Small businesses like yours are not immune to the devastating effects of problems like buddy punching and time theft. Every mistake in the payroll system costs money, which can quickly add up when your company is already struggling. This is especially true when using antiquated methods (such as pen and paper), which allow for considerable potential for human mistakes. You should expect to have a larger balance to pay at the end of each pay period as a result. To counteract this, we suggest utilizing the best software time clock for small businesses listed below to cut your payroll expenditures by more than half. The accuracy of the time recorded by a time clock app that runs automatically is guaranteed. Continue reading to get a firm grasp of the best time clock app for construction and the best free time clock.
Why A Time Clock Is Essential For Businesses Of All Sizes
Here are the reasons why our time clock is essential for both small and large businesses.
#1. Guarantees Accurate Wages
Payroll accuracy is critical to company growth and employee satisfaction. However, payroll accuracy concerns frequently arise due to unclear policies, human error, or technical difficulties with financial institutions.
The possibility of these issues disappearing from your business’s operations once you install a time clock is very high.
It is possible to pre-program several types of employee time clocks with your company’s payroll procedures, relieving you of the burden of keeping track of things like:
- Vacation time
- Shift work
- Paid time off
- No call, no show absences
By letting the time clock compile this data, you may devote less time to payroll and more time to activities that contribute to the success of your company as a whole.
In addition to saving you up to 7% on payroll expenditures, a dedicated time clock also works seamlessly with automatic direct deposit of employee paychecks, eliminating costly manual-calculation errors.
#2. Helps You Stay Ahead Of Attendance Problems
The “punch in” and “punch out” data recorded by most modern time clocks can be used to generate several types of reports. You can use these reports to gain insight into attendance-related concerns like:
- Long breaks
- Late clock-outs
- Regular, repeated absences (e.g., employee A calls in sick three Fridays a month)
- Early clock-ins
- Unapproved accumulation of overtime hours
- Tardiness
Savings of up to 21% of payroll costs per year are possible if this type of attendance problem can be managed. That’s a huge amount of money.
Another method in which a time clock might help with attendance concerns is by preventing costly delays in production. Regular or unscheduled, absences have a negative influence on your team’s ability to get work done.
If you use a time clock program, you’ll know when employees are missing so you can reassign their tasks.
Finally, having an employee time clock installed eliminates attendance-related morale drains. When a worker frequently misses work, it falls on other, more dependable workers to make up the slack.
If it happens frequently enough, your reliable workers may begin to hate the absent worker for being gone so often and you for letting it. Also, an employee time clock can be a useful tool for maintaining morale.
#3. Cost-Effective and Time-Saving for Businesses
Small and large businesses can benefit from using time clock software because of the money and time it can save.
Time spent on processing employee time cards and completing payroll will be cut significantly. The time clock software automates all the tedious jobs of keeping track of employee hours, applying withholding, and calculating taxes so you don’t have to. You can put the extra time you get toward tasks that directly affect your company’s bottom line.
In addition, both small and large businesses can save money by using time clock software. What they do is:
- Automating data gathering and processing
- Improving Accuracy
- Combating Employee Time Card Theft
- Putting the onus of timekeeping on the worker instead of the employer
A specific employee time clock also helps save money by reducing or even eliminating the requirement for costly consumable products like time cards and computation sheets.
Although these savings may not appear to be much at first glance, they can quickly mount up over time.
#4. Offers Up-to-the-Minute Data on Wage Rates
Having reliable data on topics like employee absences and other costs is one thing. It is something else entirely to have real-time data on all the factors that influence the timekeeping practices of your company.
A state-of-the-art time clock for workers gives you that data.
The precision of labor cost data that can be gathered with a good time clock is truly remarkable. You can observe things like:
- Which workers and divisions are driving up your overtime costs the most?
- Determine which roles, departments, and employees are taking the longest to accomplish a goal.
- How do your company’s hourly labor rate and labor costs compare to those of similar businesses in your industry
- The ratio of your output to your working hours.
This level of detail eliminates the need for estimates and guesswork, allowing for greater command of production and labor expenses.
#5. Keeps All Workers on Equal Footing
Even if neither you nor your employees have ever directly addressed or voiced it, fairness is a big issue in your firm.
The trust, accountability, and enjoyment of your team members will all rise if you lead by example and treat everyone equally.
By installing a time clock, you can ensure your staff that they will be treated equally; it will be impossible to give anyone preferential treatment. There is nothing left but the cold, hard facts that level the playing field. No one can claim that the time clock is biased or acting improperly.
Overview of the best Best Time Clock Software for Small Businesses
Here are the best time clock software for small business.
#1. Jibble
We chose Jibble as our top free time clock software for small businesses because it offers a forever-free subscription with unlimited users and plenty of useful features for most small and medium-sized organizations. They also provide paid subscriptions with additional features if you require them.
Jibble’s free plan offers clock in/out, employee scheduling, GPS tracking, and geofencing in addition to the more standard capabilities of time clock software like these, as well as offline monitoring, alerts and notifications for missed schedules, authorized geofences, activity tracking, and configurable payroll hours.
However, the forever free plan only allows geo-fencing in two areas, and it only allows for one work schedule. If you require additional features, you can upgrade to one of three paid tiers: Premium, Ultimate, or Enterprise. Pricing information for the Enterprise plan is available exclusively upon request and is intended for companies with 500 or more employees.
Paid plans include additional features like auto clock-out, custom verification rules, project and client tracking, data export in XLS and CSV formats, and more. Additional administrators, managers, geofencing locations, and kiosk instances are also included.
Paid Jibble users can choose an “active user plan,” which limits their monthly costs to just the time and attendance data for employees who have actually punched in and out during that billing cycle.
#2. QuickBooks Time
Formerly known as TSheets, QuickBooks Time is time and attendance software that may be used in conjunction with QuickBooks. Using QuickBooks Time makes sense if you already use QuickBooks since it allows you to easily incorporate time tracking for employees into your existing workflow.
With QuickBooks Time, supervisors can see where their employees are and what they’re doing as soon as they clock in and out. This paves the way for instantaneous scheduling and assignment of tasks. The time worked by employees is correctly recorded and transferred to the payroll system mechanically, eliminating the need for human intervention.
Both the Premium and Elite versions of QuickBooks Time are available. The Premium package unlocks additional functionality such as mileage tracking, project progress monitoring and estimation, geofencing, and more. So, before you sign up for a plan, make sure you know what you’re getting.
#3. uAttend
Because it only costs $25 per month for up to nine employees, uAttend is the most cost-effective time clock software for small businesses on our list. When fully utilized, the monthly cost per employee is less than $2.80.
You can purchase hardware time clocks from uAttend, like the JR2000, DR2000, or DR2500, or just the software and have employees clock in from their own computers, tablets, or smartphones.
There are two timers and one manager allotted to each subscription. You can pay $10 monthly for the privilege of installing an extra time class. In addition, the monthly salary of an administrator would be $6.
#4. Time Doctor
Time Doctor is another one of our top picks for small business time clock software since it makes it easy to find the right employee in a sea of data. Managers can identify inefficiencies by tracking time based on a client, project workflow, or even the task itself. The highly analytical time card system is meant to aid managers in their duties by providing them with hard facts that can be used to refocus efforts when necessary.
However, it’s a great tool for highlighting employees’ areas of growth. The company as a whole will be able to increase its online output significantly. Users who already use 60+ other web programs (including payroll systems) for task management may find Time Doctor to be an excellent addition.
Time Doctor is a helpful online resource for flexible or telecommuting employees. This is aimed at businesses, be they large or small. This is for those who spend a lot of time working on projects and would like to evaluate their prior work with specific clients and jobs so that they can do better in the future. The advertising and consulting and outsourcing businesses are included here, among others.
#5. Clockify
The steps to using Clockify are simple: name the job, add tags, assign it to a project, and start the timer. To determine if an activity was billable or not, it should be stopped and then quantified in a payroll system. Individual time stamps (like an online time punch clock) on projects can be viewed in the dashboard, or the entire team’s time can be viewed at once. Invoices can then be generated utilizing this consolidated set of data.
Also, project managers can benefit from using a digital time card system like this. This is designed for any type of business, from solo entrepreneurs to multinational conglomerates.
Best Time Clock App
A Mobile time clock app can help you gain a more precise picture of your employees’ time spent at work, reduce your labor costs, and put an end to “buddy punching” and other forms of time fraud.
However, this time clock app combines the accessibility of mobile devices with the speed of Wi-Fi to provide businesses of all sizes with a powerful resource for saving time.
How to Choose the Best Time Clock App?
Looking for a reliable and low-cost time clock app? It’s a jungle out there, we get it. There is a plethora of time clock app software available, making it difficult to choose the right one for your business.
It’s crucial that you pick a system that works effectively for your business and captures all employee hours worked. Among the various workforce/HR procedures that benefit from a time clock app that keeps track of employees’ time and attendance are:
- Attendance & leave management
- Payroll processing
- Team collaboration
- Shift scheduling
- HR Analytics
- HR Compliance
However, a decent time clock app shouldn’t take too much of your time or your employees’ time to maintain records, make clocking in and out unpleasant, or cost too much money.
Instead of manually keeping track of time and attendance in spreadsheets or online time-card calculators, a good time clock app is significantly more convenient and powerful.
When picking on the most suitable time clock app, you should prioritize the following criteria:
- Reporting needs
- Work time patterns
- Your user experience preferences
- Your organizational structure
- Integration needs
- Sites of Employment
- Need for Integration
Essential Questions and Suggestions to Help You Choose the Best Time Clock App
#1. Online or Hosted Time Clock Software?
Our recommendation is that you use an online time and attendance solution unless you have a compelling need to use a hosted service. Why? Because it is convenient, inexpensive, adaptable, available worldwide, and safe.
No large upfront investments are required, and neither do new features or software upgrades. If you decide that a certain solution isn’t right for you, you can cancel your subscription at any moment and stop paying the monthly fee.
The majority of SaaS (software as a service) options have free trials available so you can see the benefits yourself.
#2. For What Purpose Will a Time Clock App Be Used?
When did you originally decide that a timekeeping system was necessary? In management, it is common practice to ask “Why?” before making any decisions.
The following are some of the most frequent circumstances under which businesses opt to install a time clock:
- Implementing a digital HR system
- Keeping timekeeping to a minimum in terms of human labor
- Increasing employees’ sense of fairness
- Improving output while minimizing expenses is a top priority.
- Swapping out the antiquated timepiece for a more modern one.
In addition, the answer to that last question could be the deciding factor in whether you require an app that functions as a time clock, a time tracker, or both.
#3. What Are Your Requirements for a Timekeeping Mechanism?
First, think about the size of your organization; different solutions have different feature sets that are better suited to different companies. It’s possible that the greatest time clock designed for a big firm isn’t the best time clock for a little one.
You should also consider your organizational structure before settling on a time clock app, and whether or not a single administrator can handle everything, or if you’ll need one for each team or division.
Verify if the solution’s framework corresponds to that of your business.
What about schedules at the office:
- Are your employees all working the same hours?
- Do some of them come early, and do others leave late?
- Do they all work full-time?
Look for an app that may be adjusted to fit your needs perfectly. It’s also a good idea to check in with your company’s administrator and human resources manager. In order to design an effective timekeeping system, precise requirements detailing what is important are necessary.
Overview of the Best Time Clock App
Using the criteria laid out, we’ve highlighted the market-leading time clock app. The following study will provide a more in-depth overview of the primary features the time clock app has to offer.
#1. Homebase
Human resources management is best handled at the home base. Its free plan does more than just track time; it also manages personnel files, payroll, and shift scheduling.
While Homebase is useful for everybody, it is designed specifically for small businesses in the following industries: food and beverage, retail, beauty and wellness, medical and veterinary, home and repair, services, hotel and leisure, education, and caregiving.
Homebase works as well on smartphones, tablets, and computers.
Furthermore, Homebase has features like geofencing, GPS monitoring, and photo verification for clock-ins, as well as warnings for when workers are running late. Employees have the option of including a note with each time input in case they want to highlight something unique about that entry.
Homebase’s Cash Out feature is fantastic since it lets workers get their hands on a portion of their salary early to cover unexpected costs. Employees can borrow as much as they need and repay it whenever they like without paying any interest.
To use the Cash Out service, you must meet the following requirements: have a bank account, get at least two direct deposit paychecks per month, and have a Homebase account. Before using Cash Out again, you’ll need to repay the previous withdrawal.
#2. Connecteam
Connecteam is a piece of management software that includes tools for keeping workers interested and keeping them on target. It has a lot of options and functions, so it can serve many purposes.
Retail, security, cleaning, hospitality, construction, field services, logistics, staffing, and many more sectors and industries can all benefit from using Connecteam.
Connecteam’s plans are built to cover the first 50 users, which can be expensive if you have a smaller team but relatively reasonable if you fall within the limitations, and it can be utilized in a wide variety of sectors.
In addition, Connecteam is not the best option for one-man shops or freelancers because of the way it is priced.
Furthermore, Connecteam’s time clock app stands out since it allows for the addition of various time clocks inside a single account. This is common among businesses with many locations, as it allows for each to have its own set of users, administrators, and configurations.
Connecteam’s Course module is a neat perk that may be made available to your staff. Use this for in-house training or mandatory initial orientation for all new hires.
However, Connecteam provides multiple ways to incorporate Courses and Quizzes for your team, depending on your specific requirements.
Recognizing employees’ efforts and awarding them with “Employee of the Month” badges for outstanding performance are two examples of how recognition may be used to boost morale in the workplace.
#3. Deputy
Application to manage schedules, long working hours, and monitor employee attendance, useful for teams of any size. Deputy’s usefulness spans a wide variety of sectors, including but not limited to agriculture, contact centers, charity, cleaning services, construction & engineering, education, entertainment, healthcare, retail, security, supermarkets, and many more.
Also, Deputy’s pricing options are flexible based on the size of your team, but most of the differences lie in the number of included features.
Deputy’s ability to offer a bespoke feature set to its clientele sets it apart from other time clock app software.
Pricing for this plan is determined by the specific software settings your business needs and is ideal for businesses with over 250 employees.
This plan includes everything the others do, plus it can keep track of your team’s certification and qualification needs and alert you when they’re about to expire.
Functionalities can be tailored to your needs with the custom plan, and you can even incorporate external data sources, such as weather forecasts, into your preparations.
Except for the Scheduling plan, Deputy allows you to record attendance using either geolocation or biometric facial recognition.
Deputy also has a feature for monitoring project development and making course corrections as needed.
Time Clock App for Construction
With the help of a time clock app for the construction industry, you can easily and efficiently keep tabs on working hours, automatically determine billable hours for payroll and client invoicing, and much more.
Furthermore, schedule tracking is essential for completing construction projects on schedule and within budget. If you have the necessary equipment, of course! Yet without it? Manual processes will always take up too much time, and buddy punching, time theft, and costly payroll blunders will eat away at your profits.
Time clock app for the construction industry allows you to keep tabs on who clocks in and out and from where allowing you to generate timesheets that are correct to the last second for payroll and invoicing. The result is more time for you to focus on what really matters.
What Is Construction Time Clock App?
To put it simply, a construction time clock app is a piece of software that allows construction employees to punch in and out using their smartphones on the job site. The construction time and attendance clock app issues each user with a digital time card in lieu of a central clock in/outstation. Managers may see how much time their employees spend working and, in some situations, confirm that their staff is present when they clock in and depart.
How Does the Construction Time Clock App Work?
A small set of features are included in the vast majority of apps. To begin, the app includes a digital time clock that construction employees may use to clock in and out of their shifts. The employees’ hours are then added mechanically to their electronic timesheets, generating reports that management can review before processing payroll.
Overtime calculations, vacation day logging, and punch clocks are other standard elements of construction timesheet software. Then there are more high-tech options for construction timesheet software, such as geofencing, GPS tracking, and even facial recognition.
Why You Need a Construction Time Tracking App
To begin, we are well into the 21st century. Second, you should never keep track of your employees’ time on the job by hand using Excel, paper logs, Google Calendar, or any other method. This will inevitably lead to payroll mistakes and time theft. Also, read CLOCK IN WORK: What It Is, How It Works & Free Apps.
That’s not all, though. Some of the most compelling arguments in favor of investing in contractor time monitoring apps are outlined below.
- Quickly identify who did what on whatever project and at which location.
- Don’t shortchange customers by failing to appropriately record expenses.
- Maintain order by allocating a fixed number of billable hours to each project.
- Improve the client experience by giving them a comprehensive view of the time and money spent on the project.
- Update estimates so you can get a clearer picture of how long a work is likely to take.
- Know how long tasks typically take your team.
Overview of the Best Time Clock App for Construction
Here is the best time clock app for construction.
#1. Hubstaff
Hubstaff is a smartphone app that makes it simple for your construction crew to punch in and out from any mobile device, anywhere. You and your workers can get to work immediately after installing Hubstaff, as it operates invisibly in the background once installed. In spite of its usefulness, the cost of this time clock system immediately skyrockets when applied to more than a small number of workers.
Features.
- Processing of payroll
- Geospatial Positioning System
- Job sites can be made using geofencing.
- Digital time clocks
- Organizational budgeting
- Receipt of bills from customers
#2. Raken
Raken is a construction industry-specific time clock app that facilitates effortless time tracking and payroll processing. With Raken Time Cards, you may upload many crews at once and distribute hours to multiple teams simultaneously. Adding new team members or making changes to a single employee’s hours is a breeze with a construction timesheet tool.
Features.
- Team or individual time cards
- Timekeeping administration
- Assigning hours to price tags
- Timely updates on ongoing projects
- Constant updates
#3. ClockShark
ClockShark is a reliable construction time clock app and a professional work pricing solution. Each time an employee clocks in, they will be able to select the job and task they wish to perform, allowing you to keep tabs on their productivity as an effective manager. Simple to view and update, a building timesheet tool puts all your projects in one place.
Features.
- Accessible on all mobile gadgets, the app
- Automatic timetable creation via dragging and dropping
- Atomic clock
- Generate Timesheets
- The supervisor or foreman can clock in multiple crews
Does Adp Have a Time Clock?
Yes, the ADP Mobile Solutions app does provide time monitoring for a more enticing work experience for your staff. Employees have round-the-clock access to their timesheets, schedules, vacation days, and more from their mobile devices.
Best Time Clock App Free
Free time clock apps can be a great way to get a feel for how these apps work without breaking the bank if you are new to tracking employee time or have been doing it manually up until now. However, it might be difficult to choose the best option among the many time clock apps available on the market today. You scoured the web and came up with a list of the top best free time clock app for small businesses to assist you make your choice.
Here is the best free time clock app that you can use as a business owner.
#1. Paymo
The ability to submit an unlimited number of invoices directly from within Paymo makes it a great time clock app for invoicing. From your timesheet data, you may generate invoices in a professional format and be paid in more than 85 different currencies using services like PayPal, Stripe, or Authorize.net. You can only have three clients and 50 tasks under the free plan, but you can have an unlimited number of projects.
Also, time cost, project budget, task budget, and time comments are just some of the data you can add to your own personalized static time reports. These reports can also be distributed to colleagues or customers.
Freely include and delegate work to external partners. You can keep track of time spent on tasks in any app or web browser thanks to native tracking. However, you can see if any team member is using numerous clocks at once.
#2. TrackingTime
Because of its flexible reporting options, TrackingTime has made our cut as a top free time clock app. Although other tools, such as Toggl Track, let you view monitored time in a variety of formats, TrackingTime is superior. Day, month, week, batch, and team calendar views are all available.
Time spent on both billable and nonbillable tasks and projects can be recorded indefinitely. Timesheets can be imported, and both one-time and recurring entries can be added and edited in bulk. Your company logo can be included in reports with the Free plan. In addition, something that just a small handful of other applications offer in their free tiers.
#3. My Hours
Because it is ideal for first-time users of the time clock app, My Hours made it onto our list as the best free software for freelancers. You can add as many projects and team members as you like to the Free plan without worrying about additional fees. You can choose to manually enter time or make entries.
However, using the provided templates, you can easily create new tasks for various projects. Determine project costs, assign responsibilities, and monitor activities. Monthly budgets, project budgets, and task budgets are all available with the premium plan, which begins at $6 per user, per month, invoiced annually.
Also, the reports in My Hours can be filtered, downloaded, and sent to clients in either a summary or detailed format. With the premium plan, you can add your company’s branding to these reports and send them out automatically to clients.
Is Clockify Really a Free Time Clock App?
Yes, clockify is the only free time clock app that works for any team size. No matter how many people are on your team, you can utilize Clockify at no cost. You can use it as much and for as long as you like without paying us a dime.
Conclusion
While a time clock app is necessary for most sectors to record employees’ arrivals and departures, as well as breaks taken, other sectors have more specific requirements. Shift scheduling, geofencing, and point-of-sale (POS) integration are just a few examples of the specialized features needed in businesses like retail, restaurants, construction, and field services.
Look for a time clock app that was developed with your business in mind if you operate in a niche.
Best Time Clock FAQs
What Is the 7-Minute Rule?
The “7-minute Rule” states that if an employee has worked for longer than 7 minutes, their pay cannot be rounded down. If an employee puts in between 7 and 8 minutes of work (for example, 7 minutes and 35 seconds), the employer can round down the time to the nearest minute.
What Is the Best Rfid Time Clock?
The uAttend Cloud-Connected Touchscreen Time Clock ($179) is the best time clock for using RFID and PIN numbers, while the uAttend BN6500 Biometric Fingerprint Time Clock ($169.25) is the best time clock for using a fingerprint, and the best online timeclock is OnTheClock ($2.70 to $3 per user, each month).
Is There an App for Employees to Clock in and Out?
The ezClocker software tracks working hours on the go. ezClocker eliminates the need for traditional timekeeping methods like punch cards and real clocks. With ezClocker, workers may use their own smartphones to punch in and out of work.
Similar Articles
- Best 21 Time Clock Systems For Small Business(+ free options) .
- THE BEST ATTENDANCE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS FOR YOUR WORKPLACE
- EMPLOYEE ATTENDANCE TRACKING: 2023 Best Attendance Tracking Software
- TIME THEFT: Meaning, How to Spot It, and How to Reduce It
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