ClockShark review:
What 166 real conversations revealed

Starting a ClockShark trial is fast. No credit card, and under a minute from clicking Start Free Trial to the first setup screen. Onboarding is a three-step wizard. Step 1 takes your name and work phone, and the phone field validates in real time, so you need a real-format number to get through. Step 2 is company setup: name, industry, number of employees, country, and state. The industry dropdown does not pre-configure anything, so choosing Construction changes nothing about what you see next. Step 3 offers to text you the mobile app link and is easy to skip.

One thing interrupts the flow. Before Step 2 loads, a full-screen panel slides in announcing New in Lightning, ClockShark's latest release, and you have to dismiss it by hand. That is marketing inserted into setup before a buyer has seen the product.

After the wizard you land on a welcome page with a short video and a key-features reel. There is no getting-started checklist and no guided setup. You are pointed at the navigation and left to explore.

The dashboard makes a statement of its own. It does not open on a timesheet or a company summary. It opens on a GPS map. ClockShark leads with field accountability, and where a product puts its front door tells you what it thinks it is for.

For support there is a prominent Chat with an Expert button in the bottom right of the web dashboard. When live chat could not resolve our question they followed up by phone. They texted to say they would call within the next business day, and they did call, twice. A same-day call during onboarding would have helped more, but the follow-up was still useful.

We tested the mobile app on iOS under an admin account with the full feature set. The login screen is plain: email, password, a sign-in button, and a Get a Link option for passwordless login.

What happens next is worth noting, because most products handle it worse. Before you reach any feature, ClockShark shows a full-screen Stay Connected prompt explaining that the app shares location with your team while you are on the clock, even when the app is closed. The button reads Keep Me Connected. The iOS notifications dialog follows. Background GPS is central to how this app works, and ClockShark says so in plain language before it asks, instead of burying it in a system dialog. For a crew that is wary of being tracked, being told why up front does more for adoption than any setting.

For a worker, the first screen is the Time Clock: one large Clock In button in the middle of the screen. Once clocked in, a timer runs to the second, the active job and task appear below it, and two input areas open up for Notes and Attachments.

The attachments flow is the part worth calling out. Tapping it opens Take Picture, Add Photos, and Add Files. A worker can shoot a photo on site and attach it to the live time entry in one tap, with no saving to the camera roll and uploading separately. For documenting site conditions, a material delivery, or equipment damage, that is faster than any workflow with a separate upload step.

Schedule and Timesheets both sit in the navigation. Timesheets shows the week in columns for REG, BREAK, OT, DT, OFF, and TOTAL, so a worker can check their own record from their phone before it reaches payroll. Quotes and Notifications are there too.

The navigation drawer splits the product into CLOCK, MAP, CALENDAR, WORK, and SETTINGS. A worker lives in CLOCK and CALENDAR. A manager leans on MAP.

Crew Clock is the supervisor's version of the clock-in screen. Instead of one button for yourself, it lists workers with a search bar and an Everyone checkbox, and highlights active workers in green. For a foreman clocking several crew members from a shared device, or checking at a glance who is already on, that is the right tool, and the search keeps it usable on a large crew.

Who's Working Now is the mobile version of the GPS map. Pins show clocked-in workers, and a card below the map gives each worker's name, current job, and time on the clock. Each pin reports its own accuracy, 8 metres on the punch we watched, so you can tell a solid fix from a vague one rather than trusting every pin equally. The pin updates on ClockShark's capture interval rather than continuously, so treat it as a current check rather than a live track. Push on that interval in a demo if tight real-time location matters to you.

The job detail screen carries COMMENTS, QUOTES, and ATTACHMENTS tabs, with Switch and Comment buttons at the bottom. Job notes stay attached to the record instead of getting lost in a text thread.

The admin features on mobile are monitoring and response tools, not a management console. Building jobs, configuring time-off policies, and managing payroll integrations all stay on the web. That split is why the app stays fast, and why a worker picking it up for the first time knows what to do within thirty seconds.

The web app is built for admins and managers. There is no prominent Clock In button. The GPS map is the dashboard and time management lives in the navigation. The web is where you manage, the phone is where you work.

Timesheets opens on a weekly calendar, Sunday through Saturday, with Add Time and Time Off in the top right. A manual entry opens a detailed panel: date, start time, end time, optional break, timezone, employee, job (required), task (optional), notes, and attachments. The notes field takes 2,000 characters. Most time tracking tools give you two lines. That is long enough for a foreman to document site conditions, an unusual delay, or job-specific instructions that need to stay attached to the time record.

The Approve view is where managers review and lock time for payroll: a table of employees with columns for REG, OT, DT, PAID OFF, UNPAID OFF, TOTAL, and STATUS, filtered by approval status and pay period. Clicking into an employee opens their week with a JOB/TASK column, an approval status badge, a timezone selector, and Approve All. You can approve in bulk or day by day.

My Time Clock shows what a worker sees on the web, split into My Timesheet and My Schedule. Useful for anyone who works from a desktop rather than the app.

Schedules is a shift board: a weekly calendar with a jobs panel on the left, employee rows filling the calendar, and Add Shift and Publish at the top right. Managers create shifts, drag them around the calendar, and edit details inline.

The publish step is what makes it useful for crew communication. Publishing sends push notifications and email to assigned workers, so they know before their next shift, and they can view the schedule in the app at any time afterwards, including clocking in from a job's detail page in the schedule view. Scheduling depth is one of the clearer things separating ClockShark from simpler punch clocks.

Shifts are employee-based, which is fine for a small team. Moving a six-person crew means dragging six individual blocks.

Time Off has two tabs, Requests and Policies. Requests lists pending and past requests by employee, dates, policy, hours, status, and submission date. Adding a policy opens a four-step wizard: policy details, additional settings, employee selection, and employee details. Step 1 covers the policy name, the policy type, and whether time accrues and is capped or is not limited at all.

We could not get past that. Clicking Additional Settings threw an Error! error modal, which blocks accrual rules, carryover settings, and PTO bank configuration. The wizard loaded; the overview that would show configured policies and their status did not. Time off is a core function for any team past a handful of people, so ask for a live demo of this section specifically, and confirm that accrual calculations, carryover logic, and employee assignment all work before you commit.

The WORK section is where ClockShark starts to look like a light field operations product rather than a time tracker.

Jobs are the core unit. Every time entry links to a job, so labor costs organize by project without extra effort. ClockShark creates a default General Work job during onboarding so workers can clock in before real job records exist. The job list shows name, number, and stage, with search and filter controls. Customers sit above jobs: you create a customer, attach jobs to them, then build quotes and invoices against those jobs. Each job can be paired with a task, and tasks carry billable rates, tax rates, and invoice descriptions.

The intended path is customer, then job, then quote, then invoice. ClockShark has separate help articles for creating quotes and creating invoices, plus a dedicated one on handling change orders through that workflow, which suggests the two modules are meaningfully connected. Whether there is a one-click quote-to-invoice conversion was not something we could confirm from the trial or the documentation. Worth verifying in a demo.

The invoices module is the surprise. Most competitors in this space stop at payroll export and leave billing to QuickBooks. ClockShark is trying to own more of the revenue workflow. Whether a contractor uses it or stays with their accounting software probably comes down to team size and how many platforms they are willing to run.

The reports catalog is deeper than we expected at this price. Quick Summary gives the top-level read. Job and Employee reports, each with details and summary variants, answer the most common payroll question: who worked on what, and for how long. Task and Mileage reports cover the newer additions.

The Time Tracking category is where a compliance-minded team will spend its time: Timesheets, Shift Wrap-Up and Compliance, Checklists, Time Off, and Timesheet Alerts. We could not fully evaluate that last one, but exception reporting is where a field manager catches problems before payroll runs instead of after.

Financial reports cover collection, tax, payment, invoice and labor by customer, and pay rates. Put next to the invoices module, they give a service contractor a reasonable read on job profitability, provided the job and time records going in are accurate.

Overtime deserves a closer look, because this is where ClockShark does more than a basic time clock. Rules are built as named sets and assigned to people or groups, so a company can run California Office, Chicago (non-exempt) Office, Salary, Salary Exempt, and Foremen side by side, with one set as the company default. Each rule covers weekly overtime, daily overtime, daily double time, and separate Saturday and Sunday options.

There is a dedicated California 7th Day toggle, and it spells out exactly what it does: overtime for work over 8 hours in a workday and 40 in a workweek, and for the first 8 hours on the seventh consecutive day; double time for work over 12 hours in a workday, and over 8 hours on the seventh consecutive day. For a California contractor that is the rule set that usually forces a spreadsheet, so having it built in and assignable per group is a real answer. Reassigning employees between rule sets warns you how many people are about to change, which is the right amount of friction for a payroll setting.

Company Settings is where the depth shows. The left navigation splits into Company Details, Display Format, Payroll and Overtime, Timesheets, Schedules, Time Off, Groups, JobReady, JobFlow, and Emails, so each rule set gets its own section rather than one long settings dump. Groups adds departments and locations above individual workers, which lets you filter timesheets, reports, and schedules by group. That matters once a team is spread across several sites.

The integrations page lists Simpro, QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Desktop, ADP RUN, ADP Workforce Now, ADP Next Gen, Xero, Sage 100 Contractor, Gusto, MYOB, Paychex by CSV export, Paylocity, and Zapier. ADP in three variants and QuickBooks in two covers most payroll setups a contractor is likely to be running.

Two are worth calling out for field work. Simpro schedules now sync directly into ClockShark's scheduler on both web and mobile, on the Pro plan, which is a real workflow improvement for a team already running Simpro for project management. Sage 100 Contractor covers construction firms in the Sage ecosystem, Gusto and Paychex cover smaller contractors on lighter payroll platforms, and Paylocity was added recently as a direct connection. Zapier handles what the native list does not.

One gap matters for construction. There is no Procore connection on the integrations page. If you are a GC or a sub running Procore for project management, confirm that directly with ClockShark sales before you commit.

ClockShark's Lightning release adds three things: JobReady, an AI daily brief; Task Checklists; and Mileage Tracking on the Pro plan. JobReady is the one most competitors are not attempting. Its settings panel describes it as preparing employees for the day with a summary of the schedule, job locations, tasks, and notes before they clock in, behind an Enable Daily Brief checkbox that is unchecked by default.

We could not test it. The feature was not available at our trial plan level, so the settings panel states the intent without exposing what a worker actually sees.

JobFlow, ClockShark's shift wrap-up and compliance form builder, returned a 404 when we navigated to it directly, and it does not appear in the main navigation. It exists as a product: it has its own entry in Company Settings and a dedicated Shift Wrap-Up and Compliance report category. We simply could not evaluate the form builder.

That is the honest shape of this trial. Time Off policies, the approval workflow with a second user, JobReady, and JobFlow were each blocked by trial limits or errors. If any of them matter to your decision, ask for a live demo covering them specifically rather than assuming a self-serve trial shows the whole product.