It also settles a classic customer dispute: the tech was only here for 15 minutes.
"We can print off the data and send it to the customer," Riley says. "The GPS doesn't lie."
For job costing alone, Riley says Fleet Pro is "worth every penny."
The payroll problem hiding in plain sight
Riley's job-costing story points to something most contractors don't want to think about too hard: If the timesheet data is wrong, everything downstream is wrong. Payroll. Job costs. Pricing. Profitability. All of it built on numbers that a technician filled in manually, probably from memory, probably at the end of a long day.
The problem isn't dishonesty. It's human nature.
A technician arrives at a job at 8:12 and clocks in at 8:00. They finish at 11:47 and clock out at noon. Individually, those discrepancies are noise. Across a fleet of technicians, across hundreds of jobs a week, they add up fast.
Fleet Pro's GPS timesheet integration closes that gap automatically. The system knows when each technician arrived, because the truck was there. It knows when they left, because the truck left. That data flows directly into ServiceTitan's timesheets, without a technician having to touch anything.
The scale of what that catches surprises most contractors who turn it on.
Across Fleet Pro customers, the system has detected more than 650,000 timesheet discrepancies — representing more than $480,000 in potential savings. Not fraud, in most cases. Just the accumulated drift of manual time tracking, corrected by a GPS signal that doesn't round, doesn't forget, and doesn't have a reason to fudge the numbers.
"It's not a 'keep the employees honest' thing. It's a job-costing thing. We know how to price ourselves. We know what stuff really costs," Riley says.
That's the point. Accurate timesheets aren't just a payroll issue. They're a pricing issue. A contractor who doesn't know what a job actually costs in labor hours can't know whether they're charging enough to make money on it. They can quote the same job a hundred times and never realize the margin is wrong.
Fleet Pro makes the math right. Automatically. Without adding a single step to the technician's day.
When the truck talks, the dispatch board listens
Beyond cameras and location tracking, the next evolution of fleet automation is the vehicle itself becoming a data source, one that feeds directly into the business.
In September 2025, ServiceTitan and Ford Pro announced a multi-year partnership that connects Ford Pro Data Services from model year 2020 and newer Ford commercial vehicles directly into Fleet Pro. Because the connection runs through Ford's embedded modems, there's no aftermarket hardware to install and no trucks to pull off the road. Setup that once took weeks now takes hours.
Ford Pro captures more than a billion data points every day from commercial vehicles — fuel consumption, driver behavior, vehicle health. That stream now flows directly into ServiceTitan.
When a vehicle throws a diagnostic code, the alert doesn't sit in a separate system. It ties directly into maintenance scheduling, so service gets booked before a brake job becomes a breakdown — and before an expensive truck is sitting in a shop instead of on a job. Vehicle maintenance schedules feed automatically to the dispatch board, giving dispatchers real-time awareness of what's available and what isn't.
The partnership also connects Ford Pro telematics with Scheduling Pro, Dispatch Pro, and Marketing Pro, meaning live vehicle data can inform job routing, last-minute scheduling, and even location-based outreach to customers nearby.
Nearly half of ServiceTitan's customer base drives Ford commercial vehicles.
"We're incredibly excited to work with Ford Pro to make our customers' jobs easier," says Vincent Payen, ServiceTitan's senior vice president and general manager of Pro Products. "By going beyond traditional plug-in hardware and tapping directly into Ford's rich vehicle data, we're not just simplifying fleet management, we're providing unprecedented insights."
Mike Aragon, president of Integrated Services at Ford, frames it simply: "This is a radically easy and modern solution that anyone will be able to use."
For Soch, that kind of proactive maintenance visibility was actually what drew him to Fleet Pro in the first place. A brake job that should have cost $1,000 had recently ballooned to four times that after the wrong truck got checked off in the shop records. Maintenance reminders, automated and tied to the right vehicle, were supposed to keep that from happening again.
He just didn't expect Fleet Pro to prove its worth quite so dramatically, nor quite so soon.
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'They just ran'
Soch thought his bad day was over, but suddenly, the notifications started again.
That stolen truck was on the move again.
"I looked at my service manager," Soch recalls, "and I said, 'They just ran.'"
The truck was on the highway, headed toward Cochrane — about an hour outside the city. All Soch could do was watch.
Fleet Pro's dashboard showed the truck in real time. On the highway, the alerts quieted. The suspects were running, but steady. In Cochrane's residential streets, they picked back up. Harsh cornering. Speed through neighborhoods. Heavy braking on the off-ramps.
It lasted two more hours. Then the truck turned down a dead-end road in Cochrane.
"We saw the ignition turn off," Soch says.
Police recovered the vehicle that day. It was back on the road the next morning.
In five previous thefts, that truck might have been gone for weeks. This time, Naiad didn't miss a beat.
"Being able to have that vehicle on the road the next day — you can't put a price on that."
The maintenance tracking has quietly made its case, too. Reminders come in, service gets scheduled, bills stay manageable. And there is one new company-wide rule: If you leave the vehicle, take the keys and lock it.
"It doesn't matter if you're leaving for 50 seconds," Soch says. "It's just standard procedure for us now."
A fleet of 30 vehicles, running every day, in a business built one van at a time. The trucks are talking.
Soch is listening.
That's the job, really — staying ahead of the things that can quietly go wrong while you're busy running everything else. A vehicle with a bad brake line. A technician driving too fast through a neighborhood. A service call that took an hour, not 15 minutes, and needs to be documented.
Contractors have a long list of things to watch. Most of them, it turns out, don't have to be watched manually anymore. And that trend, through AI and automation that gets smarter as it goes, is only accelerating.
» Looking for more? All the Automations Working Together? MAX Does That covers what the data shows when Dispatch Pro, Marketing Pro, Field Pro, and Fleet Pro are configured to operate as a connected system.
The full ServiceTitan Automation Playbook is coming soon, a practical guide to end-to-end automation for contractors told by the operators already running it.
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