A Crew Time Clock Nobody Can Charge You For

What does it actually cost to guess at hours?

Friday afternoon, somebody reconstructs the week from memory. Marco was on the Hansen job Monday and Tuesday, or was it Wednesday. Danny came in late one morning and stayed till six on another. The sheet gets filled in with tidy eights, because tidy eights are what you can defend, and the whole thing is wrong in both directions.

That costs money in three places, and most shops only notice the first.

It costs you on the paycheck. Round to the nearest half hour in your head and you're out fifteen minutes a person a day. Five days, a crew of six at $28 an hour, that's $210 a week — $10,920 a year moving one way or the other with nobody able to say which.

It costs you on the job. This is the expensive one. Somebody on r/smallbusiness tracking around 2,200 service businesses put it flatly: "labor estimating runs 12% over on average. if hours aren't tied daily to the job, your job costing is fake." If Friday's reconstruction can't say which hours went to the Hansen repipe and which to the cafe backflow, you don't know what either cost, so you don't know what to bid next time.

It costs you when somebody disputes it. The federal rule is old and blunt: if the employer's records aren't accurate, the worker only has to show the amount of work as a matter of reasonable inference, and it's then on the employer to disprove it. That's Anderson v. Mt. Clemens Pottery Co., U.S. Supreme Court, 1946, still the backbone of every wage-and-hour case. Bad records mean the other side's estimate wins.

What do the paid time clocks cost in 2026, and what do you get?

Sources, compiled August 2026: QuickBooks Time, Clockify, Homebase, Connecteam, When I Work, busybusy and ExakTime published pricing pages; Capterra and Reddit reviews read through a mirror. Prices are list and exclude annual-billing discounts and promotional rates.

Two deserve a straight recommendation, because some of you should go and buy them. Connecteam under ten people is hard to argue with — free, syncs, has GPS. If your crew is nine and everybody has a phone, go use it. QuickBooks Time earns its money if you already live in QuickBooks payroll, because the hours land in the pay run without anybody retyping them.

What about GPS?

GPS is the headline feature and the reason most shops end up paying. The reality, reported over and over by people running these apps, is that employees can turn off location services after clocking in and the punch still lands. It raises the effort of faking a punch; it does not stop it, and it costs $10 to $45 per person per month.

The more common complaint is quieter: punches silently fail. busybusy users report spending four to five hours a week fixing mis-coded entries; When I Work users report the app sometimes failing to register punches at all. A punch that didn't happen is invisible until payday, by which point nobody remembers the day. That's the real argument for a visible, editable record.

Where is the free version genuinely enough?

It is enough if you have one to fifteen people who start and finish at a shop, or one tablet lives where the crew passes it. You want hours on the right job, overtime worked out right, something to hand payroll on Monday, and you're fine with a shared device.

It is not enough if:

• Your crews never come to a shop. Three trucks going straight from home to three sites need three devices, and three devices need sync. Buy something.
• You need to prove location. Prevailing-wage work, disputed sites, a customer who challenges hours. Buy GPS, eyes open about what it does.
• You want hours to walk themselves into payroll. This gives you a CSV and somebody has to import it. At twenty-five people on weekly payroll, the integration is worth paying for.
• Losing a week would genuinely hurt. Back it up weekly and it's fine. If you know you won't, pay somebody to hold it for you.

A contractor on r/Contractor put the warning about free tools well: "the free tier usually means you hit a wall the moment you need job-level tracking or payroll export." That describes the free tiers in the table above exactly, which is why those two are what this file leads with. The wall here is sync, GPS and payroll filing, and it's on this page in plain sight.

How do you use it?

1. Add your crew once. Names only, if that is all you want. Add an hourly rate and the payroll CSV fills in gross pay; add a burdened cost per hour and the job report tells you what labor actually cost. A PIN per person is optional.
2. Set your overtime rules before the first punch. Pick Federal, California, Alaska, Nevada or Colorado, or set your own. Getting this right on day one is the difference between a timesheet payroll can use and a week you have to redo.
3. Put your jobs in and bid the labor hours. Each job takes a name, a job number and your estimated labor hours. The estimate is what makes the variance readout worth anything later.
4. Clock in and out, tagged to a job. A big green button per person, or clock the whole crew in at once on one job. Every punch carries a job and a cost code, which is the whole reason the hours end up meaning anything.
5. Fix the misses the same day. Somebody always forgets. Correct the shift by hand, put your name on it, and the change lands in that punch's edit trail.
6. Approve the week, print it, export it. Tick the approval box, print the signed timesheet for the folder, send payroll the CSV. Take a JSON backup while you are there.

Two habits separate a time clock from a pile of numbers. Tag every punch to a job, no exceptions — the only rule that ever works, as somebody on r/smallbusiness put it, is "no job code, no reimbursement, no entry." And fix the misses the same day.

How does overtime actually work under federal law?

The Fair Labor Standards Act says a nonexempt employee gets at least one and a half times their regular rate for every hour over 40 in a workweek. That is the whole federal rule — no federal daily overtime, no premium for weekends, nights or holidays, no seventh-day rule. Four details trip people up.

• A workweek is a fixed, recurring period of seven consecutive 24-hour days. It doesn't have to start Monday or match your pay period, but once you set it you can't slide it around to dodge a week of overtime.
• You cannot average two weeks. A 50-hour week followed by a 30-hour week is ten hours of overtime, not eighty hours over two weeks. Semi-monthly pay periods don't change that. Overtime is worked out one workweek at a time.
• "Regular rate" is not always the base wage. Nondiscretionary bonuses, shift differentials and production incentives fold in before you multiply by 1.5. A per-job bonus quietly raises the overtime rate for the week it lands in.
• Paid time off is not hours worked. Eight hours of holiday pay plus 36 worked is 44 hours on the check and zero overtime. This clock counts punched time only, which is the right side of that line.

Which states have daily overtime, and what are the thresholds?

Most of the country is the federal 40-hour rule and nothing else. These stack a daily rule on top, as of August 2026. Confirm with your state labor department before running a payroll on it — this is a summary, not advice.

These ship as selectable rule sets rather than a hardcoded assumption, because getting it wrong is not a rounding error. A California ten-hour day is 8 regular and 2 overtime: at $28 that's $224 plus $84, or $308. The same day under a plain federal 40-hour rule, inside a week that never passes 40, pays $280. That's $28 a day, per person, forever.

A thirteen-hour day shows why double time matters. Under California rules: 8 regular, 4 at time and a half (hours 8 through 12), 1 at double time (past 12). At $28 that's $224 + $168 + $56 = $448. A spreadsheet that only knows the 40-hour week pays $364 for the same day.

And the trap almost every homemade spreadsheet falls into: no pyramiding. Five ten-hour days in California is 50 hours — not 40 regular plus 10 daily overtime plus another 10 weekly overtime. Hours already paid at the daily premium don't count a second time toward the weekly 40. The right answer is 40 regular and 10 overtime: $1,120 plus $420, or $1,540. Count them twice and you've overpaid $420 on one person's week.

What time records does the law actually require you to keep?

People assume this is complicated. The federal rules sit in 29 CFR Part 516 and they are short.

What has to be in it (29 CFR 516.2), for every nonexempt employee: name, address, date of birth if under 19, sex and occupation; the day and time the workweek begins; hours worked each day and total hours each workweek; the basis of pay and the regular hourly rate; total straight-time and total overtime earnings for the workweek; additions and deductions; total wages each pay period; and the date of payment.

How long you keep it. Payroll records: three years (29 CFR 516.5). Time cards, work schedules, wage-rate tables and records of additions or deductions: two years (29 CFR 516.6). Records have to be open to inspection by the Department of Labor.

What is not required. No particular form, and no time clock — the DOL doesn't care whether you use a punch clock, an app or a pencil, and nothing gets filed with anybody. The records just have to be complete, accurate and there when asked for.

Which is why the printed timesheet carries what it carries: the workweek, daily hours, weekly total, the regular/overtime/double-time split, the rate, the gross, signature lines and the approval stamp. Print it, sign it, file it for three years. That satisfies the record and costs a sheet of paper.

When is it lawful to round employee time?

Rounding is legal in narrower circumstances than most shops assume, and it's an easy way to owe back wages by accident. 29 CFR 785.48(b) permits rounding to the nearest 5 minutes, tenth of an hour or quarter hour, on one condition: it must not, over time, fail to compensate employees for all the time they actually worked. Neutral is the whole test.

Which rules out, in practice:

• Always rounding in your favour. Start times up and finish times down isn't rounding, it's a pay cut applied twice a day.
• Rounding meal periods, in California. Donohue v. AMN Services (California Supreme Court, 2021) barred it outright for meal breaks.
• Rounding at all, in California, if you already capture the exact minute. Camp v. Home Depot (California Court of Appeal, 2022) held that an employer whose system records exact time has to pay it. This clock records exact time, so in California the safe setting is none.

Worked longhand on a real week. Somebody punches in at 6:52 and out at 15:38 four days running, then 6:52 to 11:37 on the fifth. Exact minutes: 8 hours 46 minutes a day for four days plus 4 hours 45 minutes = 39.82 hours. Under 40, no overtime, $1,114.87 at $28.

Now round to the nearest quarter hour. 6:52 is seven minutes from 6:45 and eight from 7:00, so it rounds down. 15:38 is seven from 15:45 and eight from 15:30, so it rounds up. The day becomes exactly 9.00 hours and the week becomes 40.75 hours — 40 regular and 0.75 overtime, $1,151.50. Same punches, $36.63 more, 45 minutes of overtime nobody worked.

That falls the employee's way, which is the point — neutral rounding is neutral. It answers a problem a browser doesn't have: reading a mechanical punch card. Leave it off unless a union agreement or a payroll system you can't change requires it.

Why do paper timesheets lose disputes?

Paper isn't the problem; illegible, unsigned, reconstructed paper is, and so is a spreadsheet with the same faults. What makes a record hold up is boring and specific: it was made close to when the work happened, it shows actual in and out times rather than tidy totals, the worker signed it, somebody approved it, and every correction is visible with a name and a date. A record missing those invites the Mt. Clemens rule, where the employee's estimate becomes the starting point and you're the one disproving it.

What quietly destroys otherwise good records is silent editing. If a week can be changed after the fact and nothing shows that it was, nothing in it can be trusted — including the parts that were right. That's why every hand correction goes into a per-punch trail with a name and a timestamp, and why the approval prints on the timesheet.

What about job costing — why tag every punch?

Job and cost-code tagging is the feature people praise most in the paid apps, and the one that changes how a business runs rather than just how payroll gets done. Without it you know your labor cost for the month. With it you know what the Hansen repipe cost — the only number that tells you how to bid the next one.

The job report puts estimated hours next to actual, the variance in hours and percent, and the burdened labor cost — not the wage, the burdened cost: wage plus payroll taxes, workers' comp and benefits. Work that out once in the employee cost calculator and type it in against each person.

One accounting note, because most tools hide it: when a week has overtime in it, deciding which particular hour was "the overtime hour" is a choice, not a fact. This spreads the week's premium across that week's hours as a blended rate — 46.70 hours at a $37.80 burdened cost with 6.70 hours of overtime comes out at $40.51 an hour across every job that worker touched. One defensible method among several, and now you know which one is running.

That 12% overrun is a correctable 12%. A shop that tags hours and reads the variance monthly finds out within two jobs that it under-bids trim-out and over-bids rough-in, and adjusts. A shop reconstructing Friday afternoon never finds out at all.

Frequently asked questions

This is not legal or payroll advice. Wage and hour rules vary by state and change; confirm yours with your payroll provider, your accountant or your state labor department before relying on any of it. Software prices are list as of August 2026 and move often.