Arcoro Time review:
What 517 real conversations revealed

Getting started begins with a welcome email and a signup code. You create an ExakTime Connect account through the link provided, set an administrator username and password, verify your email, and land in a quick-start tutorial.

Adding your workers, work locations and cost codes took us about 15 minutes for a basic setup, which is quick for a product of this type. Migration from another platform is handled with CSV uploads, and that works well enough.

The system doesn't let you delete items you no longer want, whether that's an employee record, a location or a cost code. You can only deactivate them. Over a few years of job turnover that leaves you scrolling past a lot of inactive records.

Onboarding was more straightforward than we expected. The knowledge base articles and video tutorials are detailed, and the interface is no-frills in a way that makes it easy to find your way around without much hand-holding.

One important correction to our 2024 notes. At the time, getting started meant talking to a sales rep for a quote. As of August 2026 Arcoro publishes per-user rates for all three plans and offers a self-serve free trial. If sales-gated signup put you off before, that specific barrier is gone.

ExakTime Connect uses a top navigation bar with expandable dropdowns rather than a left sidebar. The dashboard is the landing page and puts three things in front of you. Who is currently clocked in, which work locations are active, and the setup code your crew needs to connect the mobile app.

That is a sensible default view for an office manager starting the day. Setting up geofences is one of the better interactions in the product. You get customisable GPS circles you can click and drag onto a map, and it takes seconds per site.

Note that these are radius circles. If your job site is an L-shaped lot or a long stretch of road, you will be drawing a circle that covers more ground than the actual site.

The Time Cards tab gives real-time access to timesheets. The Time Card Summary rolls up regular time, overtime and exception counts, with red dots marking anything that needs attention.

That exception flagging is the feature we'd point an office manager at first. It turns a week of timesheets into a short list of things to actually look at.

When we reviewed erroneous time cards, Map View let us see when and where the worker clocked in and out. That makes it much easier to confirm whether someone clocked in outside the geofence or worked at the location they reported. This can help verify where a punch occurred when reviewing a disputed shift.

ExakTime Mobile runs on Android and iOS. First-run setup needs the company setup code from the web account, and each worker gets a security role and a PIN set by an admin.

One limitation matters if you run multiple entities. The app does not support multi-company access from a single interface, so anyone working across two companies needs to switch accounts.

The clock-in interface is the strongest piece of design in the product. A green circular "Go" button starts the shift, a red octagonal "Stop" button ends it, and Stop stays greyed out until you are actually clocked in.

The large Go and Stop controls make the core clock-in workflow easy to understand.

Team View shows worker locations, and SiteHub shows a live feed of clock-in and clock-out events.

There is a labor cost display showing hourly costs for everyone currently on the clock. It is useful as a live number, but it has no budget to compare against. So it tells you what you are spending right now without telling you whether that is on plan.

Arcoro says workers can review and approve digital timecards. However, 25 app-store reviews in our sample described problems viewing hours or using the timecard feature reliably.

During a trial, verify that workers can consistently view and approve their timecards on the devices your crews use.

Arcoro Time gives you two clocks. Weatherproof physical units for sites where phones don't last, and the digital mobile clock.

On mobile, a punch is four steps. Tap Go, select your assigned location, select a cost code, and let it take your photo if Photo ID is switched on. Switching jobs mid-shift is easier than we expected, because tapping Go again moves you to a new project without an explicit clock-out.

The photo step is FaceFront Biometrics, and it is worth being precise about what it does. It links a photo of the worker to the time record so an admin can confirm identity after the fact. It does not match faces automatically.

In 10 real conversations, contractors described workers bypassing the photo step by photographing a shirt or asking a colleague to take the picture.

In our 2024 test, an outside-geofence punch generated a warning. Arcoro now advertises perimeter controls that can restrict clock-ins and clock-outs.

What it does not do is start or stop the clock on its own. There is no automatic clock-in when a worker arrives on site, and no automatic clock-out when they leave.

Both our hands-on session and Arcoro Time's own documentation agree on this, and it is the gap contractors raise most often about the automation side of the product.

For location history you get three views. GeoTrakker for real-time tracking, Team View for last clock-in location, and Map View for all GPS data tied to time records. GeoTrakker does record a breadcrumb trail while a worker is on the clock, so this is not a product without location history.

Two things shape how much you can lean on that trail. It switches off at clock-out, which is a deliberate privacy choice, and it shuts down entirely when the device battery drops below 20%.

It is also hard on battery life, in our experience and in user reports, which on a long shift is exactly when you would want the trail still running.

At clock-out the app asks compliance questions about workplace injuries and meal or break compliance.

Arcoro Time includes drag-and-drop scheduling. During a trial, verify how schedule changes are communicated to field workers.

Scheduling is not on the entry plan. On Arcoro's current pricing, scheduling and job assignment sit on Time Professional at $11 per user per month, not on Time Essential at $9. If scheduling is why you are considering the product, price it at the higher tier.

Field notes are one of Arcoro Time's better ideas. A worker opens the menu, taps Field Notes, hits the plus icon and specifies the subject, then attaches photos, draws annotations directly on those photos, or records a voice memo.

For a crew that would rather talk than type, the voice memo option removes a real barrier to getting site information back to the office.

Entries from the past two weeks can be reviewed and edited, and each shows its subject and comment with the option to add detail. Editing is only available before sending, so a note that goes out with the wrong cost code stays wrong.

The friction we hit was in review rather than capture. When a worker records several voice memos against one note, they arrive as separate entries rather than grouped together.

On a busy site that turns one situation into a scattered list, and whoever reviews notes in the office ends up reassembling the story.

Meal break handling is more configurable than we expected at this price. You can run breaks manually or automatically, set an auto-lunch policy with a minimum hours threshold, and have the deduction applied once a worker crosses it.

The system also stops a break being ended early and pushes break reminders. That is the sort of quiet enforcement that keeps you out of trouble.

Time off sits in the mobile side menu. Crews can see their assigned time-off plans and available hours, request time off, and track request status. Supervisors can raise requests on behalf of the team, which helps when a crew lead is managing people who don't want to deal with the app.

Notifications are on by default. The limitation is that a submitted request can't be edited, so a wrong date means cancelling and starting again. Note also that PTO administration, like scheduling, sits on Time Professional rather than the entry plan.

Arcoro Time ships 50+ instant reports, and they pull from both the mobile app and the physical clocks, which is useful if you run a mix of the two.

The named reports cover the ground most contractors need weekly. Employee Executive Summary, Employee Time Card, Employee Touch Detail, Location by Employee, and Employees by Location.

Hours worked, regular versus overtime, locations and start and stop times are all there, and everything exports to Excel or PDF.

The limits show up as soon as you want to ask your own question. The reports are raw data rather than charts, so you are reading numbers instead of seeing a trend.

Filters are limited, which means drilling into a specific phase or crew often turns into an export and a spreadsheet. The deeper analytics are a paid add-on rather than part of the plan.

That is the pattern contractors described to us as well, with 14 mentions of reporting being clunky and inflexible. The specific complaint is that you cannot build a custom report such as a deduction report before payroll.

If reporting is the reason you are switching platforms, build the three reports you actually run every week during your trial before you commit.