Contents
We also cover the five really important things to look for when evaluating a construction time clock app that is based on our learning from working with thousands of construction and service businesses over the past 5 years.
Let’s dive right in.
Part 1: The 5 Best Construction Time Clock Apps
#1 Workyard
Workyard provides leading workforce software to construction companies and specialty contractors. Workyard’s construction time clock app creates accurate timesheets using the industry’s most precise GPS tracking system.
Its easy-to-use construction time card app works really well for small to medium-sized businesses with anywhere from 1 to 500 employees, larger teams are also supported.
Workyard is a company that is focused on making technology easy for your workers. Its smart construction time clock app has been battle-tested by thousands of workers over the past 5 years.
Why Workyard?
The Most Accurate GPS Time Clock Built For The Field
Workyard’s GPS time clock goes one step further than competitors by showing you site entry & exit times, precise addresses, and driving trips including mileage. To make auditing timesheets even easier, Workyard uses smart alerts to surface potential time card mistakes.
Quick Worker Adoption With The Easiest To Use Time Clock App
Battle-tested by thousands of construction workers in the field, Workyard’s mobile time clock app makes clocking time easy for employees. One tap to clock in, take a break, and clock out. Site entry detection ensures employees clock in as soon as they step onto your job site, and you can count on Workyard to keep working in areas without an internet connection.
Allocate Work Hours To Projects
Workyard’s construction time clock provides an easier way to get the reports you need to know your project’s costs in real time. By setting up your projects and unique cost codes once, then allowing your employees to allocate their work hours to them, Workyard automatically generates labor cost reports you can access at any time.
Real Time Labor Cost Tracking & Reporting
Say goodbye to wrestling with spreadsheets to keep track of your labor costs. Workyard’s construction time tracking software simplifies profit & loss analysis for construction companies. With on-demand access to labor costs down to the task, you’ll not only improve the accuracy of client billing, but you’ll be able to gauge if employee time is being used efficiently.
Better Scheduling With Checklists & Attachments
Workyard’s construction time clock includes integrated job scheduling software that makes it easy to schedule the right employee, at the right times, with a simple calendar planner. Organize schedules by employee and/or job. Communicate exactly what needs to be done with notes, checklists, and attachments that your employees can access with our field app.
Seamless Integrations Accounting, Payroll & Construction ERPs
Workyard supports two-way integrations with Quickbooks, Sage, Foundation, ADP, Paychex, Gusto, and many more systems. Automatically sync Employees, Projects, and Cost Codes. When you are ready to run payroll, export time at the click of a button.
A summary of Workyard’s features
- Smart mobile time clock – Easy to use clock in and clock out that supports tagging hours to projects. Site arrival detection and smart reminders also ensure your workers are clocked in when they need to be.
- Most Accurate GPS tracker in the industry – See GPS map, site entry time, duration, exit time, and driving trips including time and miles traveled. GPS site arrival detection identifies late clock-ins, off-site clock-ins, and clock in and out while driving.
- Accurate mileage and travel time reporting – Mileage per employee and project is automatically calculated. See miles by employee and project.
- Built-In overtime & break compliance – Calculate overtime automatically. Support for breaks reminders and unpaid breaks. Full-audit trail of every time card change including a GPS log of site entry and exit times.
- Live job cost tracking – Import clients, jobs, and cost codes from your accounting in one click. Workers easily tag hours to projects and cost codes. See live job actuals in a powerful dashboard. One-click export allocations to your accounting system.
- Scheduling & task management – Simple office-to-field scheduling. Easily schedule projects, tasks, and work orders for your crew. Communicate with notes, photos, checklists, and more.
- Seamless accounting, payroll & ERP integrations – Quickbooks Online, Quickbook Desktop, Sage, Foundation, ADP, Gusto, Paychex & more.
Workyard as a Quickbooks Time alternative
#2 Quickbooks Time
Quickbooks Time (formerly TSheets) is provided by Intuit, a longstanding leader in providing small business accounting and tax software such as Quickbooks and TurboTax. Tsheets is designed for a broad range of industries including healthcare, legal services, IT, government, and construction.
Up until now, its time clock app has been the default option for construction businesses running on Quickbooks given its Intuit affiliation.
Some of Tsheets’ features include:
- Construction time clock app: Option to punch in and out from desktop, mobile phone, or kiosk. Ability to select jobs and tasks.
- Basic GPS Location Tracking: See a GPS line trace of employees’ locations throughout the day
- Approvals: Once employees have tracked time, managers and admins can set reminders to approve timesheets before running payroll.
- Scheduling: Create and modify schedules with drag and drop shifts
#3 Clockshark
ClockShark is a time clock app for construction and field service companies who want to replace their paper timesheets with digital ones. Moreover, residential, commercial, and subcontracting construction companies often need to send their crew to different locations.
ClockShark’s GPS time tracking system and custom geofencing capabilities make the time monitoring process hassle-free for you as well as your employees.
Some of ClockShark’s features include:
- Construction Time Clock App: Option to punch in and out from desktop, mobile phone, or kiosk. Ability to select jobs and tasks.
- Simple scheduling: User-Friendly design. Drag and drop by task or worker directly into the calendar.
- Location matters: With the app, you can set geofences to a construction site, see who’s working in real-time, & replay their routes.
- Mobile apps: ClockShark’s intuitive design deems it suitable for construction workers and business owners.
- Quick Reporting: With ClockShark, you can easily access detailed reports and overviews. You can also export your reports to various formats, or integrate it with your payroll and accounting systems.
#4 Exaktime
ExakTime’s app is adaptable to teams of all sizes. It’s especially suitable for you if you have a large crew, and you don’t have time to monitor each of your employees individually. ExakTime is streamlined for tracking across multiple teams and locations, and the solution offers actionable reporting on project costs and compliance.
Here are some of the app’s features:
- Photo ID verification: Are you worried about buddy-punching? ExakTime’s construction time clock app snaps a photo of the worker with their front camera when they punch in or out, and link it to the worker’s records for proof.
- GPS tracking: ExakTime lets you pinpoint your worker’s location when they are on the job site. Like most time clock apps, you can set virtual geofences around your construction sites. You can also measure the speed and location of mobile workers with their Geotracker feature.
- An extensive set of integrations: ExakTime can integrate with over 90 accounting payroll and software products, as well as seamlessly communicate with them. This makes payroll processing much easier, as you don’t need to manually reenter the data.
- Compliance sign-off: ExakTime collects important compliance information from workers every time they clock-out and saves their responses for easy review.
#5 eSubTime
eSubTime is designed to help your office collaborate with your construction site. eSubTime lets you achieve higher accuracy in your time tracking process, while you go paperless. If your workers don’t own a smartphone, it’s not a problem: because this app gives you multiple ways to track your crew’s time while they are on the construction site: they can either clock in or out through their foreman, via their personal smartphone, or through a centralized kiosk.
Some notable features of the app include:
- Flexible Time Entry: Record time from your workers’ personal cellphone or set up a table in a “kiosk mode.” It also makes it easy to switch between projects and keep track of lunch breaks.
- Clock Out Reminders: Workers get a reminder if they have not clocked out after a number of continuous hours.
- Ability to edit timesheets: Sometimes, workers forget to clock in or out. But eSubTime lets you modify timesheets to fix such errors.
- Works Offline: Not all areas of a job site have internet coverage. But your crew can still record their activity in the app. They can clock in or out even if they are offline, and the data would sync whenever their device goes online again.
Part 2: What To Look For When Picking a Construction Time Clock App
A construction time clock app must be easy for workers
Let’s face it, one of the biggest challenges of deploying a construction time clock app is getting your crew on board with using an app to track their hours worked.
It has to be dead simple, and the good news is if designed the right way, a smart time clock can make this very easy.
It should be so easy that a worker just needs to make a couple of taps a day to record their hours.
Secondly, it has to be designed to deal with the following scenarios that I guarantee you will happen:
- Workers starting on time, but forgetting to clock in – Your construction time clock app should be smart enough to remind workers to clock in. Workers should be able to easily correct their start time with one tap. For transparency, supervisors should be able to see they clocked in late and manually changed their start time.
- Workers forgetting to take or record breaks – For many reasons, you may want to ensure your workers take a break after a set amount of hours worked. A good time clock app can help you remind your workforce to take breaks.
- Workers finishing work, but forgetting to clock out – Again in this scenario, workers should be able to easily select their correct end time with one tap. GPS location tracking should show you the actual time they left the last job site (more on that later).
Some examples:
A simple setup process
I get it, you’ve got projects to run.
The last thing you want is to spend hours trying to figure out how to set up a construction time clock app and frustrate your team with the whole process.
Whatever app you choose, you should be able to get going in 5 minutes without having to call the support desk.
The good news is most providers offer a free trial without having to put down your credit card.
Aim to sign up, invite some of your people and test it out on one of your projects.
You’ll get an immediate sense of how easy or hard it will be to use!
Built-in break compliance and overtime calculations
This one is straight forward but surprisingly many apps don’t do this well.
To calculate your weekly hours accurately, a construction time clock app needs to:
- Support setting a pay period – To get the overtime and weekly hours calculations right the pay period in your time tracking system should be the same as what’s in your payroll system.
- Automatically calculate overtime – As soon as a time card is completed, overtime should be calculated based on your state’s rules.
- Clearly display overtime – Overtime should be visible every time card, many apps make you do the calculations or don’t give you the numbers until you run an end-of-week report.
- Support meal breaks – You should be able to set whether you pay for meal breaks or not. If workers are taking unpaid meal breaks, this should be automatically deducted from their total hours for the day.
Examples:
Flexible time entry options
You’ll need the ability for your supervisors and office to enter/edit time on behalf of others.
There are many situations where this is important.
Make sure you can do the following operations with your construction time clock app:
- Enter a time card from scratch on behalf of a team member.
- Edit a time after it has been submitted.
- Do all this on your iPhone, Android, Ipad or Computer.
Precise GPS tracking with sites visited, mileage, and travel time
There are many GPS time clock apps, but most just show you a bunch of dots or lines on a map, they don’t provide you with actionable and usable data.
Although this is better than nothing, this isn’t really that useful.
What’s more useful is the ability to see the following information at a glance:
- A list of the sites visited
- Entry time, time spent on the site, and exit time.
- Driving trips including the miles traveled and total travel time. This can be very useful for calculating mileage reimbursements and travel time pay for construction workers.
- Current live location
Precise GPS trackers take the raw signal and transform it into a much more useful itinerary of what happended throughout the day.
Here’s a visual of the difference:
Additional GPS tracking considerations:
- Privacy – If you’re looking to use GPS location tracking, make sure the construction time clock app you use only tracks location while people are clocked in. Once people clock out the app should stop tracking location.
- Battery Consumption – The better GPS trackers in the market will be smart enough to conserve battery by going to sleep when an employee is not significantly on the move. Expect only 5-15% of additional battery consumption after a full day’s work.
Offline mode
Even with mobile internet coverage getting better every year, let’s face it, not all areas of your job sites are going to have internet coverage.
A construction time tracking app designed for the field needs to continue to work offline when there is no coverage.
When back online, time and GPS data should be uploaded seamlessly without any data loss.
One way to test this is to turn off your internet coverage while testing an app and see what happens!
Approval and audit trail
Once time cards are submitted by your crew, you’ll probably want a supervisor to review the time card.
It’s important for this process to be easy for them, and for there to be a clear audit trail of every edit made.
Ideally, if a worker’s time is changed, a reason should be provided and communicated back to the worker.
This is important because it helps you avoid any disputes regarding hours down the line which are becoming increasingly common.
Also if there ever is a claim made against you, you have a clear record trail of exactly what happened including detailed GPS logs.
Some examples:
Built-in job costing
Labor costs are a huge component of your overall project costs.
Most contractors struggle to accurately track and understand the exact costs of each of their jobs, I don’t blame them…
If you are trying to do this with paper or spreadsheets it’s very difficult!
A construction time clock app can make job costing a breeze.
Here’s what to look for:
- While clocked in, your crew should be able to easily tag their hours to projects and cost codes.
- A dashboard that shows your up-to-the-minute labor costs by client, job, and cost code.
- The ability for your office to add/edit job cost allocations.
- The ability to export your job cost information to a spreadsheet or to your accounting system of choice.
Some examples:
Accounting & payroll feeds
Firstly, you want to be able to click a button and send your weekly hours to your payroll system.
Many providers support this for Quickbooks Online, Quickbooks Desktop, ADP, Gusto & more.
Secondly, if you care about job costing then you’ll want to be able to easily sync the clients, jobs, and cost codes in your accounting system to your time tracking app.
Lastly, once hours have been tagged to projects and codes, you’ll want to sync the allocations back to your accounting system.
This is where most providers fall short because they are not focused on Construction & Home Services businesses.
Avoid construction time clock apps that make you re-enter all this information, it will become very hard to keep up-to-date.
Conclusion
There are plenty of construction time clock apps on the market to help you tackle your time and job cost tracking in 2022. If you’re a contractor looking for a solution like I’ve outlined above, take advantage of the free 14-day trial we have at Workyard.
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