Pro's Picks: Say Goodbye to Paper Time Sheets

Hilary Moore

Martha's Vineyard Construction Company

Edgartown, Mass.

QuickBooks Time

Up until five or six years ago, we had paper time cards that were faxed to the office, then entered manually into a spreadsheet. As you can imagine, it was very time consuming. Then we began using TSheets, which is now QuickBooks Time.

It’s a timekeeping system for all in-house employees, and we recently integrated it with our QuickBooks accounting software. We operate solely on a cost-plus basis, we don’t do fixed price work, so now we can track job costs live rather than waiting to do a payment application each month for the client. 

And it integrates with a variety of payroll and accounting software beyond QuickBooks. That allows you to quickly and easily export all the hours worked for your payroll if you’re invoicing a job, or trying to do job costing for a budget update or change order. 

You can also track your employees if someone’s out of reach. It gives you a live GPS report of where your people are. And it doesn’t let you save hours until you add a note, so it’s also our hourly narrative. It’s all captured in a simplified report with each day, each hour they worked and description of the work, and we’re able to export that and give it to our clients.

I would say the only con is that sometimes people can have a hard time getting in the habit of switching time from job to job. And you really have to be diligent about switching jobs because it’s as accurate as it can be if you use it correctly, but if you don’t, then it could be wildly inaccurate. Which is why the GPS helps as well because you can always go back and see where you were at that certain time and then switch it if needed.