Paper timesheets are wrong in both directions. People forget hours they worked and estimate hours they did not, and neither error is deliberate.
TL;DR Track time against jobs, not just against the day. Geofencing should prompt, not clock automatically. Be transparent with the team about what is tracked. Sync to payroll rather than retyping it.
Job-costed time, not just attendance
Attendance tracking tells you somebody worked eight hours. Job-costed time tells you which jobs are profitable.
Capture
- Clock in and out for the day.
- Time per job, start and finish.
- Travel time, separately from job time.
- Breaks.
- Non-billable time, categorised. Merchant runs, admin, training, vehicle.
The non-billable categories are where the insight is. A technician at 60 percent billable is not slacking. Something structural is consuming their day, and the categories tell you what.
This is the number that tells you if your pricing is right. Quoted three hours, actual five, across a whole job type, means the price is wrong and you would never see it from a day-total timesheet.
Geofencing, done properly
Use it to prompt, not to clock automatically.
Automatic clocking on location entry causes
- Clock-ins when driving past a site.
- Failures when GPS drifts, which it does.
- Clock-outs during a lunch break off site.
- Genuine resentment, because it feels like being monitored rather than supported.
The prompt version
You have arrived at 14 Elm Road. Start the job? [Yes] [Not yet]
One tap, accurate, and the person remains in control. Compliance is dramatically better because it feels like a tool rather than a tracker.
Battery matters. Continuous high-accuracy GPS drains phones. Check what the app does in the background and test it over a full working day before rolling it out.
Be transparent with the team
Introduce it as accurate pay and better quoting, because that is what it should be.
Say clearly
- What is tracked. Location at clock events, time per job.
- What is not. Location outside working hours, personal phone activity.
- Who sees it. By role.
- How long it is kept.
- What it is used for. Payroll accuracy and job costing.
- What it is not used for. Policing break times.
Put it in writing. In many jurisdictions employee monitoring carries legal notification and data protection obligations. Check what applies before you switch anything on.
Then honour it. The first time somebody is challenged over a fifteen-minute discrepancy, the system becomes an adversary and the data quality collapses.
The upside for the team
Frame it honestly, because the benefits are real.
- Overtime captured automatically. Most under-reporting is in the team’s disfavour.
- No Sunday evening timesheet.
- Disputes resolved by record, not by memory.
- Travel time counted properly, which paper timesheets routinely lose.
Lead with the overtime point. It is true and it reframes the whole thing.
Overtime calculation
Automate it, because manual calculation is where payroll errors live.
Configure
- Standard hours and the overtime threshold.
- Rates by band.
- Weekend and holiday rules.
- On-call and call-out payments.
- Rounding rules, stated explicitly.
Rules vary by jurisdiction and can be strict, particularly on overtime thresholds, rounding practices and record retention. Get the configuration checked against the rules that apply to you rather than assuming the software defaults are compliant.
Have somebody approve the period before it reaches payroll. Automated calculation with human approval, not automated payment.
Payroll sync
The goal is nobody retyping numbers.
Flow
- Time captured in the field app.
- Manager reviews and approves, with exceptions flagged.
- Approved hours push to payroll.
- Payroll processes.
- Costs post back to job records.
Step five is the one people skip and it is what makes job costing real.
Check the integration before buying. Native connection to your payroll provider, not a CSV export you reformat every fortnight.
Exceptions to watch
Build alerts for these rather than reviewing everything.
- Missing clock-out. Somebody forgot. Common and easily fixed if flagged same day.
- Unusually long job time, against the type average.
- Clock event outside a geofence.
- Overtime above a threshold, which may indicate a scheduling problem rather than extra work.
- Zero non-billable time, which is not realistic and means categories are not being used.
Review exceptions, approve the rest. Reviewing every line defeats the purpose.
Measure it
- Billable percentage per technician and overall.
- Quoted versus actual hours by job type. The most commercially useful output.
- Payroll processing time, before and after.
- Payroll corrections per period. Should fall to near zero.
- Non-billable time by category, which shows you where the day is going.
Start by tracking time against jobs rather than just against the day. Even without geofencing, quoted-versus-actual by job type will show you within a month which of your services is quietly unprofitable.
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