8 Best Mobile Time Clock Apps and Software

The best mobile time clock apps and software will:

  • Give your team an easy way to clock in and clock out for their shift, letting them use smartphones, tablets, and computers.
  • Track everyone’s time, whether your team works in one office, across multiple job sites, or remotely
  • Keep your team accountable, with advanced clock in and out measures. For example, limiting when your team can clock in their shift or making sure someone only clocks in when they’re at the right location. 
  • Simplify how you write schedules
  • Handle your PTO tracking and requests

Plus, your mobile app should streamline your payroll processes, either by offering payroll features or making it easy to integrate your team’s time cards with your current payroll system. 

When you find the right mobile time clock app that does all the above,  it’ll save you and your business countless hours (and money) by eliminating all the inefficiencies and blindspots inherent to traditional paper time cards and timesheets.

But choosing the right mobile time clock app can be a challenge. In this post, we’ll look at 8 time tracking solutions with iOS and Android support, and compare their features and online reviews to help you choose the mobile time clock app that best fits your specific business.

Table of Contents

  1. Buddy Punch
  2. Paymo
  3. QuickBooks Time (Formerly TSheets)
  4. Connecteam
  5. Homebase
  6. When I Work
  7. Clockify
  8. TimeCamp

Note: Buddy Punch is our own product, which we created after struggling with tracking time for a 20 person team across 3 locations using paper time clocks and timesheets. We are proud to say that, since our launch, Buddy Punch has helped over 10,000 businesses meet all their time tracking needs. If you’d like to learn more about Buddy Punch’s mobile time clock, you can click here and schedule a demo or sign up for a free 14-day trial.

1. Buddy PunchBest Mobile Time Clock App and Software

Buddy Punch mobile time clock app

What Makes Buddy Punch’s Time Tracking App Unique ?

Increase Accountability for Your Team

Streamline Payroll

Simplify Scheduling

Employee time tracking without the right tools can be extremely frustrating. Calculating employee work hours, tracking PTO (paid time off), creating schedules, and then having to run payroll — all manually — is inefficient time management that could be better spent on what matters most: making your business grow and thrive.

That’s why we set out to make Buddy Punch: an intuitive, easy-to-use time clock software.

What Makes Buddy Punch’s Mobile Time Clock App Unique?

A Simple and Easy-to-Use Interface

A worry many business owners have when searching for a time tracker is that employees wouldn’t understand how to use it, or that the learning curve to implement the app to their staff’s day-to-day workflow would be too steep.

But that isn’t the case with Buddy Punch. From day one, we designed our app in such a way that you don’t have to worry about your employees not being tech-savvy enough to use it. From admins to team members, everybody gets to save time.

In fact, we focused our efforts to make Buddy Punch’s interface as easy-to-use as it could possibly be, as illustrated in the image below:

Easily punch in and punch out with Buddy Punch.

When employees log in to Buddy Punch, they are presented with minimal options. There’s a button to ‘Punch In’ or ‘Punch Out’, and they also have the option of viewing their current timecard — which means your employees won’t have to learn a new, complicated app interface just to start the workday. Time entry is complete in seconds.

As some of our users wrote in Capterra (a popular software review site):

A simple interface doesn’t mean that Buddy Punch is limited to just those two options. There’s a host of other actions your employees can take from within our app, such as requesting time off, submitting a claim to correct a punch-in mistake, submitting their time card for approval, and the list goes on.

We’ve just eliminated unnecessary distractions and hidden these secondary functions to prioritize your team’s day-to-day experience and make workforce management a breeze.

Multi App Support (Not Just iPhone and Android, But Also Desktop and Tablet)

While Buddy Punch works with iPhone and Android, it can also be used with your desktop or tablet, both as an employer and as an employee.

Employers can find all their employees’ activity in one centralized dashboard, no matter if they log in to our platform from their mobile phones, tablet, or computer. In that same dashboard, they can calculate PTO, communicate with their team, track individual projects, and much more.

On the employee side, Buddy Punch’s multi-app support enables your staff to clock in and clock out from work using the device of their choosing — or a device you set-up for them, such as a tablet at the front desk of your office.

One last thing to mention about Buddy Punch in regards to our multi-app support is that we charge per user and not per location. This means that your employees can use as many devices as they want, with no added cost.

An In-Depth Look at Buddy Punch’s Features

When we set out to build Buddy Punch, we knew that creating an app that would just help businesses track their employees’ time wouldn’t be enough.

We’ve learned, after trying to track employee time for a 20 person team across three different business locations, that there were other problems we needed to tackle, such as:

  • Employees not being accountable or honest when they punch.
  • The time-consuming nature of the payroll process.
  • The complexity of creating schedules using pen and paper or Excel sheets.

Buddy Punch comes with multiple features that solve the above problems.

Keep Your Team Accountable with Buddy Punch

To help you keep your team members accountable and honest, Buddy Punch offers the following features:

Let’s look at each one by one.

Geofencing

Buddy Punch: Geofencing

With Buddy Punch’s Geofencing feature, you can determine the radius inside which your employees can punch in and out of work, meaning that if they try to punch outside that designated GPS location, they will receive an error message and be denied permission.

Geofencing can be used in multiple locations at once. You can create multiple geofences, each with a unique job code, which is particularly helpful for businesses with employees working at multiple job sites on any given day.

GPS Tracking

Buddy Punch: GPS Tracking

With our GPS Tracking feature, when your employees clock in and out of work using a mobile device, their GPS location is captured. Buddy Punch records those GPS coordinates in each employee timecard, which you can review and verify by simply logging in to the administrator portion of our platform. This is an excellent tool to keep track of remote employees and making sure they’re on site.

IP Address Locking

Buddy Punch: IP Address Lock

Another feature that helps keep your employees accountable is IP Address Locking. With this feature, you can limit from which networks your team can punch in and out of work.

Simply input a chosen IP Address into the Buddy Punch platform, and our app will prevent your employees from punching when not connected to your specified network.

Facial Recognition

Buddy Punch: Facial Recognition

Our Facial Recognition feature makes it so whenever your employees’ hit the ‘Punch’ button in the Buddy Punch app, the device they’re using will scan their faces to verify it is actually them doing the punching to cut down on time theft.

This is a biometric clock in and out feature, that helps guarantee the right person is clocking in for their shift.

Photos on Punch

Buddy Punch: Photos on Punch

Photos on Punch works similarly to our Facial Recognition feature, but instead of scanning your employees’ faces, Buddy Punch prompts your workers to take a photo of themselves before they can punch, which is then saved in their time card.

You can then log into the administrator dashboard, and review all of these photos at once to make sure no employee had one of their co-workers punch in their stead.

Streamline Payroll with Buddy Punch

Buddy Punch helps you streamline and simplify your payroll processes in three different ways.

You can:

  • Use Buddy Punch as your payroll provider. This means you don’t need multiple software or apps to handle time tracking and payroll. You can just use one app – Buddy Punch.
  • Integrate Buddy Punch with your existing payroll provider. If you already have a payroll system that you want to keep using (like ADP or Gusto), you can integrate it with Buddy Punch. T
  • Export payroll reports. You can export payroll reports out of Buddy Punch and share them with your payroll provider.

Buddy Punch Payroll

Buddy Punch Payroll

When you use Buddy Punch Payroll, we make it easy to make sure everyone on your team is paid accurately and on time. 

You can send out paychecks via direct deposit, or by issuing an actual check. Buddy Punch will handle all the local, state, and federal tax withholdings. You can easily edit time cards and timesheets before submitting payroll, including additional earnings such as commissions, reimbursements, per diems, and bonuses.

Plus, your team gets access to a self-service portal where they can update their tax withholdings and set up direct deposit. This means you don’t need to play the middleman between your employees and accounts payable.

Payroll Integrations

At Buddy Punch, we wanted an end to the time consuming aspect of running payroll, which is why we integrate with most popular payroll providers in the market.

You can see a full list of our integrations below:

Payroll Integrations with Buddy Punch

From that image, you might have noticed we also offer a Zapier integration. This means that you can connect Buddy Punch to thousands of other apps to automate your payroll workflow further.

If you’d like to learn more about how Buddy Punch’s payroll integrations work, click here.

But integrations aren’t the only way in which Buddy Punch helps you run payroll in a simple, time-efficient manner. We also offer:

Let’s look at each one by one.

Payroll Reports on Demand

Buddy Punch: Payroll Reports on Demand

With Buddy Punch, you don’t have to waste time reviewing timesheets in search for errors and omissions. Our Payroll Reports on Demand functionality allows you to calculate what you need to run payroll in just a few clicks, and then export all that information as an Excel or CSV payroll report (pictured above).

Project Tracking

Buddy Punch: Project Tracking

Buddy Punch’s Project Tracking feature allows you to set up varying pay rates tailored to different jobs or pay scales. This in turn allows you to easily calculate labor costs, generate project reports, or create job budgets — all with a few clicks.

Time Off Tracking

Buddy Punch: Time Off Tracking

With Buddy Punch, Time Off Tracking allows you to easily keep track of all of your team’s time off, and then export reports with all that data for you to review. These reports can include all time off information for your company, or be segmented on a per-employee basis.

Accruals

Buddy Punch: Accruals

With Buddy Punch, setting up time off accrual rules is simple. Simply log in to our platform, and decide whether you want your accrual rules to be based on an annual accrual period, hours worked, or a specific pay period.

Simplify Scheduling with Buddy Punch

To remove all complexity from the employee scheduling process, Buddy Punch offers a variety of features:

Let’s look at each one by one.

Drag & Drop Scheduling

Buddy Punch: Drag and Drop Scheduling

With Buddy Punch’s Drag & Drop Scheduling, you can quickly create schedules in just a few clicks, and then edit shifts with ease (if needed).

Simply log-in to the schedules portion of our platform and click on the empty slot next to an employee’s name to create a shift.

Then, if you’d like to change/edit the schedule, drag a shift into a new slot, and drop. Once your schedule is all set, hit publish to update all changes.

Repeating/Recurring Shifts

Buddy Punch: Repeating/ Recurring Shifts

More often than not, employee shifts don’t change much across time. This is why, at Buddy Punch, we offer a Repeating/Recurring Shifts functionality.

You can copy schedules across time with just a few clicks, or have them repeat over specified regular periods, such as weekly, bi-weekly or monthly.

Employee Availability

Buddy Punch: Employee Availability

Buddy Punch makes the job of creating schedules for your employees even easier by having them be the ones who tell you when and where they are available for work.

This is our Employee Availability feature — your employees simply log into our app, and choose their availability, subject to your approval. That information will then show up in the administrator dashboard, which you can in turn put to use in shaping the perfect schedule for your team.

Punch Limiting

Buddy Punch: Punch Limiting

If you’re like many companies out there, you might be struggling with employees punching in early or punching out late, just to get a little extra time in.

To solve this, Buddy Punch gives you the ability to set Punch Limiting Rules that tie right into your scheduling.

For example, you can set the earliest time your employees can punch in (i.e. 5 minutes before a scheduled shift), and the latest time they can punch out (i.e. 5 minutes after a scheduled shift).

Or, instead of limiting by shift, you could set a daily range when your employees can punch in and out.

Note: With our schedule making app, you have the option to set these rules to all employees, or select just a few employees to put this rule into place.

Notify Employees of Their Schedules

Buddy Punch: Notify Employees of Their Schedules

Once you’ve used Buddy Punch’s platform to create the perfect schedule, you can share it with your team in a matter of moments.

Hit ‘Publish this schedule’, and then choose whether you want to notify your employees through email, push notification on their mobile devices, or both.

We also offer other types of scheduling notifications, which you can automate to get sent to your team whenever best fits your needs. These notifications include:

  • Shift Start Reminder & Shift End Reminder
  • Late In Alert & Late Out Alert
  • Early In Alert & Early Out Alert

If you’d like to learn more about Buddy Punch’s alerts, notifications, and reminders, click here.

Note: One of the benefits of Buddy Punch’s multi-app support is that your employees can check their schedules where and when they want by logging into our platform via their phone, desktop computer or tablet.

Additional Features

Buddy Punch comes with many other powerful features that we didn’t mention above, which you can pick and choose from to best fit your specific business needs, such as:

If you’d like to explore the full range of features Buddy Punch offers, click here.

What Do users have to say about Buddy Punch?

At the time of writing, Buddy Punch has received a total of 789 reviews on Capterra, with an average of 4.8 out of 5 stars.

Here are just a few of those reviews:

Click here to read all of Buddy Punch’s Capterra reviews.

Interested in learning more?

We’ve recorded a full demo of Buddy Punch, which goes over our key features:

If you’d like to request a demo for yourself, you can do so here. A person from our customer support team will show you how Buddy Punch can best fit your specific business needs, and answer any questions you might have along the way.

Alternatively, if you’d like to get started with Buddy Punch, sign up for a free trial today! Keep in mind that after the trial expires, pricing is extremely flexible depending on which features you want to use.

2. Paymo

Another great online time clock for small businesses is Paymo. They offer a whole range of features to help your team, including:

To see a complete list of Paymo’s features, click here.

What do users have to say about Paymo?

At the time of writing, Paymo has a total of 450 reviews on Capterra (average of 4.7 out of 5 stars).

This review highlights why Paymo is a great mobile time clock app:

Click here to read all of Paymo’s Capterra reviews.

Interested in learning more?

To learn more about Paymo, visit their site here and sign up for a 15-day free trial.

3. QuickBooks Time (Formerly TSheets)

QuickBooks Time (formerly known as TSheets) offers features such as:

Like Buddy Punch, QuickBooks Time is considered one of the best time clock options due to its features and flexibility (functional on web or mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets, iPad included). To see a complete list of QuickBooks Time’s features, go here.

What do users have to say about QuickBooks Time?

At the time of writing, QuickBooks Time boasts a total of 6,231 reviews on Capterra (average of 4.7 out of 5 stars).

This review highlights why QuickBooks Time is a great mobile time clock app:

QuickBooks Time review: "Clock in/out from the job site"

Click here to read all of QuickBooks Time’s Capterra reviews.

Interested in learning more?

Learn more about QuickBooks Time by visiting their site and signing up for a free 30-day trial (no credit card required).

4. Connecteam

Another solid mobile time clock app is Connecteam, thanks to features that include:

To see a complete list of Connecteam’s features, go here.

What do users have to say about Connecteam?

At the time of writing, Connecteam has a total of 229 reviews on Capterra (average of 4.8 out of 5 stars). One review that highlights why Connecteam is a great choice for mobile time tracking:

Click here to read all of Connecteam’s Capterra reviews.

Interested in learning more?

To learn more about Connecteam, visit their site here or sign up for a free 14-day trial here.

5. Homebase

Homebase helps businesses manage their employees’ time through features such as:

To see a complete list of Homebase’s features, click here.

What do users have to say about Homebase?

At the time of writing, Homebase has a total of 904 reviews on Capterra (average of 4.6 out of 5 stars).

This review highlights why users love Homebase:

Click here to read all of Homebase’s Capterra reviews.

Interested in learning more?

Get started with Homebase today by signing up for a free 14-day trial here, or visiting their site.

6. When I Work

When I Work’s features include:

To see a full list of When I Work’s features, click here.

What do users have to say about When I Work?

At the time of writing, When I Work has a total of 1,011 reviews on Capterra, (average of 4.5 out of 5 stars).

This review highlights why When I Work is a great mobile time clock app:

Click here to read all of When I Work’s Capterra reviews.

Interested in learning more?

To learn more about When I Work, schedule a demo or sign up for a free trial.  If you want software that’s similar to When I Work, then check out our post on When I Work alternatives.

7. Clockify

Clockify helps businesses track employee hours and run payroll with features including:

To see a complete list of Clockify’s features, go here.

What do users have to say about Clockify?

At the time of writing, Clockify has a total of 4,382 reviews on Capterra (average of 4.7 out of 5 stars).

This review highlights why Clockify is a great mobile time clock app:

Clockify review: "Simple, trust-based program for tracking work hours"

Click here to read all of Clockify’s Capterra reviews.

Interested in learning more?

To learn more about Clockify you can visit their site here and sign up for a free account.

8. TimeCamp

Last but not least, TimeCamp is another great mobile employee time clock app, with features such as:

To see a complete list of TimeCamp’s features, click here.

What do users have to say about TimeCamp?

At the time of writing, TimeCamp has a total of 579 reviews on Capterra (average of 4.7 out of 5 stars).

This review highlights why TimeCamp is a mobile time clock app:

Click here to read all of TimeCamp’s Capterra reviews.

Interested in learning more?

To learn more about TimeCamp, book a demo today or get started with a free account here.

Note: Buddy Punch is our own product, which we created after struggling with tracking time for a 20 person team across 3 locations using paper time clocks and timesheets. We are proud to say that, since our launch, Buddy Punch has helped over 10,000 businesses meet all their time tracking needs.

If you’d like to learn more about Buddy Punch’s mobile time clock, you can click here and schedule a demo, check out pricing options, or sign up for a free trial.

For more information on time clocks and time off management, check out our posts on:

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