A No-Nonsense Review of Intuit QuickBooks Time (TSheets)

Looking for a time-tracking app that plays well with your payroll provider? Hundreds of thousands of professionals have already given QuickBooks Time – formerly known as TSheets – the seal of approval for their business’ time-tracking needs.

QuickBooks Time is a cloud-based time tracking and scheduling app that allows employees to clock in and out from the job site with the devices they’ve already got in their pockets. The vendor aims to help companies replace paper timesheets with accurate, electronic time data as well as make payroll and invoicing faster and less costly. 

But does that mean QuickBooks Time is the best time-tracking app for your business?

In this Quickbooks Time review, we’ll cover the app’s core features, including its employee time tracking, scheduling, task tracking, timesheet management, and integrations with other systems. We’ll also dive into the sign-up and onboarding experience, its pricing structure, and its major pros and cons. Finally, we’ll explore some alternatives you might consider if QuickBooks Time doesn’t hit the right marks for your specific business needs.

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What Is QuickBooks Time?

QuickBooks Time is Intuit’s (the company behind QuickBooks, CreditKarma, Mailchimp, and TurboTax) main time-tracking offering.

The app was originally known as TSheets. It was one of the earliest mobile time-tracking apps when it first launched in 2006, and as a result, it quickly built up a sizable user base of small businesses in all sorts of industries.

Intuit acquired TSheets in 2017 and renamed it QuickBooks Time, later releasing a companion mobile app called QuickBooks Workforce to better differentiate between front-line worker needs and the needs of their managers or administrators.

Like QuickBooks itself, QuickBooks Time (it’s not TSheets any more!) is designed to be usable by as many different types of businesses as possible. As a result, it’s quite user-friendly at the outset, but it also may lack some industry-specific features.

Let’s take a closer look at those features now…

QuickBooks Time Overview

QuickBooks Time’s one-size-fits-all approach informs its core features:

• GPS and geofencing-enabled employee time tracking
• Simple timesheets with detailed analytics and reporting
• Calendar-based employee scheduling
• Live “see who’s working” view of active employees
• Basic project management and collaboration tools

You’ll notice there are no “payroll processing” or “invoicing” features listed, which are two important functions in QuickBooks Online. QuickBooks Time is a standalone app you can choose to integrate with QuickBooks Online (or QuickBooks Desktop), and you’ll have to create a new account and pay separately for that app.

However, you can get access to QuickBooks Time by subscribing to QuickBooks Online Payroll on the Premium + Plus tier. If you’re already on this tier in QuickBooks Online Payroll, keep reading to find out what can do with it.

We’ll discuss the cost differences between paying QuickBooks Time on its own and paying for it in the detailed Pricing section further down in this article.

Sign-Up and Onboarding

It’s easy to get started with QuickBooks Time. You can create a free account on the app’s website, and you won’t have to add a credit card until your 30-day trial ends.

After filling out some very basic details, you’ll be asked some questions about your intended use, which QuickBooks uses to recommend a “best-fit” tier for your business.

I selected most options and was redirected from my initial selection of the Premium tier into the more advanced Elite tier. Since I won’t be asked to pay for a month, I accepted the upgrade to see more of QuickBooks Time’s features.

You’ll be asked for a phone number as well – after verifying it, QuickBooks Time sends you a link to download the mobile app.

Once you’re in the web dashboard, you’ll see a pop-up onboarding video offering to give you a tour of the web app. Following this tour starts an interactive walkthrough using more pop-up windows to highlight features and functionality so you can start using the app to its full extent with aplomb right away.

QuickBooks Time’s sign-up and onboarding processes.

When you close the step-by-step tour, you’ll be directed to a support-focused page prompting you to either “Talk to sales,” try live interactive training modules, or just move through the typical first steps with QuickBooks Time.

This “Getting Started” guide takes you through setting up company details and preparing your team members (whom you’ll have to onboard at some point) for payroll processing — which is strongly recommended to be done in one of QuickBooks’ core accounting and payroll products.

You can even set up a “demo” account called the “QuickBooks Time playground,” which I’ll be using to review the app’s features more fully.

Overall, QuickBooks Time offers one of the best and most robust onboarding experiences I’ve seen in any business app, whether built for time-tracking or anything else.

It’s certainly the most helpful app for a reviewer, since all the pre-populated info in the demo playground makes it much easier to show you how everything works without setting up my own demo data.

Let’s take a look at everything now…

More construction companies trust Workyard for time tracking

Discover why

The Web App Experience

One of the first things you’ll notice once you start using QuickBooks Time is that it takes a slightly different approach to user interface design than many B2B apps.

Rather than separating features into distinct tabs or menu sections, QuickBooks Time uses a layered multi-window approach resembling the experience of using a Mac or MacBook desktop. In this screenshot, I’ve opened the Schedule tab, a Projects window, and a box to edit my user profile:

QuickBooks Time’s web dashboard with multiple windows open.

You’ll either appreciate this design or find it annoying depending on your opinion of and experience with Macs, but it’s a nice touch nonetheless.

The Mobile Experience

Like many employee time-tracking apps, QuickBooks Time has a companion mobile app called QuickBooks Workforce, which is built for your front-line team.

It’s easy to set up QuickBooks Workforce, but they may not know what to do until you start adding scheduled shifts and otherwise providing instruction through your web admin dashboard.

When I first opened the app, I had nothing to see because the playground mode doesn’t translate to mobile, even if you’re acting as both admin on the web and as a worker on your phone.

A few examples of QuickBooks Time’s mobile app (QuickBooks Workforce).

Once you’ve assigned a shift, it’ll be visible on the Schedule tab in QuickBooks Workforce. Your workers can see their work details, which includes date, time, assigned team members (if more than one person is working on it), and location, by clicking the relevant shift. Workers can also request time off and see their balances.

If you’re also an admin, you should see an additional “More” tab at the bottom right. This gives you a simplified version of your web dashboard, in case you need to address some urgent issue when away from your desk.

QuickBooks Time Key Features

Time Tracking in QuickBooks Time

If you’re tracking your own time, you’ll see its live reporting in a pop-up window. You’ve got at-a-glance views into your currently active project’s work time, as well as your total work time for the day and week.

QuickBooks Time’s essential time-tracking features.

You can set the active project or client being tracked from a scrollable list just below a search box, which gives access to every available project or client you can select. There are fields to note equipment used, work type, and “Mood,” which seems to primarily exist so coworkers can troll each other.

You can also add a post to the project if you need to provide additional information or file attachments. We’ll take a closer look at the Projects feature in just a bit.

Scheduling in QuickBooks Time

The QuickBooks Time scheduling panel uses the near-universal visual calendar display to show who’s working on which day. You can toggle between day, week, and month views depending on the urgency of your scheduling needs.

Adding a shift is about as easy as it might be to add a meeting to your Google or Outlook or iCal calendars. The web app’s daily and weekly views give your workers each their own rows in the calendar, making it pretty easy to add shifts to any given worker.

Scheduling jobs on QuickBooks Time’s calendar.

The monthly view adds a dropdown selector for team members to make up for the lack of dedicated rows. It was easy to give myself a made-up short shift, but I kept getting errors when trying to view the interactive demo of the calendar feature.

The demo account doesn’t show any examples of one worker tackling multiple projects for different clients on the same day, but you can create these entries and track time simultaneously for more than one task or client.

Task Tracking in QuickBooks Time

Unless your company only offers one specific service – nearly unheard-of in the construction industry – you’ll probably want the option to track project progress to better manage your team’s workflows.

These project entries are fairly simple, but they include a critical complementary feature to make time-tracking easier for field workers. You can set up geofencing around your project’s address, with an adjustable radius allowing for a more automatic clock-in and clock-out process.

Adding and managing projects in QuickBooks Time.

You can also provide an estimate for the amount of time the project will need, which can help you track worker productivity against expectations.

Timesheets in QuickBooks Time

The QuickBooks Time web dashboard dedicates most of its sections to tracking and managing your team’s time efforts with varying levels of granularity.

Three of the web app’s eight primary feature tabs focus on this purpose: 

• Who’s Working
• Time Entries
• Time Off

Who’s Working provides a quick heads-up view of your team’s real-time activity. The main window shows time on the clock for active workers. You can open a map view to see where everyone is, and you can click on any active worker’s name to zoom to their currently tracked location.

QuickBooks Time offers many ways to manage worker timesheets.

Time Entries provides a detailed day-by-day recap of your team’s submitted timesheets. Admins can edit these timesheets manually through this window.

You can also see where your workers have been during each shift in the attached map view (click on Location column entries to see the map) and view the log of updates and edits made to each timesheet – this latter feature is important for compliance purposes!

Time Off lets you manage your team’s holiday, sick, and/or vacation leave. Front-line workers can submit these requests through QuickBooks Workforce for your approval, but you can also manually add time off to any worker’s timesheet.

Reports in QuickBooks Time

The final two primary feature tabs in QuickBooks Time are all about your data.

The Approvals tab lets you review submitted timesheets before processing your team’s payroll. This feature included a “helpful” nudge to give your accountant access to the QuickBooks Time data when I first opened it, which I could’ve done without – but in general, I try to avoid doing accounting work whenever possible, which is probably why I write content for a living instead of handling payrolls.

Reports is the real main course of QuickBooks Time’s data analytics. The Reports menu offers eight categories of reports, six of which have their own sub-categories:

QuickBooks Time has many reporting options for your data.

Payroll reports give you detailed breakdowns of each employee’s work on any given week. It has day-by-day hourly records, overtime details, and a pie-chart analysis of that worker’s time on any given project as a share of their overall time worked that week, which the data wonk in me definitely appreciated.

You can also view or edit the timesheets we first explored in the previous section.

QuickBooks Time’s product team seems to really like pie charts, because they’re the bulk of what you’ll see in Itemized Total Time.

The remaining sections with their own sub-sections are either devoted to more detailed productivity analyses (Schedule Reports and Tracking), exist to help you stay compliant (Exceptions, Logging and Auditing) or are meant to help you use your time-tracking data in other parts of your business (Exports, Payroll, and Tracking).

Scheduled vs. Worked, for example, gives you an easy-to-understand chart of the differences between each worker’s scheduled work hours and the actual hours they clocked that week.

Exports, on the other hand, lets you download CSV files of your groups, clients, and team members. Many other sections in the Reports tab also let you export and download their more granular data, which ought to make it much easier to do some advanced number-crunching to target areas of improvement.

Integrations in QuickBooks Time

Adding integrations in QuickBooks Time isn’t especially intuitive.

To connect another app, you’ll have to go to the Feature Add-ons page (the word “integration” doesn’t appear anywhere I could see on the web app) and click Manage Add-ons. Intuit probably chose to use “add-ons” instead of “integrations” for a good reason, but it tripped me up for a minute while I was looking for it.

This option opens a window showing “Featured” add-ons – limited to Intuit’s core QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Desktop accounting apps – “Installed” apps, which at the start appear to just be some of QuickBook’s Time’s premium features, and a brief list of commonly integrated apps like ADP, Justworks,  or Xero.

QuickBooks Time’s integration options.

If the app you want isn’t in this list, you’ll need to search for it by name.

QuickBooks Time’s app marketplace is a fair bit smaller than QuickBooks Online’s, but it does boast native integrations with a few construction-specific business apps. The list includes niche or specialty contractor apps like LawnBuddy for landscapers and Points North for certified payroll reporting on prevailing wage projects. I didn’t see those apps when I searched for them, though.

The integration experience was the most frustrating and unfriendly out of any of the core QuickBooks Time features I looked at for this review. If you just want to connect to QuickBooks accounting software, you’ll be fine. But if you want QuickBooks Time to play nicely with your industry-specific app, you might be in for some irritation.

QuickBooks Time Might be a Good Fit for You If…

QuickBooks Time is a widely-used time-tracking app that can support businesses in many different industries. However, it may be better suited for your business if…

• You need time-tracking to work well with other QuickBooks apps.
• You’re already running payroll with QuickBooks.
• You have a smaller team and want everyone tracking time ASAP.
• Your business has a fairly simple product and/or service offering.

However, if none of these describe your situation, you might look elsewhere.

You Might Not Want to Use QuickBooks Time If…

There are downsides to using a general-purpose time-tracking app when you need industry-specific functionality, and these downsides make up the bulk of the reasons you might want to consider other apps. QuickBooks Time might not be a good fit if…

• You need industry-specific features like job costing.
• You think you’ll need regular hands-on customer support.
• You have a larger team (over 50 workers) to manage.
• You often need to track multiple jobs or projects per worker.

More construction companies trust Workyard for time tracking

Discover why

QuickBooks Time Cost/Pricing

QuickBooks Time offers a free trial for 30 days. You can upgrade your chosen tier from Elite to Premium during the trial if you think the added features would be beneficial – QuickBooks Time’s onboarding process may recommend upgrading your trial tier based on your responses to a few simple questions.

If you want to try QuickBooks Time, there are two tiers from which you can choose:

• Premium (core time-tracking features)
• Elite

Premium features include scheduling, time off management, a time kiosk option, and access to the QuickBooks Workforce app.

With Elite, you also get access to mileage tracking, project management features (tracking, estimates vs. actuals, and a project activity feed), timesheet signatures, and geofencing capabilities.

Unlike most B2B apps, QuickBooks Time has no monthly vs. annual pricing differences. However, there is a 50% discount offered if you sign up for three months up front:

The discount for buying three months up front does not appear to include a discount on per-user monthly costs, so any construction company of even modest size will see minimal cost savings with this offer.

Here are some estimated monthly costs for businesses with varying numbers of workers to track (assuming one admin manages the system on the back end):

There is one other way to get access to QuickBooks Time – it’s included as part of the QuickBooks Online Payroll Premium + Plus tier, which gives you all the tools you need to process employee and independent contractor payrolls.

This bundle uses the QuickBooks Time Premium tier, so it may not work for you if you also need project tracking and geofencing.

QuickBooks Online Payroll Premium + Plus costs $8 per employee per month on top of a $170 monthly base fee. Here’s the difference between paying for QuickBooks Time Elite by itself and paying for QuickBooks Online Payroll Premium + Plus, for businesses of varying sizes:

QuickBooks Time Reviews

It’s not hard to find a QuickBooks Time review online – after all, it’s one of the most popular time-tracking apps on the market. The app has collected a truly massive number of reviews as a result:

In general, the app receives strong scores from its massive user base.

However, a recurring theme in QuickBooks Time’s written reviews seems to be user nostalgia for its TSheets era. Reviewers on both mobile platforms called out a decline in quality since Intuit acquired TSheets and transformed it into QuickBooks Time. This Quickbooks Time review illustrates this perfectly:

iOS user jpommerville misses TSheets:
When this was Tsheets the product was great and the support even better. The integration with QuickBooks was seamless. As soon as QuickBooks purchased it and turned it to QuickBooks Time, the quality dropped and support became some of the worst I’ve ever seen.

The integration with QuickBooks Desktop has failed many many times and each time takes days and dozens of phone calls before the issue is resolved. Finally a few weeks ago the syncing between the two crashed again. This time no resolution. The solution QuickBooks recommended? Send us your company file in the mail while we attempt to figure the issue out. In the meantime, everything we do in QuickBooks over those few weeks they have our company file would all have to duplicated and re entered once the company file is returned. No thank you…

We are now switching away from QuickBooks Time after 4 years of using it because other companies have figured out how to integrate with QuickBooks better than QuickBooks has. Ridiculous.

Android user Berkeley Orton also wants TSheets back:
I gave TSheets a 5 star rating in 2018. The program has had multiple changes since it was purchased by QuickBooks. For the most part everything has been for the worse. They took away geofencing and made it an upgrade. The phone interface is more difficult. We have problems switching from task to task or from job to job. You think you have switched jobs but find out later it didn’t switch.

The PC interface is pretty good. QuickBooks has added more reports which are helpful. Still using it for now.

Capterra reviews for QuickBooks Time – like those for nearly every other app we review here – tend to be given primarily by admin users, in contrast to the mobile app reviews, which come from both admins and from many of the front-line workers whose time needs to be tracked.

As a result, Capterra scores and reviews tend to be the most useful when evaluating software from an administrative perspective.

In that regard, QuickBooks Time comes in slightly behind many of its time-tracking peers, as averaged scores of 4.7 or higher are common for time-tracking apps on Capterra.

This may be due to its shortcomings for larger organizations. Check out this Quickbooks Time Review from Capterra reviewer Susan L.:

This is a simple system if you’re managing a small group of staff. It is evident that any volume in excess of 50 staff members should not be managed through QuickBooks Time.

With a higher volume of staff, and managing varying disciplines, there’s too many limitations on QuickBooks Time to manage staff effectively. QuickBooks Time needs to streamline the filters and groupings because with all breakdowns, that include additional filter breakdowns, it’s easy to get caught in the weeds using this software. This opens up opportunity for billing service hours incorrectly. The addition of the random “unresolved” bugs that come up further justifies why we switched from this software.

Our Score (and Why We Chose It)

We rate all products the same basic way, using a six-element scoring system on a 1-10 scale, with the selected elements based on a few fundamentally critical factors. Here’s QuickBooks Time’s score across those six elements:

The reasons we chose these scores has largely been covered by the rest of this article. QuickBooks Time’s onboarding and sign-up process was as polished as you might expect from a $170-billion company (Intuit).

This onboarding makes the app somewhat easier to use at the outset, and its feature set is strong. However, as our reviews focus on apps for constructio companies, we had to deduct a couple of points on both elements, because QuickBooks Time simply isn’t optimized for construction businesses.

There are plenty of integrations, but not as many as you might expect from a QuickBooks product – the extreme focus on pushing users to integrate with other QuickBooks software also cost QuickBooks Time a couple of points here.

Customer support is generally not QuickBooks’ strong suit. Many negative customer reviews on all major review platforms highlight inadequate support as a major reason for the low scoring, which informed our lower score as well.

Alternatives to QuickBooks Time

Businesses have no shortage of alternatives to QuickBooks Time for their employee time-tracking needs. Some are better-suited for construction and field services businesses than others. Based on our QuickBooks Time review, here are a few great construction time-tracking apps you might consider instead:

Want to know more about why we chose these apps as the top alternatives to QuickBooks Time? Check out some of our “Best Of” reviews linked at the end of this page.

The Bottom Line

Millions of workers, across many thousands of businesses, use QuickBooks Time to track their work hours. For many businesses, the app does what they need. It tracks time on the job, provides a GPS view of worker travel, allows you to schedule your team to various clients and projects, and – this is often one of a business’ most important considerations – run payroll seamlessly through a connected QuickBooks product.

Is this what your business needs?

Do you expect to never need more advanced time-tracking and team-management functionality than what QuickBooks Time provides? 

Then QuickBooks Time is a great choice!

However, if you’ve been looking for a time-tracking solution built for your construction and/or field service business’ specific needs, you might not be satisfied with what you can do in QuickBooks Time.

If you need a time-tracking app built from the ground up to support construction businesses like yours, we recommend taking a look at Workyard.

Over 50,000 workers track their time to the minute with Workyard, helping construction companies using the app save hundreds — or even thousands — of dollars in payroll waste per worker.

Workyard’s GPS time clock app is widely considered the most accurate time tracker for construction businesses, particularly for those businesses juggling many jobs for many clients on any given day or week. Workyard also includes essential construction-industry features QuickBooks Time lacks, such as real-time construction cost tracking.

Click the links in the paragraph above to discover how Workyard can help your construction business track its workers accurately, save thousands each month, and become a more profitable and efficient enterprise… or just click here to sign up for a 14-day free trial now!