"Just tell me where to go today" is the most common request from a field employee, and the most common failure mode for the software meant to answer it. Cram every kind of work into one flat list, and a rep can't tell a scheduled customer visit from a walk-in they logged on the spot from a task their manager assigned an hour ago.
A beat is the plan, not the work itself
A beat is a manager-planned, ordered route — an explicit list of stops for a specific field employee's day. It answers "where should I go, and in what order" before the day starts. The field employee sees it as a single card on their home screen: today's beat, already sequenced. There's no separate check-in step for the beat itself — completion is tracked automatically as the visits within it happen.
A visit is what happens at a stop
A visit always targets a customer, and it always has a real lifecycle: scheduled, checked in, completed. It's geofence-verified the same way attendance is, and it captures an outcome and notes when it wraps up. A visit can be part of a planned beat, or it can be logged ad hoc — a field employee walks into a customer's site unannounced and logs the visit on the spot, with no beat behind it at all.
A task is neither of those
A task is general work that may or may not involve a customer — deliver a sample, follow up on a support ticket, drop off paperwork. It can require photo, signature, or GPS evidence before it's marked complete, but it doesn't carry a visit's check-in/check-out lifecycle. Assign a task with a due date, and it shows up in the field employee's queue independent of any beat.
- Planning a rep's whole day in advance, in order → beat
- A scheduled or walk-in stop at a specific customer → visit
- One-off work that isn't tied to visiting a place → task
Used together, the three cover the actual shape of field work — planned, customer-facing, and everything else — without forcing a single list to pretend it's all the same kind of thing.