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If you’ve been tracking your team members’ work hours manually, these problems might sound familiar:
Employees fill out their timesheets incorrectly
Team members forget to punch out during their break
Staff overlook submitting their timesheets entirely
Hiccups like these make tracking time a frustrating task for any business owner or manager. Especially when you need to bill clients immediately or when payroll processing can’t wait.
That’s why adopting Hubstaff’s simple time tracking app with powerful time-saving features can make a vast difference in how you manage projects.
Automatic time tracking helps you cut down on team management efforts, so you can focus on streamlining workflows and enhancing productivity.
Smarter time tracking apps with time reports also provide crucial insight into how your team works and how much time it takes to complete each task.
Plus, the intuitive interface makes it easy to toggle between reports, timesheets, invoices, and time off requests.
This way, when it’s time to invoice clients or process payroll, you’ll know exactly how many billable hours you’ve got on file — without needing to clarify or correct timesheets.
Time tracking is easy with the Hubstaff desktop app, Chrome browser extension, Chromebook app, or mobile app that your team can download for free.
Users can start or stop the timer with one click and have complete control over when it runs. Time can be tracked toward particular tasks, projects, work orders, clients, or locations.
There’s a deeper level of automation that uses location to auto-start or send reminders that you’ll read about in the following sections.
At the most basic level, tracking work hours helps you understand how long projects and tasks take to complete. That helps you create more accurate budgets and stick to due dates.
With automatic time tracking, team members aren’t interrupted by constant check-ins. That’s because Hubstaff’s proof of work features gives managers a snapshot of where time is spent and how progress is coming along.
For example, the time tracking software tracks mouse and keyboard usage and then reports on productivity levels.
Steady decreases or sharp declines in productivity could be a sign that team members are struggling with a certain project. This might be a good time to organize a team or individual meeting to overcome any confusion.
In time, the productivity levels should swing back. And you’ll be able to check through the Hubstaff dashboard or through detailed reports.
Apart from activity levels, you can see which apps your team members use or which websites they visit while working. You can also capture screenshots to see how employees are progressing with certain tasks or where they might need more guidance.
These features are customizable on a per-user basis, and your team members will be able to see all the same data that managers can.
But what if a team member forgets to stop the timer? Don’t worry — the idle time feature is triggered after 5, 10, or 20 minutes of inactivity. The employee receives a notification that asks whether they would like to keep the idle time in their work log. If they choose to keep it, managers will be able to see that there was no activity during that specific timeframe.
However, employees are free to delete any time entry from their work log. Having this transparency and control over their data helps your team members feel safe and comfortable when tracking work hours.
Powerful time tracking apps — like Hubstaff — offer reports that help you check in on how things are going across multiple projects.
The 17 customizable time reports give you access to a variety of data. Plus, filtering the information makes it easier to stay organized.
You can see how much time individual team members spend working on a specific task/project or how many hours the entire team has logged.
For field teams, you can check the total time they spend working at a Job site. Or you can check the idle or manual time logs for each employee.
Let’s examine some of the most important reporting features in greater detail:
With Hubstaff’s payment reports, you can see the amounts your team members billed over a certain timeframe, along with how much you’ve paid. Change filters and views to make each report more useful for you. You can even export or schedule these reports to help you keep an eye on labor costs.
See the status of your client and your own team’s invoices. You can dig into outstanding and past due invoices to know where payments are due.
As with all the other available reports, you can filter your expenses by date, time, billable hours, and non-billable hours. This way, you always know how much time your team is spending on what.
See how much of a project’s budget has been spent so you can plan for the future and stay profitable. You can review these reports by weekly or daily limits, by client, or by project.
First, business owners or managers invite their team members to track time.They’ll need to download the app on their device, and managers can assign tasks that will then show up in the timer.
The time tracker app then allows employees, freelancers, and more to start and stop the timer to record work hours toward specific tasks or projects.
Managers can review and approve timesheets and pay team members directly through Hubstaff using a payment integration.
Finally, everyone can see detailed reports and learn from their own work habits. Managers and business owners can invoice clients, track expenses, and more.
Many different companies use Hubstaff’s time tracking software, but the most common teams are in design and development, work remotely, or are out in the field. These teams might also hire freelancers or outside consultants to help them accomplish more as they grow.
For landscapers, construction crews, and other field teams, the mobile app uses GPS tracking to log both the time spent working and the locations they visit.
For example, if you have a team of landscapers, each person can download the mobile app to their own device. Then the time tracking software marks down each work location and how much time it takes to finish each job.
Managers can create work orders that store all of the crucial job details and then set a geofence (or virtual barrier) around Job sites.
Attendance tracking becomes easier this way, as you can always check if your field team is tracking time for the jobs you assign.
This helps you avoid being understaffed and allows you to find out quickly if anyone needs more guidance.
Reporting work time with Hubstaff’s time tracking software is simple. First, your team needs to either download the desktop or mobile apps, install the Chrome extension, or sign in to use the web app.
If you’re a team of one, you can get started with the free plan, which includes limited reports. For small businesses or enterprises, the Starter, Pro, and Enterprise plans include all the available reports.
Managers can schedule reports to be delivered on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. They can also customize them by week, team member, project, or client.
Organized reporting allows you to review costs, budgets, invoices, time spent working per team member or project, employee utilization trends, and more.
This is exactly the kind of insight teams need to become more profitable and plan better for future projects. Once you generate the report, you can share it with one or multiple email recipients. Or you can export data in CSV or PDF formats.
Hubstaff’s time tracking software helps employees track time and register overtime hours automatically. Plus, the desktop app and mobile app work for every industry imaginable, from cleaning, construction, and manufacturing to software developers, agencies, health care, and more.
Timesheets are generated automatically based on the hours employees track each day. Managers will have a chance to easily review and approve timesheets right within the app. This means that errors won’t mess up your payroll processing, and team members will be paid on time.
One challenge when managing workers in the field is that employees often forget to punch in and out of their shifts. Fortunately, this is an easy fix with Hubstaff’s geofencing feature.
Employees are automatically clocked in and out when they enter or leave a work area you define on the map. And if anyone is late or doesn’t show up, you get notified instantly, so you don’t have to drive to each location to check on your crew.
Additionally, you can even optimize your employee’s routes with the fleet tracking feature.
By seeing what street your employees usually take on the way to different sites and where they stop along the way, you can assess how well they are planning their travel.
This allows you to make better estimates in terms of start and finish times for each gig.
The free mobile time tracking app is available for both iOS and Android users.
After downloading, team members can simply choose the project or job they are working on and tap Start. The time clock will record all the work hours across any location and upload it to the web app every 10 minutes.
If the geofencing feature is enabled, the app will automatically start tracking hours once the employee enters the Job site.
The time tracking app also has a dashboard map. That’s where you can see your team’s whereabouts in real-time.
Plus, there are over 30 integrations with third-party apps available to help your team be as productive as possible. Among them, you’ll find software like Asana, Gusto, Quickbooks, and Basecamp.
The type of time tracking app you choose ultimately comes down to what you need it for.
Are you looking for automation to cut time spent on project management? Do you want to know what projects are costing you the most money? Or maybe you need a time tracking app for something else entirely.
Once you have your goals figured out, you can start evaluating multiple time tracking apps based on different criteria.
The best time tracking apps include a high level of customization, so you can truly make it work for your team. This is especially important when creating time reports, where too much unnecessary data can get overwhelming. Plus, a great work hours tracker will allow you to add manual entries or edit existing time logs apart from just tracking time automatically.
Powerful time tracking apps should also include productivity tracking and project management features. This way, you can pair time tracking with unlimited projects or tasks. And you’ll have a better understanding of how your team works as a result.
Lastly, powerful time tracking apps have a simple interface where you can easily find what you’re looking for within seconds. If you have multiple features under the same roof, such as productivity tracking and project management features, your dashboard should be constructed in a way that doesn’t overwhelm you or your team.
Using time tracking software comes with many benefits for businesses of all sizes. The more you understand how your team works and what your most profitable projects are, the more you can streamline your processes and take your company to the next level.
These are some specific ways time tracking apps can help you achieve this:
When you’re tracking work hours automatically, you’ll better understand how long each task takes to complete. With this information, you can make adjustments to reduce that time.
You can either assign the task to someone with more experience in that area or help struggling team members improve their efficiency. These insights also tell you if there is any confusion around tasks or projects, so you can jump in and offer more guidance.
Reducing costs and increasing your profits come easy with productivity tracking. That’s because you’ll be able to reward overachievers and train or re-assign people who aren’t performing as expected. Not only that, but with accurate time tracking, you get all billable hours on file per project. When it’s time to bill clients, you’ll know that all the time spent working will be added to your invoices.
With Hubstaff, freelancers, consultants, and employees can bill your organization for every pay period based on how many work hours they log, either manually or by using the time tracker. You can also automatically create invoices for clients based on your team members’ time logs.
Having all of these features through one app can save you time and money.
Time tracking apps can help your team do their best work. But you can further boost productivity by encouraging and rewarding team members by sending them Hubstaff achievement badges. That way, they’ll feel motivated to deliver quality work on time.
The best-time tracking apps have multiple plans available for businesses of all sizes. This way, the app provides what you need now and then suggests more extensive plans as you grow.
For example, you can start using Hubstaff’s tracking app for free if you’re a team of one. For two or more team members, you can use any of the paid plans that suit your needs. These allow you to add unlimited users and give you access to a lot more features.
Get the top-rated time tracking app that helps teams billable hours, get paid, and invoice clients.