The 5 Best Mechanic Time Tracking Apps

mechanic time tracking app

The automotive industry is one sector where the power of using time-tracking software often goes underutilized. Most auto shops tend to use a less structured style for their estimates, preferring to rely on personal experience to determine how long a job should take and the cost.

However, using a time clock system is a simple way to get more exact data. Once that data is collected, mechanics can use it to determine their prices on work orders to maximize profits, boost productivity, and outdo their local competition.

To help you find the right option for your business, we’ve curated a list of the five best mechanic time-tracking apps on the market based on their ease of use, functions offered, and customer reviews. Hopefully one of these will prove to be a great fit for your business.

1. Buddy Punch

Starting our list of time clocks for mechanics, we have our very own Buddy Punch — an all-in-one, web-based time tracking and team management platform. 

There were three criteria we focused on while developing this software, and those same attributes make it a valuable feature for any business focused on manual labor that doesn’t want to spend too much time fiddling around with administrative features:

  • Employee accountability: Many of the features we built into Buddy Punch are designed to make your technicians more responsible for their time spent on the clock without you having to constantly watch over them.
  • Design simplicity: While developing Buddy Punch, we wanted to make sure we kept it as simple to use as possible. A good time clock helps your team manage their time better; it doesn’t cause you more headaches.
  • Payroll streamlining: Instead of having to go through timesheets at the end of each pay period to calculate hours and transfer data, Buddy Punch offers features and integrations that ensure that invoicing customers and paying employees takes only seconds.

Let’s go under the hood to see exactly how Buddy Punch can help mechanics and auto repair shops.

Note: If you’d rather get a hands-on feel, you can start a free trial by clicking here.

Job costing

Buddy Punch’s job costing feature was designed specifically for businesses that need to track employee hours by job. Simply create job codes for each of your customers, and then your employees will clock in and out of them. 

When you view their timecards, you’ll see exactly how much employee time was spent on each job, making it easy to bill customers the right amount.

Drag-and-drop scheduling

You can create and manage schedules for your team easily using Buddy Punch’s drag-and-drop schedule builder. Simply click an empty cell to create a shift, then drag and drop shifts as needed. You can edit a shift by clicking on it, and once you’re ready to publish the shift, all scheduled technicians will get a notification.

Shift trades and covers

The shift trades feature allows employees to request shift trades with other employees. The shift covers feature lets employees take over shifts that someone else is scheduled for but can’t work. This means your team members can exert some responsibility and help make shift management easier for you.

And if you don’t want employees to be able to change their schedules without your approval, you can simply set up a workflow that requires manager or admin approval for all requests.

One-button punching

We wanted to make sure we didn’t make Buddy Punch too difficult to use, which is why its most important feature — the ability for employees to clock in and clock out — can be done in one simple click. This feature works on computers, tablets, and smartphones through Buddy Punch’s mobile apps for iOS and Android.

Notifications

Buddy Punch offers several built-in notification options for employees, administrators, and managers. These features notify you/your team if anything important needs their attention. Notifications include time card edit requests, time card approval status changes, overtime alerts, and more.

Punch rounding

The punch rounding feature is a set-and-forget feature that makes it easier to keep employee timesheets accurate without requiring constant micromanagement. 

This feature sets punches to be rounded up, down, or to the nearest predetermined interval you select (anywhere from two minutes to 30 minutes). This option is particularly useful if you’ve set up Buddy Punch as a kiosk in your shop.

Payroll reports on demand

Buddy Punch offers a wide variety of customizable reports that allow you to get a closer look at the data behind your business. With the payroll report on demand, you can get a detailed look at your employees, their hours, overtime, locations, and departments. You can also cycle through prior pay periods as needed.

Overtime calculations

Buddy Punch’s overtime calculations feature allows you to select from more than a dozen overtime types to determine how your overtime pay is calculated. You can choose different overtime types on a per-employee basis, and we can add any missing overtime types if you need us to (just contact us to let us know). 

Regular, overtime, and double overtime hours and pay are calculated automatically and can be viewed via the reports feature mentioned above.

Payroll integrations

Lastly, to help mechanics pay their staff, Buddy Punch integrates directly with many of the most popular payroll and accounting software. Connect directly to programs like QuickBooks, Paychex, ADP, and more (click here to view the full list of integrations) to run payroll in minutes.

Get even more out of Buddy Punch

So far, we’ve only touched on a few of the features you get access to with Buddy Punch. There’s still more to consider, such as:

Buddy Punch’s customer reviews

We’ve spent a lot of time talking about Buddy Punch. Now it’s time to let our customers have a turn. Buddy Punch’s technician time tracking software has an overall rating of  4.8 out of 5 stars across 1,000+ reviews on Capterra.

Below are some of the reviews we’ve received from our mechanic and auto shop customers:

“It saves me time in calculating punch hours, and it gives the employees extra confidence that their hours are being calculated fairly and accurately. It’s easy to use, set up is user-friendly, and tech support is quick and helpful.” Read the full review.

“Excellent customer service. It’s reassuring to know that I can ask a question or make a suggestion, and a response is received almost instantly, even on the weekends. The program is very user-friendly for both administrators and employees.” Read the full review.

“Buddy Punch allows me to easily punch in and out myself on my mobile device while also making it very easy to manage employees.” Read the full review.

As these reviewers noted, Buddy Punch is a vast improvement over manual time tracking, intuitive to use, and comes with a helpful support team.

Try Buddy Punch for free  

If you feel that Buddy Punch might be the right time-tracking app for your auto shop, sign up for a 14-day free trial here (no credit card required), book a one-on-one demo, or view a pre-recorded demo video.

2. uAttend

uAttend is a time management company that specializes in both physical products (such as biometric time clocks) and online time clock software. Their cloud-based time clock program comes with features such as:

  • Scheduling
  • Time lockouts
  • Punch rounding
  • Overtime alerts
  • PTO management
  • Payroll exports

At the time of this post’s writing, uAttend has a total of 448 reviews on Capterra, with an average of 4.5 out of 5 stars. Here’s what one customer has to say about the platform:

“We have multiple locations, and they all link together to make employee tracking easier. Since it’s cloud-based, it’s more handy than using software that’s only available on one computer. I would recommend uAttend to anyone!”

3. TimeCamp

TimeCamp is a simple time-tracking platform with an extremely generous free plan for small businesses (working for unlimited users, projects, and tasks), though many of its more powerful functions are locked behind a paid plan. Some of those features include:

  • Automatic time tracking
  • Timesheet approvals
  • Attendance tracking
  • Time tracking reports
  • Productivity tracking
  • Custom billing rates
  • Easy invoicing 
  • Project management

TimeCamp has a total of 598 reviews on Capterra with an average rating of 4.7 out of 5 stars. Here’s what one customer has to say about the platform:

“The main pro for me: besides tracking time in real time, you can also track time backward. The desktop tracker makes it easier to see what you were working on and how much time you spent on it. You can also see time you spent on websites, emails, and looking at a specific document.”

4. Insightful

Insightful is focused on helping teams monitor their time and productivity with the same tool. If you have office staff who work at a computer in addition to or instead of working on cars, you can use Insightful to track what apps and websites they’re using most often. Other key features include:

  • Employee monitoring
  • Time tracking
  • Automatic time mapping
  • Screenshots

Insightful has a total of 96 reviews on Capterra with an average of 4.7 out of 5 stars. Here’s what one customer has to say about the platform:

“It is very convenient, and the reports are very comprehensive and really easy to read. Also, I love how you can see what software and sites employees open, and how much time they spend on them. Plus, you can adjust which sites, software, etc. are labeled as productive or not.”

5. Hubstaff

Hubstaff has features for all different types of workers. For on-site workers, you can create schedules and track time. For field workers, you can track employee locations. And for back office workers, you can monitor what websites and applications they’re using while working. This helps streamline time tracking no matter where or how your employees do their work.

Other major features Hubstaff offers include:

  • Employee productivity monitoring
  • Employee scheduling
  • Online time reporting
  • Automated payroll and invoicing
  • GPS location tracking
  • Offline timekeeping

Hubstaff has a rating of 4.6 out of 5 stars across nearly 1,500 reviews on Capterra. Here’s what one customer has to say about the platform:

“As a company with lots of employees working remotely for us, we need strong software to monitor employees’ performance and act according to the efficiency analysis. Its best feature is idle time management which helps you know if some employee is sitting idle.”

Choosing the best mechanic time-tracking app

Even though we’ve managed to narrow down the wide range of time-tracking software options to just a few with effective features and strong reviews, you’ll still have to do a little trial and error to figure out which one fits your style and your employees best. Luckily, looking at the features each one comes with can help.

If you like the idea of using physical time-tracking software and don’t mind paying a higher price upfront, you might like uAttend. If you’re big on data insights, you might like what Insightful brings to the table.

But if all you really need is simple and intuitive time-tracking software with plenty of strong features and helpful customer support to attend to your every need, then you really can’t go wrong with Buddy Punch.