The 10 Best Time Tracker and Employee Scheduling Software

Time-tracking tools can be the key difference between a business that fails and one that thrives. How employees spend their time on the clock is a consistent concern of business owners, whether they’re using manual methods of timekeeping such as timesheets, making use of physical time clocks, or have upgraded to digital time trackers. 

Time trackers in particular have a number of benefits:

• They improve the accuracy of data, allowing you to utilize statistics to optimize your workforce scheduling, invoicing, and profitability.
• They drastically cut down on human error when it comes to work hour entry and transferring data for payroll.
• Many come with built-in features that encourage greater employee productivity throughout the workday.

In fact, the only downside to time trackers and employee scheduling software is the sheer number of options you have to sift through in order to find one that fits your needs. But we’re here to help with that.

We’re going to outline the 10 best time trackers and employee scheduling software. We’ve selected these based on a mix of criteria: usefulness of features offered, how easy they are for managers and employees alike to start using them, and customer reviews. 

1. Buddy Punch

Buddy Punch is a user-friendly and versatile time tracker and employee scheduling software that’s been adopted by over 10,000 businesses. Our tool has proven particularly effective for small businesses, retail stores, construction sites, manufacturing floors, remote teams, and more. As an all-in-one employee management tool, you can use it to track employee hours, create schedules, manage PTO, and run payroll. 

We created Buddy Punch to be this versatile for one simple reason: it’s the sort of time-tracking software we wished was on the market when we needed one. Back then, we relied on manual methods of timekeeping, such as paper timesheets, to manage 20 employees at three different locations. It was unsustainable, inefficient, and worse, was preventing us from improving our productivity.

Back then, time-tracking tools either lacked the sort of functions we’d want to monitor our employees and encourage greater productivity, or they seemed overly complicated and difficult for team members to learn. It seemed like there was no tool that managed to be both versatile and intuitive.

So we set out to create our own, and Buddy Punch was born.

Why Buddy Punch stands out

There are many roles that Buddy Punch fills when compared to competitors in the market.

Intuitive and easy-to-use interface

Our primary concern while designing Buddy Punch was ease of use. We wanted to ensure that any employee could benefit from our time tracker regardless of how tech-savvy they are. That’s why we made it so simple for employees to log in.

As you can see in the image above, employees are only presented with the most necessary options when they log in. They can clock in, clock out, and view or submit their timesheet. No other distractions, no need to jump through several hoops before your team members can get to stocking shelves or performing equipment checks prior to construction work.

As one customer writes on Capterra (a popular software review site):

“We needed a new solution for timekeeping and Buddy Punch came through! Onboarding and integration was so easy. Once I figured out all the setting options, it’s really easy to customize to exactly what you need.”

This simplicity shouldn’t be mistaken for a lack of options for your employees. Your team members can still request time off, submit requests to correct punch-in mistakes, and view their estimated pay. All we’ve done is hidden these secondary functions to streamline the day-to-day experience.

Versatility

Our philosophy of simple design and streamlined experience holds true regardless of the device you access Buddy Punch on. Our tool can be accessed via the web or as a native app, meaning it functions regardless of where and how your employees work. 

If your team is centralized in an office, they can use Buddy Punch on their Windows or Apple desktops. If your team works in the field, they can use Buddy Punch’s mobile apps on their iOS and Android smartphones. You can even set up Buddy Punch on a tablet to function as a time clock kiosk that everyone on-site uses to punch in and punch out. 

As one customer put it:

“I like that the employees can clock in and out on their phones since we have construction sites where there isn’t a mobile office. It also lets them select the job they are working for so we can have accurate billing.”

Seamless onboarding

We’ve simplified how easy it is to switch your company over to Buddy Punch. First off, our customer support team is always ready to assist you if you have an issue at any stage during this process. One of our users had this to say about their experience with customer support:

“Their customer support is second to NONE — always super responsive and knowledgeable while providing BEYOND this world stellar customer service. Regardless of industry, Buddy Punch is a great and reliable tool to improve efficiency and productivity.”

We give you and your administrators two different methods of adding your employees: manually or through an Excel import.

If you choose to add your employees manually, you can do so by adding their names and email addresses. Our team can walk you through this step if you desire.

Alternatively, if you want to import your entire team at once, we can provide you with an Excel file to fill out with their information. Simply send it back to us when it’s complete and we’ll take over the onboarding process for you.

Customer support

Through your experience with our software, you can rest assured that our customer service agents will always be ready to assist you through our live chat feature. We even boast a median first response time of 54 seconds during business hours!

Best of all, anyone on your team can take advantage of this. Our live chat is available for administrators trying to get a handle on functions to monitor team members, for team members that may have questions or issues while navigating our app, and for you if you want some advice on making the most of Buddy Punch’s features towards a specific goal.

Each of our live chat representatives uses and has studied Buddy Punch. Any question you or your team members have will be addressed properly, regardless of complexity. 

How Buddy Punch improves time tracking

Buddy Punch empowers you to make sure that employees are where they need to be when they need to be there, focused on tasks during work hours — even if you’re not present to ensure it. This is accomplished through the following features.

Geofencing

Create a radius on an interactive map, known as a geofence, up to a circumference of 5,000 feet. Whenever an employee attempts to clock in or clock out while outside of a geofence, they’ll be denied. Create multiple geofences at will and use this to exert control over remote retail locations or on construction job sites without being present.

GPS tracking

Buddy Punch’s GPS tracking allows you to monitor where your remote and field workers are while they’re on the clock. There are two options you have here: tracking employees while they’re on the clock in real-time, or only logging employee locations the moment they clock in and clock out.

Regardless of how you choose to ensure team members are where they’re meant to be while on the clock, Buddy Punch preserves privacy by immediately ceasing data tracking once your staff members clock out.

PTO tracking

Easily monitor employee PTO through the most common types or by creating custom types at will. All paid time off taken will automatically appear on employees’ time cards. As team members request time off, you’ll receive a notification for easy approval or denial. You can even take things a step further and enable auto-approval on leave requests.

Buddy Punch’s PTO tracking comes paired with a built-in PTO accrual feature to determine how paid leave accumulates for your employees.

Facial recognition

Buddy Punch’s facial recognition helps solve most concerns about time theft in the workplace. Buddy Punch uses Face ID to scan an employee’s face as they clock in, comparing it with a verified screenshot on file. No employee will be able to clock in for another employee with this security feature enabled.

How Buddy Punch streamlines employee scheduling

Employee scheduling should be as quick, simple and painless as possible. Additionally, team members should be able to fully understand when they’re expected to work at a glance. There are a few ways Buddy Punch helps achieve this.

Drag-and-drop scheduling

Buddy Punch makes it easy for you to schedule your employees. Create shifts on the calendar by simply clicking on an empty cell, then drag and drop shifts as needed. This level of ease paired with the ability to visualize scheduled employees helps ensure there are no gaps in the workweek. 

Shift trades 

Tired of dealing with last-minute schedule changes when an employee puts in a leave request or has an emergency? The shift trades feature helps alleviate your responsibilities and puts power in your team members’ hands at the same time. Employees can trade shifts or request someone to cover their shift. Once a match is made, you’ll receive those shift trade requests and can approve or deny them. 

Shift notifications

Buddy Punch has a robust notifications system that augments many of its features, including shift scheduling. Once you’ve made a schedule, all relevant employees will receive a notification to ensure they know when they’re expected to work.

Let’s say you have a field worker, Jake, who wants to take a sick day off to recover from a fever. Once notified that he’s scheduled to work on Monday, he can put in a request to get Bill to cover his shift. Then you’ll receive a notification to approve or deny the swap.

You can also set up notifications for events such as approaching the end of a shift, needing to submit timecards, for employees to remember to punch in or punch out, and more.

How Buddy Punch helps you run payroll

Tracking employee data accurately is extremely useful, but it could still be a hassle to wrangle this information when it comes time for payroll. That’s why we included several payroll-related features in Buddy Punch to cut down on human error and streamline the entire payroll process for business owners. 

Payroll integrations

Attached to third-party payroll software? Buddy Punch integrates directly with many of the most popular tools on the market, making it easy to transfer over your employee data without hassle or risk of human error skewing numbers. We integrate directly with Zapier, QuickBooks, ADP, and more. Click here to view the full integrations list.

Job codes / project tracking

Buddy Punch allows you to set up job codes, departments, or locations as a method of tracking employee time for specific tasks and projects. You can assign these codes to employees or let them clock in and select the specific task or project they’re working on.

How much time does it take Kyle, Jake, and Chris to finish up on a construction site? How quickly can Jane and Bill restock your shelves? This feature lets you answer these questions by recording the time employees spend on tasks. When you run payroll reports, you’ll see exactly how much time was spent on each project.

Payroll reports and exports

Buddy Punch offers customizable reports to accompany many of its features, including payroll. In just a few clicks Buddy Punch calculates everything you need for payroll, exported in Excel CSV or Adobe PDF format.

Built-in payroll

For business owners that are open to upgrading their payroll software, Buddy Punch offers a comprehensive payroll option. Turn Buddy Punch into your all-in-one solution for all things employee management and take advantage of features such as:

• Anywhere, anytime payroll
• Automatic payroll tax filings and payments
• In-depth employee data for workforce insights
• Paperless payroll
• and more.

Click here to learn more about Buddy Punch’s built-in payroll option.

Buddy Punch’s other features

Believe it or not, we’ve still only scratched the surface when it comes to features Buddy Punch has for business owners. There are other options as well, such as QR codes scanning, overtime calculations, group punches, timesheet editing, automatic punch outs, and more.

You have a full arsenal at your fingertips that you can pick and choose from depending on what works best for your workforce management style. Click here to view a full list of Buddy Punch’s features.

Want to learn more about Buddy Punch? Start a free trial (no credit card required), watch a recorded demo, or request a personalized demo.

2. DeskTime

DeskTime is an all-in-one time tracker for businesses, with a major focus on features that are meant to boost employee productivity. According to their data, on average they can improve stats by 30% — a bold claim, but one that’s believable considering their features:

• Time tracking: Desktime considers this the very core of what their tool is all about: precise tracking of work hours, clock in and out times, and employee breaks. Make use of both automatic and manual time tracking to get a comprehensive view of how time is spent while employees are on the clock.
• Performance evaluation: DeskTime allows you to take a deeper dive into tracked time data. Understand not just what your team members are doing, but for how long they’re engaged in each activity. Track URLs and apps, productivity, projects, and even document titles to ensure everyone’s working on their assignments.
• Reporting: View all the in-depth information gathered by DeskTime at will. Understand how your team’s performance ebbs and flows over time and export the data to create physical records that you can use to create benchmarks to exceed in the future.
• Scheduling: Streamline your team management through the use of DeskTime’s features to organize work hours and oversee staff absences. Make use of shift scheduling and an absence calendar to exert greater control over employee attendance.

Desktime has a score of 4.6/5 on Capterra, based on 564 reviews. Here’s what one reviewer had to say:

“Attendance and productivity are typically managed by managers along with HR but processes are usually manual and takes a lot of time. This allowed management and HR to have a tool to monitor and inspect productivity and attendance more effectively.”

3. When I Work

When I Work is a tool that specifically focuses on optimization of work schedule creation and management for business owners. Their goal is to provide a modern solution for scheduling that works on desktop and mobile apps alike. They achieve this through features such as:

• Employee scheduling: When I Work’s main component. Shift management is meant to be drastically simplified through tools such as auto scheduling, task assignment, schedule templates, and remote job sites. Save hours by creating schedules in mere minutes.
• Time clock: The When I Work time clock ensures accurate time tracking regardless of employee circumstances or locations. This feature comes with GPS tracking for remote workers, labor cost management, absenteeism monitoring, timesheet editing, and more.
• Team messaging: Manage team communication all in one centralized app. When I Work allows you to bring team messaging under one private and secure roof, allowing you to improve team member cooperation through options such as one-on-one communication, broadcast messaging, group messaging, and notifications.
• Integrations: When I Work has many third-party integrations to make it easy to slot this into your pre-established routine. They have options from payroll, to point of sale, to on-demand pay, working perfectly with names such as Gusto, Square, ADP, and more. 

When I Work has a score of 4.5/5 on Capterra, based on 1,123 reviews. Here’s what one user had to say about it:

“When I Work was an answered prayer for our personnel department. We recently underwent a large expansion that added several employees, contractors, and locations. By shifting to When I Work, we have been able to eliminate the need for a separate staff member to oversee employee attendance and productivity.”

4. Connecteam

Connecteam has enough versatile features to be an all-in-one employee time-tracking software if that’s what you’re looking for. They offer you full control over your employees, from scheduling to payroll, through features such as:

• Time clock: Connecteam lets you accurately track employee work hours and submit timesheets for payroll in a click. You can also monitor attendance in real-time with notifications and enhanced dashboard visibility. 
• Scheduling: Connecteam makes it easy to create optimized schedules with ease. You can view employee availability, qualifications, and preferences while you’re setting up schedules. Then, quickly build them with templates and duplicates, or let auto-scheduling take control. 
• Task management: Connecteam makes it easy to track employee task completion, all from your mobile device. You can even set up one-time tasks with due dates or establish recurring tasks in order to automate daily assignments among your team. 
• Forms and checklists: Connecteam has a fairly unique feature with its digital forms, which allow you to create forms and checklists for employees to fill out. These provide digestible breakdowns of tasks for team members to complete in order to boost their productivity.

Connecteam has a solid reputation, sitting with a rating of 4.7 out of 5 stars on Connecteam with 342 total reviews. Here’s what one user has to say about it:

“Connecteam has helped with managing our employee work time and scheduling tremendously. I have slowly implemented more and more features to benefit our company as a whole and I have been extremely happy with what I have implemented so far. The customer service has always been outstanding!!! I am never disappointed in their service.”

5. Hubstaff

Hubstaff is a time-tracking app with numerous productivity features to improve productivity and profitability in the workplace. 

• Time tracking: Hubstaff’s built-in time clock app makes attendance tracking easy for business owners. Your employees can clock in and out from any mobile device or computer, you can set and track budgets in line with your forecasting, and all client information is centralized for work orders.
• Employee timesheets: Hubstaff’s digital timesheet options make it easy to process payroll, invoice clients, and get a clear understanding of your costs. With exact time entries, billable hours and non-billable hours, and automated approval workflows, you can completely ditch paper timesheets.
• Project management: Hubstaff lets you set up accounts and teams to then track project workflow, which includes automatic notifications for costs and client budgets. You can also use insights gathered from data to plan better in the future.
• Detailed reporting: Hubstaff allows you to go much deeper into data than just looking at screenshots. They offer numerous detailed reports for employees and freelancers, covering general metrics, budgets and limits, payments, invoicing, time off, scheduling, and more. 

Many of its users consider Hubstaff to be among the best employee workforce management tools on the market, as it has 1,502 reviews and a score of 4.6/5 on Capterra. Here’s what one reviewer had to say:

“Using Hubstaff has been exceptionally easy across the board. It is an asset for our company to see project profitability, team member hours, and manage time off for a fully remote company. The customer service with Hubstaff is superb. Highly recommend the app!”

6. Paymo

Paymo is interesting because it bills itself as project management software first, noting that it also comes with time-tracking and employee scheduling app features as a secondary bonus. To that end, we’d recommend business owners who are particularly interested in improving their project management give this tool a try. Here are some of the features you get access to:

• Time tracking: Paymo has numerous options for tracking time, including a web timer that incorporates itself directly into your browser, automatic tracking of time spent in browsers and desktop apps (functional on Mac, Windows, and Linux), and native mobile apps that can track spent on mobile phones.
• Kanban board: One of Paymo’s more unique features, this function allows you to visualize workflows with statuses and cards, which can simplify the process of identifying bottlenecks in your workflow. Your whole team can view and move tasks around as they complete them, improving team cooperation.
• Leave planner: Take a new tact for handling time-off requests with Paymo’s leave planner. You can add and manage leave days in bulk, establishing public holidays across the company in just a few clicks. Use the leave day widget so you and your HR department can track usage of paid leave days for every team member.
• Invoicing and estimates: Paymo makes it easy to generate or even clone invoices, customize invoices with branding, and export them to accounting tools such as QuickBooks or Xero or in Adobe PDF or Excel CSV format.

As of this post’s writing, Paymo has a rating of 4.7/5 on Capterra, based on 689 reviews. Here’s a positive review from a loyal user:

“I looked at several options for my company and decided on Paymo for the following reasons. The software has a very clean and intuitive interface. One of the best features is how you can customize how projects are set up and tracked. You generate a task list that is checked off as you move through the project. This is an amazing feature that organizes the project while it tracks it.”

7. QuickBooks Time

QuickBooks Time is a very popular cloud-based time-tracking app thanks to falling under the QuickBooks umbrella. They offer time tracking, project management, and payroll options for business owners, through features such as:

• Timesheets: Track, edit, and approve timesheets right from your laptop or desktop, use the mobile app to approve and manage your team via your phone, and establish a tablet as a kiosk for clocking in and out on site.
• GPS technology: QuickBooks Time ensures you always know where your team is working from. The GPS time clock and geofence options both make use of real-time data to enforce rules about working at remote job sites.
• Mobile time tracking: Turn any device into a time clock app through QuickBooks Time. You get full access to its various features here, including project tracking, simplified scheduling, real-time data, and more.
• Reports: Dig into accumulated data in order to get greater insight into how your business and employees are functioning. Predict job costs, plan for payroll, and boost overall profitability.

QuickBooks Time has a rating of 4.7/5 on Capterra, with 6,943 reviews.  As one positive review puts it:

“I’ve been using QuickBooks Time for a few months now, and overall, it’s been a solid experience. The software offers a convenient way to track time, manage payroll, and keep things organized, especially for small to mid-sized teams. The mobile app is one of its best features.”

8. Clockify

Clockify is an incredibly popular time tracker, mostly because it has one of the most flexible free plans on the market. That said, most of its more powerful features are locked behind paid plans. With Clockify, you have options such as:

• Timer: Easily track the time spent on tasks in your workplace. Clockify’s one click timer is as simple to use as entering the activity you’re working on then starting the timer. You can organize categories based on projects, tasks, tags, status, and more.
• Timesheets: Clockify allows you and your employees to categorize and log time spent on different projects and tasks, along with additional information such as notes, tags, and more. You can also make use of templates to quickly populate timesheets with the most common activities for your workplace.
• Calendar: Clockify allows you and your team members to visualize your days and organize time. Use the timeline feature to view days in blocks, use total time to see total tracked time throughout the week, zoom in 5, 15, 30, or 60-minute time blocks, and more.
• Scheduling: Use Clockify’s built-in scheduling to plan shifts and resources and allocate workloads to your team members. You can see views of all assignments on a timeline from different perspectives, enabling you to better identify gaps and points of optimization.

Being known as a free tool means Clockify has likely been tried by a ton of business owners, as evidenced by having 9,096 reviews on Capterra (with a score of 4.8/5). Here’s what one user had to say:

“Clockify is a very easy-to-set-up platform. Once one signs up, the functionality is available in minutes. It is easy to set up team members. The reporting is also straightforward; I use it to download my time with multiple clients into Excel.”

9. TimeCamp

TimeCamp, as the name implies, is all about everything relating to time tracking and attendance. Their goal is to give business owners complete control over how employees spend their work hours, and they achieve this through features such as:

• Automated time tracking: TimeCamp lets you track work time down to the second through its automated time tracker, promising minimal effort and maximal accuracy for business owners. Capture working hours, breaks, and clock-in and clock-out times.
• Productivity tracking: TimeCamp lets you fully account for the productivity of remote, hybrid, and on-site teams alike. Make use of website and app monitoring, work time tracking for billable hours, and attendance monitoring to optimize your operations.
• Budgeting: Make use of TimeCamp’s time budgeting feature to better visualize and plot a course towards increased profitability in your workplace. This feature comes with budget planning, customizable rates, financial reports, and more.
• Invoicing: Use TimeCamp to track time in projects, control work costs, and invoice clients. Use data gathered in accurate timesheets to ensure that all payments are accurate. 

TimeCamp has a rating of 4.7/5 stars on Capterra, with 598 reviews as of this post’s writing. Here’s one user’s glowing review:

“I love this program. It is easy to use and easy to find where your time is for billing. I have really been able to keep on top of my hours with the functionality of this program!”

10. Insightful

Insightful is an analytical team tracking app that focuses on gathering data and using it to inform insights for your business. If you’re all about visualization of data and facts, this is likely the perfect time-tracking app for you. It comes with features such as:

• Employee monitoring: Insightful empowers you to know exactly what your employees are doing, every minute of every day. Insightful tracks apps and website usage, uses random screenshots, and tracks activity logs throughout the day, including idle and active time. Additionally, you can use a stealth mode to help protect your team’s data.
• Time and attendance data: Insightful lets you manage computer-based time and attendance, so you can track employee hours, gain clear visibility into attendance, and see how time is currently allocated in your workplace (and can be reallocated to boost productivity). 
• Location-based insights: Whether your employees are working from home or working from the office, Insightful can help you determine which method is better for employees based on data on how they perform in different locations. 
• Integrations: You can use Insightful alongside some of your favorite work management tools. Insightful integrates directly with some of the most popular tools including Asana, Trello, ADP, and more. 

Insightful is not the most popular tool on this list, with only 96 reviews on Capterra, but it has a score of 4.7 and a loyal customer base. Here’s what one user had to say: 

“Automated time tracking is a great tool. Remote employee monitoring is great, but I solely used it to see what types of apps and websites our employees use. We don’t use the screenshots since ethically it is not accepted in our organisation, but it could be a great tool for those who need it. They have projects and tasks — this has added significant value for us.”

Choosing the right employee time tracker and scheduling software for your business

Even though we’ve drastically narrowed down your options, you may still be wondering which of these 10 tools might be the best fit for you. Rather than spending time giving them all a try, we’d advise you to take into account what your ideal goal is with using a time tracker.

In our opinion, there are three critical things the “best” time-tracking and scheduling software should achieve for a business owner:

• It should streamline payroll: The ideal app should be capable of calculating all of your payroll data automatically, as well as reporting it in the form of a payroll report, using a built-in processor, or integrating with your favorite payroll system.
• It should increase employee accountability: The best time tracking software should come with accountability features that ensure your team members are making the most of their work hours, even if you’re not present. Think of tools such as geofences, IP address locking, or facial recognition, all in the name of keeping billable hours accurate.
• It should simplify scheduling: Lastly, to be worth your consideration, time management and employee attendance software should let you simplify the scheduling process through features such as drag-and drop-schedule creation, the ability to set up repeating shifts/schedules, and more. 

With these three goals in mind, you can better pick which tool would fit your needs.

If you want simplicity for yourself and your team members paired with great customer support, you can’t go wrong with Buddy Punch. But these other nine options are also strong fits as well. If you like the idea of organizing teams with Kanban boards, turn towards TimeCamp. If you want productivity-based insights, Insightful is the tool for you. 

At the end of the day, so long as you’re open to trying new tools and making a switch if one proves too complicated or lacking, your perfect solution is likely among this list.