The 5 Best Construction Time Clock Apps in 2023

In this article, we shortlist the top five construction time clock apps for contractors and field services businesses in 2023.
5/5
construction time clock app

If you’re looking for a construction time clock app, you’ve come to the right place!

In this article, we’ll reveal the best construction time clock apps for contractors and field services businesses in 2023.

We’ll also cover the key features to look for when evaluating construction time clock apps (and why) to help you find the perfect solution to suit your business needs. 

Let’s dive straight in!

Best Construction Time Clock Apps

1

Best Time Clock App For Contractors & Field Services

4.4/5

64 reviews

4.4/5

96 reviews

Workyard provides leading workforce management software to construction companies and specialty contractors. Workyard’s construction time tracking software creates accurate timesheets using the industry’s most precise GPS tracking system. 

Workyard’s easy-to-use construction time clock app works really well for small to medium-sized businesses with anywhere from 1 to 500 employees. Why? Because Workyard is focused on making technology easy and accessible for contractors and field teams.

Workyard’s intuitive construction job scheduling app has been battle-tested by thousands of workers over the past five years, making it a viable and reliable solution for the construction industry. 

Why Workyard?

The Most Accurate GPS Time Clock App Built For The Field

Workyard’s GPS time clock app goes one step further than competitors by showing you site entry and 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.

time clock app

Allocate Work Hours To Projects

Workyard’s construction job costing software 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 and 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 time, 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 from the field.

Seamless Integrations Accounting, Payroll & Construction ERPs

Workyard supports two-way integrations with QuickBooks, Sage, Foundation, ADP, Paychex, Gusto, Paylocity, 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.

payroll integrations

A summary of Workyard's key features

  • Time Tracking – $6/mo per user
  • Workforce Management – $13/mo per user
  • Large Workforces – Custom

Test drive Workyard, no card required.

2

Basic Construction Time Clock App

2/5

43 reviews

3.2/5

46 reviews

QuickBooks Time (formerly TSheets Time Clock Kiosk) is provided by Intuit, a longstanding leader in providing small business accounting and tax software such as TurboTax. QuickBooks Time 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 given its Intuit affiliation.

Some of the software’s key features include: 

Pricing

  • Premium – $8 per user/month
  • Elite- $10 per user/month

3

Clock Shark

Simple Clock In Clock Out App

3/5

229 reviews

3.5/5

878 reviews

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 key features include:

Pricing

  • Standard – $7 per user/month
  • Pro – $9 per user/month

4

ExakTime

Time Clock App With Productivity Tracking

2.8/5

215 reviews

3/5

102 reviews

ExakTime’s construction time clock app is adaptable to teams of all sizes. It’s especially suitable if you have a large crew, and you don’t have time to monitor each of your employees individually.

ExakTime’s construction app 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 key features:

Pricing

  • Advanced – $9 user/month
  • Premium and Elite – Custom

5

eSub

Time & Labor Tracking App

2.8/5

30 reviews

2.5/5

45 reviews

eSub Time is an app for contractors designed to help your office collaborate with your construction site. eSub Time 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. 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:

Pricing

  • Base – $49 per user/month
  • Advanced – $69 per user/month

What To Look For In a Construction Time Clock App

When evaluating construction time clock apps, it’s important you understand (and look for) these key features to ensure you select the best solution for your business.

1. A construction time clock app that's easy to use

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 super simple, and the good news is if designed the right way, a smart time clock can make this very easy.

In fact, it should be so easy to use that a worker just needs to make a few taps a day to record their hours.

Furthermore, it has to be designed to deal with the following scenarios that are guaranteed to happen:

  • Workers start on time but forget 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 forget 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 finish work but forget 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).

The app should also support tracking time for independent contractors. If you are paying independent contractors on an hourly basis, you’ll want to be able to track both your employees and 1099’s with the same app.

2. A simple setup process

You’ve got projects to run. Therefore, 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 five 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!

3. 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 on every time card. However, many apps make you do the calculations manually 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.
Regular and overtime hours in Workyard.

4. 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.

5. 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 like Workyard take the raw signal and transform it into a much more useful itinerary of what happened throughout the day.

Precise GPS tracking data in Workyard.

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 their 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.

6. Offline mode

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!

7. Approval and audit trail

Once time cards are submitted by your crew, you’ll probably want a supervisor to review them.

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.

8. 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. Especially if they’re trying to do this with paper or spreadsheets!

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 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.
Workyard's detailed job cost reports.

9. Accounting and payroll integrations

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 client information, field data, and cost codes with your accounting system from your time tracking app.

This is where most providers fall short because they are not focused on construction or field services businesses.

Avoid construction time clock apps that make you re-enter all this information, as it will become very hard to keep up-to-date.

Next Steps

There are plenty of construction time clock apps on the market to help you tackle your time and job cost tracking in 2023.

If you’re a contractor looking for a solution similar to what I’ve outlined above, take advantage of the free 14-day trial we have at Workyard.

Sign up today!

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References

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