Time tracking
Construction
Hours attach to a site and a cost code, the crew arrives before anybody opens a laptop, and the records have to survive a payroll audit. For another implementation reference, see Monitask's reference.
Nobody on a site is going to open a web pageThe actual problem
The entry point has to be at the gate or in the site office: a phone, a tablet on a wall, a kiosk. Anything requiring somebody to sit down and log in will be filled in later by a supervisor from memory, which is the arrangement you already have.
It also has to work with no signal. Sites lose connectivity routinely and a system that stops when the bars disappear stops being used within a fortnight.
Hours attach to two things at once
A site, and a cost code. Either alone is useless: knowing somebody was on the Riverside job does not tell you whether the hour was formwork or clean-up, and knowing the code without the job does not let you bill it.
Which means the codes have to be short enough to choose in seconds and stable enough that they mean the same thing next month. A code list assembled by an estimator and never reviewed by a foreman produces attribution nobody trusts.
The crew question, honestly
One foreman clocking eight people is faster and it is the arrangement most sites want. It is also how hours get recorded for somebody who was not there, which is the objection auditors raise.
The workable middle is crew entry with individual confirmation: the foreman records, each person sees their own hours the same day and can dispute them before payroll. That keeps the speed and puts the record in front of the person it concerns.
Every worker sees their own hours, the site and the code, the same day they were recorded.
Disputes go to payroll before the run rather than after it, which is where crew entry either becomes trustworthy or does not.
Location, and where we draw the lineThe feature that needs a line
Geofenced clock-in is genuinely useful: it establishes that somebody was at the site when they said they were, which is exactly what a payroll audit asks.
Continuous location tracking of a worker is a different thing and raises real questions in several jurisdictions, including where a personal phone is involved.
Location is checked at the moment of clocking in and out, and the worker sees each check.
There is no continuous tracking, no location outside a shift, and nothing collected from a personal phone beyond the clock event itself. Whether even that is permissible where you operate is a question for your own counsel; nothing here is legal advice.
Records that survive an audit
Public work frequently carries obligations about classifications and rates, and the reporting that goes with them. Whatever the regime where you work, its records share three properties.
- They are contemporaneous rather than reconstructed.
- They attribute to a named person and a classification.
- They show corrections rather than hiding them.
The third is the one systems get wrong. A record an administrator can silently alter is not evidence, and an auditor who finds it stops relying on the rest.
Travel, rain and the awkward hours
Travel between sites, waiting for a delivery, a day stopped by weather. Each is real time with a real cost and each is recorded inconsistently in most businesses, which is why job costing on smaller contractors is frequently wrong in the same direction.
Give them their own codes and the picture changes within a quarter. Leave them uncoded and they get absorbed into whatever job was open, which quietly makes one job look worse than it was.
What this will not fix
An estimate that was wrong. A subcontractor who invoices differently from how they work. A foreman who does not want the job costed.
Time data makes each visible sooner. It does not have the conversation, and a contractor installing this expecting it to will conclude the software failed.
Where to start
One site, one month, the codes agreed with a foreman rather than handed to one. The code list decided in week one is the one everybody lives with, and a foreman who helped write it will defend it.
Subcontractors and their hours
Most sites run mainly on subcontractors, and their hours arrive as an invoice rather than as a record. Job costing built only on your own crews describes a fraction of the job.
Bringing subcontractor hours into the same codes is worth more than any internal report, and it is a contracting question before it is a software one: the obligation to record has to be in the subcontract or it will not happen.
Equipment and the other costs on a code
Plant hours, materials and hire all attach to the same codes as labour, and a system that records only people gives you a third of the picture.
Whether you record them here or in your accounting system matters less than agreeing one code list used by both. Two lists that nearly match are worse than one imperfect list.
Getting foremen to use it
Three things that decide it
Speed at the gate. If clocking a crew takes longer than writing on a clipboard, the clipboard wins and the system is filled in later.
It has to work with no signal. Non-negotiable on most sites.
They must get something back. A foreman who can see the hours on their own job, against the budget, has been given a tool. One who only feeds an office report has been given an errand.
The payroll conversation
Accurate records occasionally produce an uncomfortable first month, because what was recorded before and what happened were not identical. That is normal, it is worth expecting, and handling it as a reset rather than as an investigation determines whether the system survives.
A contractor who uses the first month's data to pursue people will have inaccurate data from the second month onward.