The Map shows two kinds of pins: tickets (SLA-coloured dots, positioned from GPS fields or a geocoded address on the ticket) and technicians (colour-coded teardrops with the tech's avatar). Company locations — offices, depots, garages — render as distinct square pins.
DispatchDesk never tracks devices. A technician's position is derived from work: when their ticket enters your On Site status, the pin moves to that job; when they complete a drive-home ticket, it moves to their configured home; admins can pin anyone manually, and each technician popup shows a "📍 why here" line explaining the current position. When there's no live signal, the pin falls back to the technician's home base. Positions are planning signals, not surveillance.
Map GPS latitude/longitude fields for exact pins, or map address fields (a single field, or street/number/postal/city components) and DispatchDesk geocodes them via your routing provider. Office and home coordinates can be hand-corrected by pasting exact lat/lng if a geocoder lands a street away.
Connect your own OpenRouteService (free tier) or Mapbox (free tier, live-traffic ETAs) API key under Settings → Routing. Your coordinates go directly from your site to your chosen provider — DispatchDesk holds no shared routing account and never sends ticket content. Three ways to see routes:
Route panels show distance and drive time per leg; Live Status adds who's moving right now, with time-on-road and ETA.
Move a technician to an office or home in one click from their popup; "Set technician location" pins anyone anywhere (for privacy, it never displays the previously saved address).