How to track employee hours on a construction crew

The four ways crews track time (and where each breaks)

Almost every contractor uses one of four methods. Each works at some scale and fails at the next.

• Paper timesheets — cheap and universal, but they are filled out at the end of the week from memory, which means rounded, inflated, and impossible to tie to a specific job. Fine for one or two people; a liability past five.
• A group text or spreadsheet — better than paper because it is timestamped, but nobody job-costs from a text thread, and you still re-key everything into payroll.
• A punch clock at the shop — accurate for start/stop, useless the moment work happens at the jobsite instead of the yard.
• A mobile time clock app — each worker clocks in/out on their phone at the jobsite, tagged to a job, with location. This is where crews land once accuracy and job costing start to matter.

What you actually need to capture

Accurate hours are not just a start and stop time. To run payroll and cost a job you need each shift tied to four things:

• Who — the specific employee, not "the framing crew".
• When — clock-in and clock-out timestamps, plus any breaks, captured live rather than reconstructed Friday afternoon.
• Where — the jobsite. Location at clock-in is what separates a real entry from a guess and is the foundation of job costing.
• Which job — so the hours roll up into labor cost per job, not just a payroll total. This is the number that tells you whether you actually made money on the Henderson driveway.

Get overtime right before it gets you

In the US, the federal standard (FLSA) is overtime at 1.5× for hours worked over 40 in a workweek for non-exempt employees. Several states layer on daily overtime — California, for example, requires overtime past 8 hours in a day and double-time past 12. Travel time between jobsites during the workday is generally compensable. Getting this wrong is not a rounding error; unpaid-overtime claims are one of the most common and expensive labor disputes contractors face.

Two rules of thumb: track hours by workweek the way the law defines your workweek, and never let "we will fix it on payroll" become the system. If your time data is accurate at the source, overtime calculates itself.

The mistakes that cost real money

• Rounding up. Fifteen minutes a day per person across a 10-person crew is ~65 paid hours a month nobody worked.
• Reconstructing from memory. Hours written down Friday for work done Monday are always wrong, and always wrong in the employee's favor.
• No job tag. Without hours tied to a job you can run payroll but you can never answer "did we make money on that one?"
• Buddy punching — one worker clocking in for another. Covered in depth in the buddy-punching guide.
• Ignoring travel and break rules, which turns a small process gap into a wage-and-hour claim.

A simple system that scales

The system that holds up as you grow is: clock in at the jobsite on a phone, tagged to the job, with location captured automatically; breaks logged as they happen; the foreman reviews and approves the week; approved hours flow straight into payroll. No paper, no re-keying, no Friday reconstruction.

Step by step

1. 1

   Pick one source of truth

   Choose a single method everyone uses — a mobile time clock for crew-based work. Mixed methods guarantee gaps.

2. 2

   Clock in at the jobsite, tagged to the job

   Capture who, when, where, and which job at the moment work starts — not from memory later.

3. 3

   Log breaks as they happen

   Record meal and rest breaks live so net hours and break compliance are accurate.

4. 4

   Review and approve weekly

   Have the foreman or office approve each timesheet against the schedule before payroll runs.

5. 5

   Push approved hours to payroll + job costing

   Approved hours should flow into payroll and roll up into labor cost per job with no re-keying.