QuickBooks by Intuit was introduced to the market in 1992, making it one of the longest-standing pieces of business software available. QuickBooks Time is Intuit’s time tracking and scheduling solution — formerly TSheets and acquired by Intuit in 2017 — that can operate on its own or as an add-on to QuickBooks. 

In addition to time tracking and scheduling, QuickBooks Time offers automatic timesheets and payroll integration; paid time off (PTO), break, and leave management; and serviceable support for employee attendance.

QuickBooks Time is rated mostly positively by users, who enjoy the platform’s functionality and the company’s customer support. Negative reviews center on the high costs, slippage in customer service over time, and some missing features. 

I wanted to test QuickBooks Time for myself and see where it lands across essential features and functionality for small-to-medium-sized businesses. Below, you’ll find my honest review of QuickBooks Time, including where it excels and where it misses the mark.

Final verdict

While QuickBooks Time offers good support for timesheets, payroll, and paid time off (PTO) and leave, it performs less well on employee time tracking, scheduling, and attendance tracking. The mobile app is fluid and enjoyable, if a little basic, but the main web app is dated and a bit clunky.

It offers solid reporting (with some notable gaps), integrates well with other software, and has good security features (although clock-in security could be tighter).

While QuickBooks Time’s price is definitely higher than that of competitors, it may work well for existing users of QuickBooks.

Total score: 3.5 / 5

Read the full review below for more information on how each section was scored.

Pricing	2 / 5
Account Creation and Setup	4 / 5
Main Features	3.3 / 5
→ Time tracking	3 / 5
→ Scheduling	2 / 5
→ Attendance and Labor Savings	2 / 5
→ Timesheets and Payroll	4.5 / 5
→ Paid Time Off and Leave	4.5 / 5
User Interface and Ease of Use	3.5 / 5
Mobile App	3.5 / 5
Reporting	4 / 5
Help and Support	4 / 5
Integrations	4 / 5
Security	4 / 5

Pros and cons

Pros	Cons
✅ Excellent integration with QuickBooks Online	❌ Time and attendance tracking is quite basic
✅ Good reporting, especially for accounting purposes	❌ Poor visibility on lateness, no-shows, etc.
✅ Many integrations with payroll providers	❌ Poor support for overtime and conflicts in scheduling, shift swaps, and coverage
✅ Simple account creation, especially for QuickBooks users	❌ More expensive than similar options
✅ Good timesheets, payroll, PTO, and leave support

Pricing

To access QuickBooks Time, you must sign up for a QuickBooks Online Essentials plan at a minimum. That’s because only this and higher-tier plans include time features. 

Pricing for the Essentials plan is $75 per month, but Intuit offers a 30-day free trial and occasional promotions where new customers get the first three months at 50% off. 

The two tiers beyond Essentials are Time Premium and Time Elite, both of which you can add Payroll to.

Here’s how the pricing and features break down for these two plans, alongside pricing for two competitors for comparison:

	QuickBooks Time Premium	QuickBooks Time Elite	Clockify (Pro)	Buddy Punch (Pro)
Base cost per month	$95*	$115*	$0	$19
Cost per user per month	$8	$10	$7.99	$5.99
Payroll add-on	$68 + $2/user	$94 + $2/user	N/A	$39 + $6 per user
Example: 15-person team	$215	$265	$119.85	$108.85
Example: 40-person team	$415	$515	$319.60	$258.60
Example: 15-person team with payroll	$313	$389	N/A	$147.85
Mobile app	✅	✅	✅	✅
Payroll and invoicing	✅	✅	❌	✅
Schedules	✅	✅	✅	✅
Reports	✅	✅	✅	✅
Who’s working	✅	✅	✅	✅
PTO	✅	✅	✅	✅
Time kiosk	✅	✅	✅	✅
Customer support	✅	✅	✅	✅
Track mileage	❌	✅	❌	❌
Track projects	❌	✅	✅	✅
Project estimate vs. actual	❌	✅	✅	✅
Project activity feed	❌	✅	✅	✅
Timesheet signatures	❌	✅	✅	✅
Geofencing	❌	⚠️ (Reminders only)	❌	✅
Accountability	Reminders only	Reminders only	❌	Multiple features
Overtime and conflict resolution	Limited	Limited	❌	Notifications and alerts
API	✅	✅	✅	✅

*Includes QuickBooks Online Essentials Plan ($75/mo), which is mandatory to access QuickBooks Time.

All facts considered, QuickBooks Time is a pricey option. This is partly because you need a QuickBooks Online subscription in addition to the base rate, and partly because the per-user cost is so high. 

Verdict: 2 / 5

For teams both large and small, QuickBooks Time is one of the most expensive options on the market. 

Account creation and setup

I found creating a QuickBooks Time account relatively easy. One small hurdle is that you must have an existing QuickBooks accounting subscription to use QuickBooks Time. 

If you do, moving to QuickBooks Time is very quick and straightforward. Your employees and customers sync automatically, with all the relevant information for wages, payroll, and PTO and leave. 

I didn’t have an existing QuickBooks subscription, so I had to set one up first. If you’re starting from that point as well, the setup will be longer. You can use an employee directory from a provider like Gusto or a spreadsheet, and the latter option works for customers, too. 

I was a little disappointed to see that there isn’t a way to import an existing schedule during account creation, as I’ve really enjoyed this feature with other providers. But it’s a minor point here. 

Once my account was set up, I encountered a few on-screen tutorials.  I also turned to the QuickBooks YouTube channel for in-depth videos on setting up and using the software, which I found helpful.

Verdict: 4 / 5

The account creation and onboarding process is simple, and it would be even more so if I were an existing QuickBooks user. I took a point off because you can import employees, which is great, but not schedules.

Time tracking

Time tracking in QuickBooks Time is mostly straightforward. There are some good features, notably around shift information and reporting, but there are also important shortcomings. 

Shift information 

The core features are all here: Employees can clock in from the web app, mobile app, or a desktop or tablet kiosk. 

Something I appreciated seeing is that both managers and employees can add notes to shifts. While this functionality isn’t unique to QuickBooks (Homebase and Buddy Punch also offer it), it’s always good to see. You can even require employees to enter notes, such as a summary of their shift. 

Another standout was the ability to add any number of Custom Fields, which can then be used in the Schedule and Time Tracking. When I first started with QuickBooks Time, there was already a Service field. But I was able to create additional custom fields, such as Projects and Departments.

This is great for day-to-day management, end-of-month reporting, and customer billing. It’s something I haven’t seen in many other time clocks, and the benefits are obvious: You can categorize time entries however it works best for your business. Plus, if you create the field in QuickBooks, it will sync automatically to QuickBooks Time, so you can get a truly holistic view.

Time-clock entries can be associated with a Client (e.g., “Mark Johnson”), Service Item, and Department. You can also mark them as Billable and add notes. 

GPS and employee accountability 

QuickBooks Time’s GPS tracking works well and includes a Mileage feature for companies with fleets. You can set up geofences around locations and job sites, too, but the functionality here is limited. For example, you can’t set a rule that employees can clock in only within a specific fence. Instead, your team gets a reminder to clock in and out as they enter and leave. That’s not quite the same thing, from an accountability perspective. 

However, I thought it was clever that you can allow workers to see nearby customers when they’re clocked in. This is great for on-the-fly route planning. 

Unfortunately, there are no other real anti-theft measures to speak of. Other apps, like Buddy Punch, offer a number of useful employee accountability measures: proper geofencing, photos on punch-in, facial recognition, and IP address locks. It would’ve been great to see some of these in QuickBooks Time.

Schedule integration 

I found the integration between Scheduling and Time Tracking to be really lacking. 

You can clock in to a shift by selecting it in your Schedule, but if you start by clicking or tapping Time Clock (as one normally would), the entry isn’t associated with any particular shift. 

There’s a huge downside to this: There’s no simple and easy way to see who’s on time, who’s late, who’s early, who’s missed their shift, or anything else managers might care about. There is a Tardy report, but I tested it by clocking in late for a shift, and it didn’t catch it. I later read why in QuickBooks’ help documentation:

“Team members who are currently clocked in won’t display as tardy on the report. You might want to run the report again at the end of the workday.” (Emphasis added.)

That’s not very useful for managers who want to see what’s going on during a shift, is it?

You also can’t clock in a worker by clicking on their shift from the schedule. Instead, you have to create a manual time entry for them.

Verdict: 3 / 5

There are some good features around shift information, but not much in terms of employee accountability. Additionally, the separation between the Time Clock and Schedule features makes for a poor management experience.

Scheduling

Next, I tested out QuickBooks Time’s scheduling features from a manager and employee perspective.

Creating schedules as a manager

Building a new schedule is easy: Click on any date to enter a new shift, then fill in the information in the menu that appears to the right. Here, you have many options to customize the shift. You can add a title, choose a color, set the start and end times (and timezone), select multiple team members, add a customer and location, enter notes, and include any custom fields you’ve set (like the “Project” field I created).

You can also set the shift to repeat: every X months or weeks on specific days, or else every day or weekday. After a shift has been set to repeat, when you click on it again, you can choose to edit just that day or the entire series. This is handy, but if you select multiple team members, you’ll have to edit each series individually after saving. 

While testing, I missed the ability to create reusable shifts, such as “Opener” or “Afternoon Cover,” with set times. Having to set start and end times for each shift is a bit tedious. Fortunately, you can drag-and-drop shifts and Alt Click + drag to copy a shift. There are also convenient Save Week as Template and Copy Previous Week options. As a result, once you’ve got one or two full weeks set up, you can do a lot by just copying and pasting. 

I initially felt confused that QuickBooks Time let me publish individual shifts before publishing a week. I kept accidentally hitting Publish on individual shifts instead of Save Draft, which meant shifts went out to my (mock) employees before I was really done. I’m sure I would have gotten used to it, but the setup seems to invite small mistakes. 

On a positive note, the Day and Month views work as expected, and I liked that you could drag-and-drop shifts in the Day view to change their times. 

I also found it useful that you can view the schedule by customer rather than by team member; that’s helpful for field workers such as contractors, construction crews, painters, and plumbers. You can drag and drop shifts between customers, too. 

In hindsight, it’s unfortunate that you can’t “View By” any of your Custom Fields. That would be a real bonus in a future version of QuickBooks Time.

Dealing with overtime and scheduling conflicts

Very regrettably, QuickBooks Time doesn’t provide any clear alerts about overtime or scheduling conflicts.

If you exceed eight hours when creating a shift, the total time turns red, which is somewhat helpful. But there are no visual cues if the week exceeds the set number of hours or if the total number of hours in the day exceeds eight.

For example, I was able to schedule three separate five-hour shifts for the same person with no warning. In fact, I was able to schedule the same person for a shift from 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. and from 1:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. the same day — no warning, no flag. 

To me, that makes it far too easy to make mistakes, which can snowball into incorrect overtime pay calculations, payroll issues, and even noncompliance risks. Other apps, like Homebase and Buddy Punch, offer strong conflict resolution and plenty of warnings around overtime and other scheduling issues. 

Scheduling from employees’ POV

As an employee, you can view your schedule on the web version of QuickBooks Time and in the QuickBooks Workforce mobile app. 

From the web, you can click on a shift to clock in; you can’t do this in the mobile app, for some reason. You can click on a shift to see more information, including notes and custom fields, the customer and address, and the date and time. 

The biggest drawback here is that employee self-service options are essentially nonexistent. Crucially, there’s no support for shift trades or covers — which leaves managers to deal with mountains of emails and text messages to resolve scheduling issues, or else shift changes happen without their knowledge or approval. 

Both situations are frustrating for managers. They can even expose companies to safety and compliance issues, if improperly trained or unqualified workers take shifts they shouldn’t.

Likewise, there’s no way for employees to update their availability themselves. Once again, managers are left resorting to emails and messages to stay on top of people’s changing availability and manually updating schedules whenever a change occurs.

Verdict: 2 / 5

It’s easy to create a schedule, and there are good features for organizing work: by customers, services, jobs, and other custom fields. But I had to take points off for the lack of employee self-service tools and the very poor overtime and conflict management. In this area, QuickBooks Time pales in comparison to competitors.

Attendance and labor costs

As mentioned, managers can see who’s working at any given time and their location, but little beyond that: no alerts, tags, or icons for late punch-outs, early clock-ins, or missed shifts. As a manager, that makes it hard to plan for the day. 

I did like that QuickBooks Time provides a map view of who’s working. Though it’s a standard feature of modern time trackers, it was still nice to see.

Other cost-saving features were fairly basic. As I noted earlier, you can remind employees to clock in and out, but you can’t automatically clock them out when their shift ends or as they leave a geofence. 

QuickBooks Time supports overtime as a payroll calculation, but it’s not displayed in a meaningful way for managers in the Schedule or Time Clock features. As a seasoned manager, I know just how easily scheduling accidents and shift covers can lead to overtime, so this was definitely a disappointment. Other apps I’ve tested, including Connecteam and Buddy Punch, offer overtime alerts, guardrails for scheduling, and safety features such as automatic clock-outs. 

That said, I was happy to see that QuickBooks Time provides break tracking — though I had to dig a bit to find it (under Feature Add-Ons > Breaks). Once it’s turned on, you have various options: create break rules, set them for a specific or undefined length, make them paid or unpaid, and enforce them automatically based on time since clocking in or days of the week.

You can also guarantee workers their entire break by preventing them from clocking back in, automatically ending the break when the time is up, and notifying workers X minutes before that happens. And at any time, you can see who’s currently on break through the Who’s Working screen.

Verdict: 2 / 5

QuickBooks Time deserves some points for good break management and basic attendance features, but overall, it falls short of other popular software in this area.

Timesheets and payroll

QuickBooks is first and foremost accounting software, so I was expecting a smooth experience with its timesheets and payroll features — and I pretty much got that. 

You can view, add, and edit timesheets by clicking on Time Entries. This will give you a list of all the time entries for a given period, and you can select which columns to view. Frustratingly, you can only select up to eight columns; in QuickBooks itself, you can view all the columns at once. 

While you can search time entries by team member, you can’t filter by location or even, surprisingly, by customer — despite how central this category is to QuickBooks Time. That said, you can export these reports to CSV and sort, filter, and manipulate them in Excel or Google Sheets as you see fit. 

I appreciated that there’s an option to view a history of manager edits, which enables a sort of audit of changes made. This is actually a recurring theme in QuickBooks Time that I felt was well done: whether it’s time entries, custom fields, or scheduling, most features include a log of changes you can review.

The Time Entries section also has Manual Time Card and Time Slider features. These make it a little easier to manually add time for different users if needed. Manual Time Card lists the dates and customers, and you add time to the relevant cell. Time Slider lets you click and drag to select a timeframe (e.g., 8:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.) for any given day.

As for payroll reports, I found them robust. 

You can run reports by week, month, or custom date, filter for team members or groups, view time as a decimal or hh:mm:ss (hours:minutes:seconds), and hide team members with no activity. 

The report includes scorecards for straight hours, regular hours, time off, overtime, and total hours. You can see more information by clicking on a team member; this reveals their overtime, different jobs, and timesheets. You can download individual reports for those details in CSV, Excel, or PDF format, too.

Of course, all this information is also visible in QuickBooks Online. You can approve timesheets either in QuickBooks Time or QuickBooks, where you’re also able to manage payroll.

Verdict: 4.5 / 5

Unsurprisingly, QuickBooks Time has strong timesheet and payroll functionality. It’s especially useful if you’re a QuickBooks Online user, but it also integrates with several other accounting platforms and payroll providers. 

Paid time off and leave

QuickBooks Time supports PTO very well. 

First off, it’s easy to create PTO policies with all the usual options. Employees can earn time off annually, each pay period, or based on hours worked. You can set rules for whether unused PTO expires or carries over (“use it or lose it”). And you can control policy start and reset dates, as well as whether employees can enter negative PTO balances. 

But with QuickBooks Time, you don’t have to create policies from scratch. The software includes a few policies you can use right away: Holiday, Vacation, PTO, Sick Time Off, and Unpaid Time Off.

Additionally, you can bulk-upload PTO balances, which is convenient when first setting up QuickBooks Time. You’re also able to add holidays — including statutory/public holidays — for the whole team, specific groups, or individuals. You can enter holidays on the Time Off screen, and I found the process straightforward.

What slightly frustrated me, though, was how long it took to load time codes when I wanted to modify them. It may not be a universal experience, but everything else in the app was working fine, so I’m inclined to believe it was a bug.

To request time off, employees can do so through the mobile app. It was a quick, painless process when I tested it out. 

You simply add the relevant day or days off (which don’t need to be back-to-back), select the amount of time off for each day, and choose which PTO policy it should fall under (if you’re subject to multiple policies). There’s also a field to include a note explaining your reason for requesting time off.

As a manager, you can view, approve, and deny requests. I was happy to see that you can also add a note to the approval or denial, which simplifies communications.

Verdict: 4.5 / 5

I docked half a point for that frustrating user interface bug. Other than that, the PTO and leave features in QuickBooks Time offer a simple experience and strong functionality. 

Reporting

QuickBooks Time offers various reports, including:

• Payroll
• Itemized Time Total
• Scheduling:
  • Scheduled vs. Worked
  • Tardies (see Attendance and Labor Costs for concerns with this feature)
• Exceptions:
  • Less than X hours worked on a weekday
  • Not yet approved or submitted
• Exports:
  • Groups and Group Managers
  • Customers
  • Team Members
• Logging and Auditing:
  • Applicable Large Employer
  • Approvals History
  • Time Off Balances
  • System Log
  • Timesheet Log
• Payroll:
  • Hours Summary by Team Member
  • Wage Report
• Tracking
  • Job Costing by Team Member
  • GPS Points
  • Hours by Date, Team Member, Group, or Customer

As I said before, I was disappointed to see little in terms of employee accountability. There are no reports for absences or late/early clock-ins/clock-outs, which makes it hard for managers to spot trends and react accordingly. This is one of the few things that makes QuickBooks Time feel like it was built more for accountants than actual team managers. 

Verdict: 4 / 5

There are many reports available to meet a wide range of business needs, but fewer than would genuinely help team managers. 

Help and support

I had a mostly positive experience with QuickBooks Time’s support, which is accessible via the support icon in the top-right corner of the screen. 

In addition to Product Help, you can view the Getting Started Guide, see What’s New, and Suggest Ideas. Clicking on Product Help opens a sidebar with a search field for help articles and a Contact Us button. That button takes you to a form where you can describe your issue, but you have only 170 characters to do so. That feels unnecessarily short, especially because questions of any real depth will easily run up to the limit.

After clicking Continue, you have the option to either Ask the Community (using QuickBooks Time forum) or Start a Chat or get a Callback, both of which are available from 6:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. PC time (9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. ET). 

I chose the Chat option, and was connected to a friendly agent very quickly. They first asked for my name, email address, and company ID, then helped me with my query. Unfortunately, there is no way to see who’s clocked in late or early in the Who’s Working screen, but they suggested a few workarounds, like looking at the Timesheets. They didn’t offer to escalate my request or add the suggestion to a roadmap. 

Verdict: 4/5

Overall, an enjoyable experience, and the person was knowledgeable. 

User interface and ease of use

You may have noticed from the screenshots in this review that the web version of QuickBooks Time has a dated, rather clunky interface. The overall experience feels like using Windows 98; the app could use a major modernization. 

Visuals aside, the organization of the app is fairly simple and mostly well thought out. There’s a menu on the left that lets you access all the different windows; they’re actual windows you can drag around the screen. My only issue is that you can open multiple windows, but you can’t resize them. This often results in a cluttered user experience. 

As I’ve mentioned already, I also wish each window showed additional information that would be helpful at a glance. Schedules don’t show overtime risks or scheduling conflicts, which is a major shortcoming, and the Who’s Working screen doesn’t show late clock-ins or even no-shows.

Now, in fairness to the platform, Intuit is in the process of migrating features. Many, but not all, QuickBooks Time features can be found in the Time section of QuickBooks Online. Scheduling is there, for example, but most actual time tracking features aren’t, so the experience is a bit inconsistent across the board. 

Perhaps in the future, QuickBooks Time will be scuttled in favor of a single QuickBooks application. But until then, the overall experience isn’t entirely enjoyable. 

Verdict: 3.5 / 5

The app is dated, and the interface isn’t very enjoyable to use. It also often fails to convey information managers will want at their fingertips. On the whole, though, navigating QuickBooks Workforce wasn’t a totally arduous experience. 

QuickBooks Workforce mobile app

• Google Play Store Score: 4.7 / 5 (56k reviews)
• Apple App Store Score: 4.6 / 5 (179k reviews)

The mobile app, called QuickBooks Workforce, has a modern interface and is easy to use. It has five main screens: 

• The Overview screen shows total hours worked for the day, and you can click it to see more details (including customers, projects, and billable rate). Managers can also look at hours worked by team members, by week, or by pay period. Clicking “View Report” opens the payroll report with the same filters as the desktop version. You can view and request time off, too. You can organize these four sections (Time Clock, Hours by Team Member [managers], Schedule, and Time Off) as you like.
• The Time Tracker screen allows you to clock in, select the customer, billable rate, and any custom fields, add notes, attach photos, and see your location. On this screen, you can take a break, clock out, and use Switch to change customers. Plus, the Time Tracker screen shows timesheets — for yourself or, if you’re a manager, for everyone.

• The Schedule screen mirrors the web version of QuickBooks Time, just without Week or Month views. Instead, you see only an agenda of your upcoming shifts. Managers can, of course, view all workers’ shifts and create new ones, but the functionality is much more limited compared to the web app. You can’t make recurring shifts, for example, or copy and paste shifts. There is a handy Search feature I liked, though, so you can look up “morning shift” or “on call” shifts, for example.
• The Time Off screen enables workers to request time off, but as a manager, you can’t approve or deny requests from the mobile app. You have to use the web version for that. It’s a minor frustration for managers who are often on the move, but not a major miss.
• The More screen lets managers pull up the team roster, see who’s working, manage customers, and view hours by team members. Workers can see information for their own team, update notification settings, and get help.

Verdict: 3.5 / 5

QuickBooks Workforce offers good functionality for employees. But for managers, several features are missing: PTO and leave requests, advanced scheduling, and reports. You’ll need to use the web app for most things. 

Integrations

QuickBooks Time integrates with several payroll providers and other platforms. The QuickBooks Time App Marketplace has 25 integrations in total, including QuickBooks Online (of course), ADP, Square, Paychex, and Onpay, as well as business analytics software like Power BI and cloud storage like Dropbox and Google Drive. 

Verdict: 4 / 5

QuickBooks Time offers a decent number of integrations, but competitors like Buddy Punch integrate with more payroll providers. 

Security

QuickBooks is a major accounting software solution used by large enterprises. So it’s no surprise that the security is robust. 

The platform is compliant with PCI DSS, SOC 2 Type I and Type II, ISO 027001, and VPAT protocols. Data is also protected at rest and in transit (SSL, DigiCert) and complies with TRUSTe Privacy Program standards for data privacy. 

When it comes to the app, there are many ways to control who has access to what data, with multiple permission levels for workers, managers, admins, and accountants. 

Lastly, as mentioned, there’s strong logging throughout. In the company’s own words: 

“QuickBooks Online offers unique Always-On Activity Log and Audit Trail features, which cannot be turned off by a user. They record every login to the service and any changes made to every financial transaction. The Always-On Activity Log is a complete record of activities, while the Audit Trail is an easy-to-read history of all changes to a specific transaction. So nothing can happen to your records without you or your accountant knowing about it. And you’ll always have a paper trail to trace all transactions back to their source.”

The only feature that could use a security improvement is the time clock. From a time-theft and employee accountability perspective, it’s not particularly secure. It would be easy for employees to buddy punch or manipulate their tracked time in other ways. 

Verdict: 4 / 5

QuickBooks Time is very secure — but security from a team management perspective could be stronger, in my opinion.

3 QuickBooks Time alternatives to consider

If after reading this review, you decided that QuickBooks Time isn’t right for you, the three alternatives below are all good options to consider.

1. Buddy Punch – Best all-around alternative

Buddy Punch offers powerful yet easy-to-use solutions for time tracking, scheduling, attendance tracking, PTO, and more. Where QuickBooks Time does a great job with software integrations — notably due to its parent software, QuickBooks Online — Buddy Punch excels at all the essentials of managing hourly teams.

It’s especially useful for companies in transport and logistics, hospital and medical services, manufacturing, construction and engineering, professional services, and, of course, retail and hospitality. But as of 2026, Buddy Punch serves more than 70 industries and sectors.

• Capterra rating: 4.8 / 5 (1,118 reviews)
• Starting at: $4.49 per user per month ($5.95 with Scheduling)

Time tracking

Buddy Punch really stands out here, thanks to the sheer number of time clock features and functionalities. Workers can clock in and out via mobile app, kiosk, employee PIN or username and password, single sign-on (SSO), QR code, text-to-punch (great when the internet cuts out), and manager group punch. 

The platform also offers GPS logging and photos on punch-in, device and IP address locks, geofencing, real-time GPS tracking while on the clock, and even facial recognition, which significantly reduces the risks of buddy punching and other time theft. 

Accountability and labor savings

Another area where Buddy Punch shines compared to QuickBooks Time is employee accountability — specifically in managing employee attendance issues. You can easily see who’s clocked in at any given time, and rather than having to run a report after the day’s done, you can see from the main screen who arrived late, who clocked in early, and who was a no-show. Buddy Punch also sends you text or email notifications when employees are running late or miss a shift. 

Overtime tracking is solid, too. The scheduling features make it easy to see if and when employees will hit overtime — something that’s nearly impossible in QuickBooks Time — and there’s an option to receive notifications before approving a shift change. Buddy Punch also includes automatic punch-outs, break tracking and management, and punch limiting to scheduled shifts. 

Scheduling and schedule changes

Buddy Punch’s drag-and-drop schedule builder works much the same as QuickBooks Times’s, but you can also create shift templates (e.g., Morning Shift, Reception – Evening) that can be dragged onto the schedule. That really speeds things up each week. 

The platform has good employee self-service features, too — something QuickBooks Time lacks. Employees can request shift covers and changes with their colleagues, subject to your approval if you choose. It definitely helps reduce the number of emails and text messages flying around, which typically leads to fewer scheduling mix-ups, such as missed shifts or incorrectly trained covers. 

And much more…

Automated timesheets, integrated payroll, PTO tracking, break tracking, and a great mobile app help solidify Buddy Punch as a strong competitor to QuickBooks Time for business owners and managers alike.

2. Clockify – Best for office teams

Clockify is a time-tracking and scheduling app focused on resource planning, budgeting, and client invoicing. Like QuickBooks Time, it has fewer scheduling, time tracking, and employee attendance features than other platforms. But Clockify does have solid reporting and a free time-tracking-only plan for unlimited users.

• Capterra rating: 4.8 / 5(9,225 reviews)
• Starting at: $5.49 per user per month ($7.99 with Scheduling)

3. Hour Timesheet – Best for government contracts

Hour Timesheet offers time tracking, leave management, and job costing. It complies with Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA) regulations, and so is a good choice for government contractors. Unfortunately, the platform doesn’t offer scheduling, but it does offer its own payroll solution (via Gusto).

• Capterra rating: 4 / 5 (26 reviews)
• Starting at: $8 per user per month ($14 per user per month + $40 monthly base fee with Payroll)

Methodology: How I tested QuickBooks Time

To test QuickBooks Time, I created a QuickBooks Online company and admin user, then a QuickBooks Time account. 

When I test a software solution, I typically start by getting a general “feel” for it by exploring the user interface. With QuickBooks Time, I clicked through each screen, testing the user interface and seeing how different features, like scheduling and time tracking, work together (or not). I also like to check out the Settings menu at this point to find any hidden options for the features before testing them. 

Then, I test the main features one by one; I take notes and screenshots as I go, noting anything I think is done really well and anything that could be improved. This usually takes about an hour per feature. In this case, that included scheduling, time tracking, attendance and labor, timesheets and payroll, PTO and sick leave, and reporting. 

Next, I test out the mobile app. I’m looking for usability and full-featuredness. A good mobile app will let you do almost everything on the fly, with an interface that’s adapted to on-the-go use. 

Finally, I check out the pricing and compare it to other providers to get a sense of where it sits in the market. Plus, I look at any available integrations and check out both technical security features (e.g., PCI DSS or SOC 2 Type II) and worker-oriented ones (e.g., anti-time-theft functionality).

I consider all this through the lens of my own experiences as a manager, aiming to zero in on features and gaps that will matter to business owners and other managers.