Guide for crew owners

How Contractors Track Crew Hours: Paper vs Spreadsheet vs App

By Jeff Mohler, founder of My Guys Time

It's Thursday, a little after five. The trucks are back, everybody wants to go home, and you're standing in the yard asking your foreman what time the crew got to Tuesday's job. He thinks it was seven. Maybe seven-thirty. The concrete truck was late, so maybe they started on the other site first.

That conversation is how most small outfits track hours, whatever the paperwork says. This guide is about the three ways contractors actually do it (paper, spreadsheets and apps), what each one is good at, and the point where each one stops working. Honest tradeoffs, not a feature list.

Most small contractors start on paper, move hours into a spreadsheet on Thursday, then look for an app when a second foreman shows up and the week can't be rebuilt from memory. Paper is fine for one crew you see every day. Spreadsheets help the office and still fail in the truck. A simple crew time card app gets hours in the day they're worked. My Guys Time is $12/month flat for the whole company.

Paper time cards: what still works

Paper has one big thing going for it: everybody understands it. No logins, no phones, no training. Hand a guy a card and a pencil and he knows what to do. It costs next to nothing, and if you're on the job with your crew every day, you can check it with your own eyes.

Where it falls apart:

Cards go missing. They ride around in pockets, lunch boxes and cup holders. Some of them come back. Some come back wet.
Nobody can read them. Is that a 7 or a 1? By Friday, the guy who wrote it doesn't remember either.
Somebody retypes everything. Every hour on paper gets entered again by whoever does the books. That's two chances to get it wrong.
Receipts drift away from the hours. The supply-house run is on one slip, the hours are on another, and the two never meet up.

If you're sticking with paper for now, use a card that asks for the right things every day: job, start, end, hours, and a foreman signature at the end of the week. Our free construction timesheet template is a weekly crew card you can download as a PDF or Excel file. And here's a straight comparison of paper timesheets vs an app.

Spreadsheets: better for the office, not the truck

A spreadsheet is where most outfits go next, usually because the bookkeeper asked for it. It adds the totals for you, it's easy to send around, and it's a lot easier to read than pencil on cardboard.

The trouble is who fills it in, and when. Foremen don't update spreadsheets from the job. They're running a crew. So the spreadsheet usually gets filled in on Thursday, from paper cards, texts and memory. That means the spreadsheet is cleaner, but the hours going into it are just as shaky as before.

Then there are the copies. One version on the office computer, one emailed to the bookkeeper, one with Tuesday fixed and Wednesday not. Somebody always ends up asking which one is right.

A spreadsheet is a good tool for the office. It just doesn't solve the part that happens in the truck. More on that in spreadsheets vs an app.

Crew time apps: three shapes

Once you go looking for an app, you'll find they come in about three shapes. They're priced differently and built for different outfits.

Per-user GPS platforms

These verify time with GPS, often with geofences, scheduling and job costing built in. They're strong when you can't be on every site and need proof of who was where. They're usually priced per user per month, sometimes with a base fee or admin license on top, so the bill grows with your crew. See how two of them compare in Workyard vs My Guys Time and BusyBusy vs My Guys Time.

Free all-in-one apps with a cap

Some apps bundle a time clock with scheduling, chat and HR tools, and they're free up to a set number of users. For a very small team that's a real deal. Once you pass the cap, you're picking paid plans. See Connecteam vs My Guys Time for one example.

A flat-price crew time card

One price for the whole company, built around a foreman entering the crew's hours and signing off on the week. That's what My Guys Time is, at $12/month flat, whatever your headcount.

For the side-by-side math, see what construction time tracking costs. For a fit-by-fit rundown of the main options, see the best time tracking apps for small construction crews.

How I got from a 2x6 to an app

I'm a mason. For a long time, my crew's hours lived on a short length of 2x6 that rode behind the seat of my truck. At the end of each day I'd pencil on who was there and how long we worked. It wasn't pretty, but it was accurate, because I was on that job every day and I wrote it down myself.

That held up until I started a second crew and put a foreman in charge of it. Now I wasn't there to see the day. The hours came to me secondhand, and by Thursday evening my foreman and I were trying to put the week back together from what we could remember. Some weeks we got close. Some weeks we didn't.

So I went looking for an app. What I kept finding was built for people at desks, and nearly every one of them charged per guy. That never made sense to me. Why should the app cost more because you hired another guy?

I couldn't find the thing I wanted, so I built it. The foreman logs the crew's hours from the truck before he leaves the job. He signs off on the week on one board. The office sees hours, rate and notes, and hands the hours to whoever runs payroll. One price, the whole company. If you're curious how that plays out on a masonry crew, there's more on masonry crews.

Decision checklist

Answer these five and you'll know which shape fits:

How big is the crew, and how much does it swing? If your headcount jumps every spring, a per-user bill will jump with it. A flat price won't.
Are you on site every day? If you see every hour with your own eyes, paper may be all you need. If a foreman runs the day without you, you need hours entered on the job, the day they're worked.
Do you need GPS proof? If you can't trust the hours without location data, look at a GPS platform. If the foreman's sign-off is good enough, you can skip it.
Who runs payroll? If you or a bookkeeper enter payroll by hand, a clean, approved week of hours may be all they need. If you want hours to flow into payroll software by themselves, you'll want an app with a payroll integration.
Do you need the extras? Scheduling, chat, job costing and HR tools are worth paying for if you'll use them. If you won't, a simpler time card does the job for less hassle.

FAQ

How can I track my hours for work?+

Write them down the day you work them, not at the end of the week. A paper card, a spreadsheet or an app all work if you fill it in daily. Memory is what makes hours drift.

What is the best free way to track work hours?+

A printed or spreadsheet time card costs nothing. Our construction timesheet template is a free download (PDF or Excel). Some apps also have free plans, usually capped by users or features. My Guys Time isn't free: it's a 7-day trial with no card, then $12/month flat for the whole company.

Is there an app that can track my work hours?+

Yes, plenty. Which one fits depends on whether you need GPS, scheduling or a free plan. See the best time tracking apps for small construction crews. For a crew run by a foreman, My Guys Time is a weekly crew time card at one flat price.

Is it legal to track salaried employees' hours?+

The rules depend on where you are and how each person is classified. Ask your payroll provider or an employment attorney. We don't give legal advice.

How do contractors track employee hours on a job site?+

The method that holds up is the foreman logging the crew's hours on the job, the same day, before anybody leaves. Then he signs off on the week, and the office reviews it once. That's the workflow My Guys Time is built around. See how it works.

The full picture for small crews: construction time tracking. Running W-2 guys and 1099 subs on the same job? Read do 1099 subs get overtime.

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