timesheet
It is Friday afternoon. A foreman texts the hours for five people. One crew moved between two jobs on Wednesday and the split between them is a guess made three days later. Payroll gets done anyway, because it has to be. Then somebody asks whether the rough-in phase is over budget, and the same numbers cannot answer it, because they were never attached to the phase.
Search for construction time tracking software and the results are dominated by field time clocks. GPS verification, geofenced clock-in, kiosks with a PIN or a face, offline capture on sites with no signal. Those products are good, and they are solving one of two problems that share a name. Picking the wrong one of the two is how a team ends up paying for software and still doing the reconciliation by hand.
Write down which of these is costing money right now, because the answer changes the entire shortlist.
The first job is payroll integrity. Who was on site, when they arrived, how long they stayed, whether the hours submitted match reality. This matters most where hourly employees are paid from those hours and where a wage dispute is expensive. The features that serve it are verification features: location at clock-in, a geofence that refuses a punch from a car park two miles away, a shared kiosk so a phone is not required, and a record that survives being questioned later.
The second job is job costing and progress. Which hours landed on which phase, how that compares with the estimate, and whether the schedule is telling the truth. The features that serve it have nothing to do with location. They are about the list of buckets a worker chooses from, and whether that list is the same one the schedule was built from.
A product can do the first job perfectly and leave the second one untouched. Location proves a person was inside a circle. It says nothing about what they worked on inside it. Most of the confusion in this category comes from buying verification and expecting cost visibility to arrive with it.
A geofence permits a clock-in only inside a radius drawn around the site. That removes punching in from the truck on the way over, which is a real and common cost. It does not remove a person standing inside the radius doing nothing, and it does not attribute the hour to work.
Three things are worth checking before this feature decides a purchase.
Basements, rural sites and steel structures lose signal. Ask whether entries are captured locally and synced on return, and what happens to location data captured while offline. A tool that silently drops a punch is worse than paper, because nobody notices until payroll.
Some products stamp location only at clock-in and clock-out. Others record a breadcrumb trail through the shift. The second is a labour relations decision rather than a setting. Crews find out, and a tool introduced quietly is the tool that gets worked around. Say plainly what is collected, and when tracking stops at the end of a shift.
If the crew uses personal phones, battery, data and reimbursement are part of the rollout. A shared kiosk on a tablet at the gate avoids all three, at the cost of a queue at seven in the morning.
Prices in this part of the market spread widely, and published figures as of 26 September 2026 show it. Workyard states that plans start at $6 per user per month, billed annually. busybusy lists its Pro plan at $11.99 per user per month billed monthly, or $9.99 billed annually, plus a $40 admin licence with the first user included. Jibble publishes a free forever tier with unlimited users. Price is rarely the reason one of these wins. What happens to the hours after capture usually is.
Every one of these tools asks a worker to pick something before the time counts. A job, a cost code, a phase, a task. That list is the most important design decision in the whole rollout, and it is the one nobody reviews.
The standard failure looks like this. The office maintains a list of forty cost codes inherited from the accounting system. The schedule lives somewhere else, with phase names that were written by whoever drew the bars. Neither list maps cleanly onto the other. At month end a person sits down and translates one into the other in a spreadsheet, which is exactly the day the software was bought to eliminate.
The fix is unglamorous. The list a worker picks from should be the same list the schedule is built from. If the schedule contains "second floor rough-in", the timesheet should offer "second floor rough-in", not "plumbing labour". When the two lists are one list, the comparison between planned and actual is arithmetic rather than a project.
Two more rules make that list survive contact with a crew.
Keep it short. Eight to fifteen buckets on a job is usually enough to find an overrun. Forty buckets produce mis-coded hours and false precision, and mis-coded hours are worse than coarse ones because they look correct.
Put work type on a second axis instead of multiplying codes. Travel, rework and warranty work as separate selections alongside the phase, rather than as "second floor rough-in rework". Rework as its own line is the single most useful number on the sheet, because it is the one most teams do not have and the one that explains where the estimate went.
| Field time clock | Project tool with timesheets | Spreadsheet and paper | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Verification | GPS, geofence, kiosk, photo | None, the person enters it | None |
| Hours attach to | Job and cost code, kept separately | The same cards the schedule uses | Whatever the column is called |
| Answers "is this phase over" | Only if the code list is maintained | Directly | By hand, monthly |
| Works with no signal | Usually yes | Usually not | Yes |
| Published pricing shape | Per seat, roughly $6 to $18 a user a month | Included, or a small add-on | Zero, plus a day a month |
| Breaks down when | The labour is subcontracted, not employed | Hours must be defensible in a dispute | Headcount passes a handful |
The row that decides most small construction teams is the last one on the left. A time clock assumes employees. Subcontractors cannot be clocked in, they invoice. For a team whose site labour is mostly subcontracted, verification features are unusable, and what is actually needed is a submission and approval flow: the sub records hours against the phase, submits a week, and somebody approves it before it becomes payable.
That is a different product shape, and it is the reason a general project tool with a timesheet layer often fits a small contractor better than a purpose-built field clock. The board types a project tool offers matter here, because a schedule view and a timesheet drawing on the same list of work is the whole point.
This is the gap that the whole category tends to skip. Hours spent is one number. Work completed is the other. Without the second, a phase showing 120 hours against an 80 hour estimate might be in trouble or might be nearly finished ahead of a badly built estimate, and there is no way to tell which.
That second number does not need to be precise. A weekly percent complete, set by the foreman in a single pass down the phase list, is enough to turn hours into a judgement. Ninety hours spent on a phase estimated at eighty, with the foreman calling it half done, is a conversation to have on Monday rather than a surprise at handover. Ninety hours at ninety per cent complete is a slightly poor estimate and nothing more.
Most field time clocks have somewhere to put this, usually inside a daily report alongside photos, weather and notes. The question to ask is whether that figure lands next to the hours in the same report, or in a separate log that somebody has to open and read. If reading it is a separate act, it stops happening by the third week.
Photos matter for a related reason, and not the one usually given. Their value is not proof for a client. It is that a photo attached to a phase, taken the day the hours were logged, settles the argument about what "done" meant when the argument surfaces two months later. A board where the photo, the hours and the deadline sit on the same card removes the search entirely, which is worth more than any single feature in the capture screen.
Capture is the part that gets demonstrated. The leaks are downstream of it.
Rounding and overtime rules come first. Daily overtime, weekly overtime and local rules differ, and a tool that computes them in a way the payroll process does not expect creates a correction every period. Get a real week through the rules before signing anything.
Then the export. Take one genuine week, export it, and hand the file to whoever runs payroll. If a single number gets retyped, the tool has not removed the work, it has moved it. This one test eliminates more candidates than any feature list.
Then approval. Without a point at which a week becomes final, corrections arrive after invoicing, which is the expensive moment to find them. Approval by week rather than entry by entry keeps the effort down to a few minutes.
Last, double entry. Hours in the clock app and progress on the schedule means two systems describing the same work, and by Wednesday they disagree. Whichever one is easier to update becomes the truth, and it is rarely the one management reads.
Crews do not lose tools, they ignore them. The pattern that survives is short and predictable: one entry point, half hour steps, and a named person who chases the missing day. If nobody is accountable for chasing, the data is decoration inside a month.
Entry on behalf of others is worth confirming explicitly. Foremen will enter for the crew, whatever the policy says, and a product that makes that impossible gets replaced by a text message.
Then pilot properly. One crew, one job, one month, running alongside the current method rather than instead of it. Compare the two at the end. The comparison finds the case nobody described, usually a contract type that does not fit the rate model, before the whole company is committed. A short setup guide is enough to get a single crew running without a rollout plan.
Decide whether the pain is payroll integrity or job costing, then fix the bucket list so the timesheet and the schedule use the same names, because no tool recovers from those two lists disagreeing. If the jobs already run on boards, keeping hours on the same list of work removes the reconciliation step entirely, and Pinateca offers timesheets as an add-on at $9 per user a month, counting only the people who enter hours.
It depends on who is being paid from the hours. GPS and geofencing exist to make hourly employee time defensible, so they earn their cost where wage disputes or inflated hours are a real expense. For a team whose site labour is subcontracted, location verification is unusable, because subcontractors invoice rather than clock in. In that case a submission and approval flow matters far more than location.
Yes, and there is a specific benefit to it. When hours are recorded against the same list of phases or tasks that the schedule is built from, the comparison between planned and actual needs no translation step. Separate tools go deeper on time features, which matters when payroll rules are genuinely complex, but they leave somebody mapping two lists together every month.
Eight to fifteen is usually enough to locate an overrun, and most teams start with too many rather than too few. Long lists produce mis-coded hours, which look correct and are therefore harder to catch than coarse data. Adding a separate work type selection for travel, rework and warranty gives more useful detail than splitting phases further.
Run one real week end to end, then export it and give the file to whoever processes payroll. If any figure has to be retyped, the tool has moved the work rather than removed it. Also test a week containing overtime and a crew that switched jobs mid day, since those two cases break more products than anything on a feature page.
A spreadsheet holds up while the headcount is small, the rates are uniform and one person can remember the corrections. It starts costing more than it saves once hours must be chased from several people, once there are multiple contract types such as fixed monthly retainers, and once errors reach invoices a client sees. The practical measure is how many hours the month end takes, and how often it produces a correction that leaves the building.