A delivery van makes 14 drops before lunch. The customer opens the trips list and sees 16 trips, or two, and neither matches how the driver describes the morning. Service fleets meet the reverse: a technician's 40-minute job and a 3-minute fuel stop land in one long trip.
Both come from a handful of device settings. This post shows which settings move a trip boundary and what each change does to a real delivery round. It also shows what you pay in report history when you save.
Polygon stores trips, parkings and stops as intervals. A calculator reads each unit's messages in time order and applies the device's trip settings. It then writes the intervals. The trips list, the unit card and the trip, parking and stop reports all read those stored intervals, not raw messages.
The settings belong to the device, not the unit. They live on the device's Trip Detector tab. The tab reference lists every field and default, and the concept page explains each rule. This post assumes both and goes deeper on stop-and-go work.
Three interval kinds matter here:
For each message the calculator answers two questions: is the unit moving, and does this message open a new trip? Condensed from the engine:
still_for = seconds since the last moving message
parked = not moving and still_for >= min_park_time
new trip when any of:
moving after a parked message
ignition goes off -> on (Ignition source only)
the assigned driver changed
silence > max_intrl_in_msgs after moving,
and silence >= min_park_time (not Ignition)
silence >= min_park_time that ends in movement after a still message
silence >= min_park_time on both sides moving,
but covering ground slower than min_m_speed
on close, keep the trip only if
duration >= min_trip_time and distance >= min_trip_dist
otherwise its time joins the parking around it
What counts as moving depends on Movement Detection:
That last line catches most delivery fleets. A van with an ignition sensor and no odometer runs on Auto, so it runs on Ignition.
The worked example is illustrative, derived from the rules above. Harbor Fresh Foods runs Van 07, whose device has GPS and ignition sensors and no odometer. The device reports every 30 seconds while driving and every 120 seconds with the ignition off. The morning round covers about 52 km:
Here is what four configurations store for that morning:
| Movement Detection | Min. Parking time | Trips | Parkings | Drops stored as stops |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Auto (resolves to Ignition) | 300 s | 16 | 5 | 0 |
| Speed | 300 s | 6 | 5 | 10 |
| Speed | 600 s | 2 | 1 | 14 |
| Speed | 120 s | 16 | 5 | 0 |
On Ignition, every engine start opens a trip, whatever the stop's length. That gives one trip from the depot, 14 after the drops and one after lunch. The 10 short drops appear nowhere. They are not stops, because each one ended a trip. They are not parkings either: the engine stores a parking only when it lasts at least 300 seconds. That minimum has no field on the tab.
Switching to Speed takes the ignition out of the decision. Short drops stay under 300 seconds, so they become stops inside the trip. The four long drops and lunch reach the parking threshold, so the round splits into six trips. This matches how most dispatchers describe a delivery run.
Raising Min. Parking time (Seconds) to 600 turns every drop into a stop, because the longest one lasts 540 seconds. Only lunch parks, so you get one trip per half day. Trip duration then includes drop time, and the trip shows stop time separately.
Lowering it to 120 rebuilds the Ignition picture by another route. Every drop parks and splits the trip, but the 10 short drops still fall under the stored-parking minimum.
Total distance barely moves across all four rows. Each extra split leaves out the short stretch between the last still message and the first moving one of the new trip. Boundaries change trip counts and durations, not mileage.
Two settings never split a trip. Min. Trip Distance (Meters) and Min. Trip Time (Seconds) only drop short legs, which merge into the parking around them. A van moved 80 m between loading bays leaves no trip.
Select Save Changes and Polygon queues a recalculation for every unit the device sat on during the last 60 days. The cost follows from how that job runs on a default installation:
The trade-off: a fast, visible correction for recent weeks, against stable older history that customers already hold invoices for. Try a change on one van first. Compare last week's trips on the trips list with the driver's delivery log, then roll out the same values.