How to Read a MyGeotab Exceptions Report

If you manage a fleet, you don’t have time to review every trip your drivers take. That’s the idea behind “managing by exception”: you set the limits that matter, and the system flags only the moments a vehicle or driver goes past them. In MyGeotab, those flags live in the Exceptions report.

This guide walks through what the report shows, how to interpret the three most common exception types (speeding, idling and harsh braking), and how to turn the data into coaching rather than just a pile of alerts.

What is an Exception in MyGeotab?

An exception happens when an asset or driver breaks a rule you’ve set up in MyGeotab. The software monitors compliance, and you step in with coaching only when a limit is exceeded or a trend appears. Rules are managed under Groups & Rules > Rules, and every time one is broken an event is recorded in your database that can also trigger notifications.

Built-in rules are sorted into categories such as safety, productivity, fleet optimization, compliance and sustainability. Speeding and harsh braking sit in the safety category, and idling has its own family of rules.

How to Open and Filter the Exceptions Report

1. Log in to MyGeotab and open the Exceptions page from the main menu (it sits under the Groups & Rules area; some guides label it Rules & Groups depending on your version).
2. You’ll see a list of events generated by your company’s rules.
3. Narrow it down using the filters: date and time range, asset or driver, and rule (for example Speeding or Harsh Braking). A search bar also lets you search by vehicle, driver or rule name.
4. Click any row to open the details: the driver or asset involved, date and time, the rule that was triggered, the location on the map, and any notes or comments.
5. Use Export to save the results for a meeting or a coaching file.

What you can see and do depends on your permissions. With basic access you can view exceptions, while reviewing them requires an additional exception-review permission.

Tip: The Exceptions report shows where each rule was broken. The separate Risk Management report shows how many rules were broken relative to distance driven. Use both together. A driver with 10 exceptions over 500 km is a very different story from a driver with 10 exceptions over 50 km, so compare drivers on exceptions per 100 km (or per 100 miles in older Geotab material) rather than raw counts.

Reading an Idling Exception

Idling exceptions are usually about money and emissions rather than safety, and in Canada, winter makes them a fair topic of conversation.

How the rules work:

• The standard Idling rule fires after a set time limit. Its default is 3 minutes and 21 seconds, which you can adjust.
• Idling within zone tracks idling in specific places, such as a customer site or yard. It treats a vehicle moving slower than 5 km/h as idling, which accounts for normal GPS drift.
• Preventable idling (a beta rule) excludes power take-off (PTO) activity, so work-related idling doesn’t get counted against the driver. Its default duration is 10 minutes.

Why it matters, according to Natural Resources Canada:

• Idling for more than ten seconds uses more fuel than restarting the engine, and if you’ll be stopped for more than 60 seconds (outside of traffic) the engine should be off.
• A typical vehicle with a 3-litre engine wastes over a quarter of a litre of fuel for every 10 minutes of idling.
• Idling is not an effective way to warm up a vehicle, even in cold weather. Block heaters can improve fuel economy by as much as 10% at -20°C.
• If drivers of light-duty vehicles cut just three minutes of idling a day, Canadians would collectively save an estimated 630 million litres of fuel a year.

When you read an idling exception, check the location and duration together. A 20-minute idle at a job site while a driver is working in the vehicle is very different from 20 minutes in a parking lot. Also keep in mind that many Canadian municipalities have their own anti-idling bylaws, commonly in the range of a few minutes, so your internal threshold should reflect the strictest rules in the areas where you operate.

Reading a Speeding Exception

A speeding row tells you who, when, where, and how far over the limit. Before reacting, know which version of the rule is in play:

• The newer built-in speeding rule triggers when a vehicle exceeds the posted speed limit by 20% for more than 5 seconds, and that threshold is not customizable.
• Older or custom speeding rules can use thresholds you define yourself, which is why many fleets build an additional “Excessive Speeding” rule on top of the standard one.

What to look for:

• Location: Open the map view. Repeated events on the same stretch of highway, or at the same exit ramp, usually point to a routing or scheduling problem as much as a driver problem.
• Pattern: One event is a conversation starter. The same driver appearing every week is a coaching priority.
• Severity: Separate minor overages from excessive ones, since they call for different responses.

To reduce false alarms, make sure your team understands that the rule compares speed to the posted limit, so a flagged event is worth checking against the map before you raise it with the driver.

Reading a Harsh Braking Exception

Harsh braking events point to following too closely, distracted driving, or poor anticipation of traffic. MyGeotab offers two generations of these rules:

• Sensor-based rules rely on the accelerometer, so a pothole can produce a spike and a false positive.
• GPS-based rules (marked “New”) measure the vehicle’s movement between points in space, filtering out noise from road conditions. They tend to log more events because they also capture less severe harsh driving, which is intentional: it lets you coach behaviour before it turns into a collision.

The GPS-based thresholds are set automatically by vehicle class, so you don’t need separate rules for different vehicles. Harsh braking triggers at 0.300 g for passenger vehicles, 0.280 g for light-duty trucks, 0.240 g for medium-duty trucks and 0.200 g for heavy-duty trucks. In other words, a heavy truck is flagged at a much gentler stop than a car, which reflects how much more dangerous hard braking is at that weight.
When reviewing harsh braking:

• Check the location. Clusters at a particular intersection or construction zone may be a route issue rather than a driver issue.
• Look for the same driver appearing alongside speeding exceptions. Speeding plus harsh braking is a stronger risk signal than either alone.
• If you’re comparing a new GPS-based rule against past data from the older sensor-based rule, expect the event counts to rise at first.

Turning Exceptions Into Coaching

The report is only useful if it changes behaviour. A simple routine:

1. Set expectations first. Make sure drivers know what the rules are and why they exist.
2. Review weekly. Filter by driver and rule, then look for repeat patterns rather than one-off events.
3. Coach with the map. Showing a driver the exact location and time makes the conversation specific and fair.
4. Track the trend. Use exceptions per 100 km from the Risk Management report to see whether coaching is working.
5. Fix the cause, not just the symptom. If exceptions cluster on one route or time of day, adjust the schedule or route.
6. Use real-time feedback. In-vehicle alerts such as a beeper can reduce speeding before it shows up in your report.

One published fleet example, JP Services, uses this approach: they rely on the detailed exception report and the Risk Management report, and report cutting idling and maintenance costs after tracking idle time and raising awareness among drivers.

Final Thoughts

A MyGeotab Exceptions report isn’t a list of drivers to punish. It’s a prioritized list of moments worth a closer look. Read each row for the who, when, where and how bad, compare drivers fairly using distance-based metrics, and use the patterns to coach, adjust routes and cut fuel waste.

If you’d like help setting up rules, thresholds and scheduled reports that fit your fleet, the team at GPS Tracking Canada can help you get the most out of MyGeotab.