The 5 Best Field Service Time Tracking Apps
The issue of time theft is a real and pressing concern for field service businesses. It’s estimated that 43% of hourly employees round up their weekly work hours, while according to the American Payroll Association, nearly 75% of U.S. businesses are affected by time theft.
While many companies are able to take steps to reduce time fraud at the office, combating this issue is a bit more complicated for field workers. Implementing a field service time-tracking app with features like GPS tracking, geofencing, and photo clock-ins is one of the best ways to guard against time theft.
Benefits of using a time-tracking app for field service
Time-tracking apps deliver several benefits to field service business owners:
- Confirm job site attendance: Employee tracking apps help you prove that employees are on the job site when they say they are with GPS location tracking.
- Avoid buddy punching: Many time tracking apps offer features like facial recognition or require employees to take a photo of themselves when clocking in/out to prevent employees from clocking in and out for one another.
- Ensure time card accuracy: With more advanced time tracking features like geofencing, you can prevent employees from clocking in/out when they’re not on site.
- Reduce payroll and invoicing errors: Time tracking apps automatically calculate employee hours, PTO, and overtime to ensure your payroll is always correct. Additionally, many apps also allow you to attribute employee hours to specific projects, improving the accuracy of your client invoicing.
- Improve customer service: Knowing where your team is at any given moment will help you improve your response times. It also helps facilitate better customer communication by allowing you to provide your customers with a more accurate estimate of when a technician will arrive.
- Save time: An automated time tracking system can simplify many time-intensive tasks. By choosing time card software that syncs up with your payroll system, you’ll no longer have to enter data by hand. It will also save you from having to calculate extra hours, overtime, or vacation time.
Improper time management, day-to-day miscommunications, and scheduling conflicts can result in setbacks, poor customer service, and a hit to your service organization’s profitability and reputation. Time-tracking apps help you avoid all of these issues.
The 5 best field service time tracking apps
Below, you’ll find our top five picks for the best field service time-tracking apps:
We selected these apps by measuring how much control they give business owners in managing field workers, protecting customer information, monitoring work time, and optimizing operations via work order and project cost management.
1. Buddy Punch
Buddy Punch is our all-in-one workforce management tool that was created with a specific focus on three aspects of time management: employee accountability, design simplicity, and operation streamlining. The idea was that once you implemented our software solution into your strategy, you would notice immediate benefits.
With features such as GPS tracking, job codes, drag-and-drop job scheduling, notifications, PTO management, customizable reports, payroll integrations, and mobile/tablet device compatibility, field service companies can overhaul their HR operations.
Let’s take a deeper dive into each of these features so it’s clearer how they can have a positive impact on your business.
GPS tracking
In our opinion, a quality field service time-tracking app must include GPS capabilities. On a real-time basis, business owners need to be able to keep up with their service professionals’ locations, what jobs they’re currently working on, and whether they’re in a position to respond to new service requests as they come in.
Buddy Punch’s GPS tracking (which marks punch-ins on an interactive map) empowers business owners to make snap decisions based on service technician location tracking. Never lose track of your mobile workforce.
Meanwhile, a later look at this GPS data in your work history can help with pre-emptive route planning and, later, route optimization, depending on the frequency of certain service calls and job details.
If you’re sending the right technicians and getting follow-up business thanks to their skill sets, there’s no reason to not optimize dispatch scheduling based on what you know about your repeat business (while still preparing for new jobs). Real-time data and metrics make optimizing based on remote service history a snap.
Job codes
Field time tracking is the key to achieving operational efficiency for your business. With Buddy Punch’s job codes feature allowing you mobile access to locations, you can monitor how much time your field service teams spend offsite or onsite throughout the workday.
If a technician works on multiple jobs on the same day, they can easily swap to the right job codes as they finish a task and change what they’re working on. Then, you can view all the jobs an employee worked on their time card to focus on optimizing business operations based on which service industry tasks provide the greatest profit for the least time.
Drag and drop scheduling
With Buddy Punch as your service dispatch software, you can use a drag-and-drop scheduling interface to streamline the whole process. You can create shifts in Buddy Punch’s interface by clicking on empty cells, then move them around while using the visualizer to see how well you’ve scheduled your team.
Once you publish the schedule, a notification will be sent out to your technicians automatically. If you grant them permission, you can even have them swap shifts to cover for each other when needed.
Notifications
Speaking of notifications, Buddy Punch lets you automate various communications through our built-in alert system. For example, administrators receive a notification when team members clock in or request a change to their time card (such as putting in a leave request).
Administrators can then approve or deny this leave request, which sends a notification back to techs informing them of the decision. This means that everyone can focus more on work and remain secure in the knowledge that if something important happens, they’ll receive a heads-up.
PTO management
Sick time, vacation days, personal leave, and more — Buddy Punch’s user-friendly PTO management system gives you complete control over your team members’ absences. You can even create custom PTO types as you want.
Additionally, you can implement a self-service approach to PTO. If you enable this feature, your techs will be able to put in a leave request and get it approved automatically. Otherwise, you can approve or reject as you require.
There’s also an accruals feature for businesses using that method of accumulating PTO.
Customizable reports
Buddy Punch’s customizable reports give you the power to make meaningful decisions with all the data collected during your techs’ work days. With this, you get a detailed overview of your employees, their hours, overtime, locations, and more — all of which can be exported to PDF or Excel formats depending on your preference.
Payroll integrations
Another aspect of workforce management that Buddy Punch streamlines is how the end of each pay period is handled. Rather than having to sort through and transfer all your employee data to ensure that payments are accurate, Buddy Punch makes it easy to send that data directly to your favorite payroll software.
Some popular payroll service providers that Buddy Punch integrates with include QuickBooks, ADP, and Paychex.
Mobile and tablet apps
Mobile functionality is mandatory for field technician time tracking at remote job sites. Buddy Punch provides this but also takes it a step further by including tablet compatibility. You can be sure that you can monitor time entries from anywhere at any time.
Other unique features
We’ve only just scratched the surface of everything Buddy Punch offers. Consider other features you can mark off your checklist such as:
Even that isn’t everything that Buddy Punch brings to the table. We have a constantly updated blog for business owners seeking methods to improve their businesses, our help center contains hundreds of articles on using our app, and our customer support team is always available to answer questions via live chat.
Customer reviews
As of this post’s writing date, Buddy Punch has a rating of 4.8 out of 5 stars across nearly 1,000 customer reviews on Capterra.
Here are a few reviews that speak to Buddy Punch’s ease of use and ability to monitor remote employees:
- “Very inclusive of everything an admin needs to address different scenarios in the field. Multiple customer reps were available via chat to help with setup and answer questions. Rep was very knowledgeable and helped me with every single question and scenario I had trouble with.” Read the full review.
- “Buddy Punch is easy to use for managing our remote team members. It’s easy to set them up in the system, establish their locations, and manage how they can punch in and punch out.” Read the full review.
- “Managing remote personal assistants can be time-consuming and sometimes a worry. This has helped me tremendously keep track of my assistant’s pay and ensure a clean and smooth process.” Read the full review.
- “Buddy Punch saves my team of managers time when trying to collect timesheets and by being able to approve timesheets remotely. It’s also easier to log in on a daily basis via the app so staff stay members more current on their hours. This makes it easier not having to recall two weeks of time worked like when they were using a paper timesheet.” Read the full review.
If you feel that Buddy Punch might be the field service time-tracking app you’ve been looking for, sign up for a free trial. You can also book a one-on-one demo or view a pre-recorded demo video.
Buddy Punch works on any device with an internet connection, including both Microsoft and Mac computers, Apple and Android phones, and iPads and Android tablets.
2. FieldAware
FieldAware is a field service management solution (FSM) with a wide variety of features that will improve your performance on-premises and boost customer satisfaction, such as:
As of this post’s writing, FieldAware has a rating of 3.3 out of 5 stars, based on 63 reviews:
“Overall we now easily dispatch field techs, export/import timesheets into our time payroll system, and can locate associates for a more efficient mid-day dispatch.” Read the full review.
3. WorkWave
WorkWave is a field service software that tailors itself towards cleaning, HVAC, and landscape professionals. Its features include:
This is a strong mix of features for your field service team to complete their tasks, your back-office staff to perform resource routing, and for you to optimize customer management.
As of this post’s writing, WorkWave has 3.1 out of 5 stars and 58 reviews on Capterra.
“The ease of set up: the WorkWave setup team migrated our database for us. They set up multiple sessions for training and were so helpful and professional in teaching us the workings of this program. They even set up additional sessions of basic training when we lost the employee who was first trained on the system.” Read the full review.
4. Synchroteam
Whether your business is pest control, lawn care, construction, or anything else field-related, Synchroteam can help you manage your team. It works to track time on Android or iOS devices. Some of its key features include:
- Schedule & Dispatch
- Mapping & GPS Tracking
- Field Service CRM
- Job Reporting
- Customer Portal
- Inventory Management
- Time Tracking
At the time of writing, Synchroteam has a total of 89 reviews on Capterra with an average of 4.4 out of 5 stars.
“We helped Future Connections select, implement, and migrate to Synchroteam from an outdated FMS. It was an easy switch because FC’s processes are well supported by ST. The planning is now more efficient, and the efficiency of the field team has also increased significantly. The capability to monitor progress has improved, as has the ability to support last-minute changes.” Read the full review.
5. Field Promax
Field Promax is a work order management software that improves operations for both remote technicians and office staff. Some of its features include:
At the time of this post’s writing, Field Promax has four reviews on Capterra and a 4-star rating.
“Field Promax is the best value for money. It has all the necessary functionalities to organize my work and keep in touch with my technicians. At the same time, it’s very intuitive, and I don’t get flooded with too many features.” Read the full review.
Honorary mentions go to Jobber, which is known for its strong customer experience and smooth payment processing, as well as Housecall Pro and Service Fusion — the latter can be connected to AWS IoT, which is rapidly changing the field service industry.
Choosing the best field service time tracking solution
Even though these are some of the most popular field service monitoring systems on the market, not all of them are going to be a fit for your business. Ultimately, it still comes down to trial and error, analyzing features, and doing your research to determine which one will be the best fit for you and your techs.
If it’s important for you to be able to track business development through software, WorkWave might be the solution for you. If you value having inventory management as an option, Synchroteam has you covered.
But if what you’re looking for is a flexible tool that allows you to enable or disable features depending on what your techs respond to, a simple user interface that makes it easy for anyone to understand, and a responsive customer support team to solve issues that arise, then you can’t go wrong with Buddy Punch.
