Hours of service and the electronic log book
Drivers at provincial carriers keep their duty status in the app instead of on paper, and sign each day off.
My Log Book, under Fleet, is an electronic record of duty status. It does the job a paper log book does — the driver records what they are doing as the day goes, and signs the day off — without the paper, the arithmetic, or the pad that gets left in the other truck.
A federally regulated carrier is under the electronic logging device mandate and must use a device certified by a body accredited by Transport Canada and wired to the engine. This is neither, so an officer will not accept it as an ELD record. If your carrier profile says federal, the log book is not offered to your drivers and the screen says why. Provincially regulated carriers are not under the mandate and may keep a log book like this one.
Recording your day
Four buttons sit at the top of the screen: Off duty, Sleeper berth, Driving, and On duty (not driving). Tap the one that matches what you are about to do and it is stamped at that moment. You can add the location, the odometer, the unit and a note before you save it.
Nothing runs on a timer and nothing is guessed from your phone. The log holds exactly what you tell it, which is why every change of status has to be entered — including the hours off. A day with driving in it and no rest recorded reads as a day with no rest.
What the app works out for you
- Your hours driving, on duty and off duty for the day, drawn on the same four-row graph as a paper log.
- How much of your cycle you have used and how many hours are left in it.
- Whether the day breaks a limit — over 13 hours driving, over 14 hours on duty, less than 10 hours off, or no unbroken 8-hour break. Those are the southern figures; a day driven north of 60 is measured against that part’s own set instead.
- Whether you drove more than 16 hours after the end of your last 8-hour rest. That one is easy to miss on a paper log because the window opens the evening before, so it is checked across days rather than inside one.
A day that is still running is only checked for going over. It will not tell you at nine in the morning that you have failed to take ten hours off, because you have not failed to — you have not taken them yet.
Cycles
Cycle 1 allows 70 hours on duty in any 7 days. Cycle 2 allows 120 hours in any 14 days. Your cycle is set on your driver file, and an owner, admin or manager switches it there with a button — there is a carrier-wide default for new drivers, but any driver can be on the other one. The bar at the top of the log book counts against whichever you are on.
Moving to Cycle 2 needs 36 consecutive hours off first; moving to Cycle 1 needs 72. The driver file says so when you change the setting. What the setting does is record which rules the driver is measured against from then on — taking the rest is a separate, real thing that has to actually happen.
Signing the day off
Certify is your signature. It says the entries for that day are true and complete, and it is what turns a set of entries into a record. Sign each day. A certified day locks so it cannot drift afterwards; if you find a mistake, reopen it, fix it and sign again.
Corrections
You can change the time, status, location, odometer, unit or note on any entry, and you can remove one, but either way you have to say why. The reason stays visible on the entry from then on. That is deliberate: a log corrected with a reason is worth more at an audit than one that was never corrected, and a log quietly rewritten is worth nothing.
What your supervisor sees
Owners, admins and managers get Fleet → Hours of Service: every active driver on one screen with their current status, today’s driving hours, where they stand in their cycle, anything over a limit and any day still unsigned. Drivers over a limit come first, then unsigned days. Opening a driver shows their whole book.
That view is read-only, and on purpose. The entries and the signature belong to the driver. If something is wrong, ask them to correct it — supervising the logs is your obligation as a carrier, but rewriting them is not.
Driving north of 60
Standard 9 is two regimes rather than one with a variation. Part II covers driving south of the 60th parallel; Part III covers driving north of it, and the figures are different in both directions: 15 hours driving and 18 on duty rather than 13 and 14, a 20-hour elapsed limit rather than 16, 80 hours in a 7-day cycle 1 rather than 70 — and no daily off-duty total at all, only the 8 consecutive hours, which both sides require.
If your carrier profile includes a jurisdiction that reaches above the parallel, the log book asks which side you are driving on when you record a status. It stays on your last answer until you change it, because a driver who has crossed is usually up there for days. The day is then measured against the right part, and the day panel says which one it used.
Hours that come from a certified device do not need anybody to answer it. Geotab records the operating zone the vehicle is in and sends it on the same feed as the duty status; Samsara puts it on the driver instead, in their ELD ruleset. Either way a device-sourced day is measured against the part that applies to it without a driver touching anything. Where neither said — an older Geotab record, or a Samsara driver with no Canadian ruleset — the day is measured against the southern rules and the screen says that is what happened.
Not where you are registered, and not a provinces-versus-territories split — Quebec and Labrador both reach above 60. The rules follow the driving, so a day is classified from the driving in it: on duty in Whitehorse and driving north of the line is a northern day. A carrier that never operates above the parallel is never asked the question, and their log book reads exactly as it always has.
Both parts are written in respect of driving, and neither says which one governs a day whose driving happened on both sides. So the app does not pretend to know. Such a day is labelled Crossed 60, measured against the southern limits because they are the stricter of the two, and anything flagged on it is presented as a prompt to check rather than as the standard’s answer. An entry where nobody said which side is read as southern for the same reason — the conservative reading can only over-report, and saying so is the point.
Whichever side you are on, check the limits against your own jurisdiction’s regulation before your drivers rely on them.
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The trip record an auditor checks your log books against, and a check that runs before the truck goes.