An employee forgets to clock out and another one starts earlier or finishes later than expected. Someone else says they worked through lunch, but you can’t see it on their time card.

Across a team, these small inconsistencies mean you have to piece together schedules, messages, and timesheets to work out what hours everyone actually worked.

Timekeeping software helps you tackle these issues and makes jobs like payroll, billing, and tracking labor costs easier across the whole business. Below, read about the top eight team timekeeping systems on the market, and see which challenges each one is best at solving.

Platform	Best for	G2 rating	Free trial	Starting price
Buddy Punch	Cutting down time spent chasing teammates for timesheets	4.8/5	14 days	$4.99/user/month
Timely	Capturing small pieces of billable work	4.8/5	14 days	$16/user/month
OnTheClock	Keeping rounded time cards accurate	4.4/5	30 days	$4/employee/month
When I Work	Spotting attendance problems across a team	4.4/5	14 days	$2.50/user/month
Workyard	Clocking whole crews in and out	4.8/5	14 days	$6/user/month
Factorial	Giving different teams different ways to clock in	4.4/5	14 days	$8/user/month
ClickTime	Locking team timesheets at payroll cutoff	4.6/5	No	$15/user/month
Harvest	Spotting hour overruns in projects	4.3/5	30 days	$9/seat/month

1. Buddy Punch – Best for cutting down time spent chasing team members for timesheets 

In many businesses, the admin team has to chase both managers and individual members of staff to get their time cards in. The closer it gets to the cut-off point for payroll, the less time you have to check everyone’s hours and fix anything that’s not right.

Buddy Punch manages this by building each employee’s time card in real time as the week progresses, based on their clock-in and clock-out information. As the deadline approaches, all they have to do to check if their time card is right is log into the app.

If a staff member spots something wrong, they can correct it themselves in the app, as long as you’ve given them permission to edit their own hours. You decide what happens next — Buddy Punch either adds the change straight to their time card or sends it to a manager for approval first.

Once the card looks right, the employee sends it for final approval. If your company already uses Buddy Punch’s scheduling tools, you can compare the hours on the card with the hours the employee was meant to work and check anything that looks unusual. You can then approve it or send it back if something still needs fixing.

This whole process depends on everyone doing their part on time. Buddy Punch can help keep things on track by taking care of the follow-up for you.

If an employee forgot to send in their information, send them the Submit Time Card Reminder. If they got their card in but you’ve not heard from their manager or administrator, send them an Approve Time Card Reminder. You can set reminders for a chosen number of days before or after the pay period closes, or create several if you want to chase up staff and managers more than once.

Pros

• The app builds each time card from clock-in and clock-out data, meaning payroll receives accurate, real-time information.
• Send reminders to staff, managers, or admin to submit or approve time cards, reducing time spent chasing up.

Cons

• Managers or admin need to return a submitted time card before a member of staff can fix a mistake.
• Staff only get reminders if they allow notifications on their phone.

Pricing

Buddy Punch’s Starter plan costs $19 per month plus $4.99 per user per month billed annually. There’s a free 14-day trial available.

2. Timely — Best for capturing small pieces of billable work

In small law, accounting, and consulting firms, billable work often happens in short bursts. It’s easy to forget to record and invoice a 20-minute call to one client while working on a bigger job for another. The dollar cost of this lost time across a team of 20 or 30 billable staff can be substantial.

Timely’s solution to this is its Memory app, which privately captures each app, website, file, or document that’s in active use on your computer.

Over the course of the day, it builds up a timeline showing what you were doing and when. It ignores anything you’ve left open in the background, so it doesn’t count that time when you’re working on something else.

In your timeline, Memory saves important on-screen information like the app used, file or document name, page title, and website, together with the time spent on each task.

You then map each activity in Timely to the right client project or task. Over time, Timesheet Assistant learns how you usually sort similar work.

At first, you’ll need to check and fix its suggestions one by one. As it gets better at matching work to the right client, you can review batches of suggested entries at once, adding them all to your timesheet in one click. The week view also shows how many captured activities still haven’t been added to a timesheet.

I like how Timely handles overlapping work. Say a colleague is on a Zoom call for an hour with Client A but uses a few short gaps during that hour to check a document for Client B. Client A is still billed for the hour, but each short spell of work spent on Client B is recorded and billed separately.

On larger teams, managers can use the People page to see the hours everyone has logged without getting access to each employee’s private Memory timeline.

Pros

• The tool tracks billable work on colleagues’ computers, whether it lasts a few minutes or several hours, so you can invoice clients for each piece of work.
• Timesheet Assistant learns how you assign work to clients, projects, and tasks, then suggests where similar entries should go.

Cons

• Staff need to check and fix Timesheet Assistant’s suggestions while it learns where best to assign each activity.
• Timely supports normal PSTN phone calls only through its Teams integration.

Pricing

To benefit from the features in this review, you’ll need Timely’s Premium plan, which costs $16 per user per month for up to 50 users. Teams with more than 50 members need Unlimited, which costs $22 per user per month. Both are billed annually. The company offers a free 14-day trial.

3. OnTheClock — Best for keeping rounded time cards accurate

From a regulatory perspective, you can generally round time — meaning you can move an exact clock-in or clock-out time to the nearest set time, like six or 15 minutes — so long as you don’t underpay staff. But over-rounding can also cost you money.

For example, six extra minutes a day for someone on $20 an hour adds up to $520 a year. If you have a team of 40, that’s $20,800 you don’t need to be spending.

I like how OnTheClock lets you choose no rounding, six-minute rounding, or 15-minute rounding for the whole team. Once you choose the rule, OnTheClock applies it automatically to every punch.

If someone forgets to clock in or later notices they punched at the wrong time, they can leave a note explaining what happened. You can set OnTheClock to automatically email their manager in such cases. When you get a note like that, ask admin to tell you the exact time the employee punched from the Raw Activity Log, and then you can decide whether the time card needs a correction.

Admin can set up the system so that they need to approve all changes, or they can give managers and employees editing rights.

If there’s a dispute, you have the original punch plus an audit log showing every change made and who made it. For example, if a manager adds a missed punch, OnTheClock marks it “AD,” showing that the entry was added by someone rather than recorded by the employee.

Pros

• It stores the exact punch time even after rounding for full transparency.
• Staff can add a note about a punch mistake on their timesheet.

Cons

• Only admins can see the Raw Activity Log, so managers need their help to check exact punch times.
• If you let staff correct their own time cards, they can also delete punches, meaning they could remove a valid punch by mistake.

Pricing

OnTheClock costs $4 per employee per month plus a $5 monthly base fee. The company offers a free 30-day trial.

4. When I Work — Best for spotting attendance problems across a team

Most people on your team clock in and out exactly as you expect them to. But there can be exceptions, like someone forgetting to punch themselves out, another coming in late, or someone punching in from the wrong location. When this happens with too many people, you end up spending a lot of time correcting people’s hours before payroll.

I like how When I Work handles this. It keeps both the schedule and the time clock in the same system, so it can compare each punch with the shift that an employee was meant to work.

Click into its Attendance Notices panel to see each problem listed under the day it happened, showing the type of issue and the employee involved.

The panel stays updated in real time so you can spot situations as they develop. Say someone’s shift has started but they haven’t clocked in. When I Work first shows this as a missed clock-in. If they arrive later and punch in, it changes to a late clock-in. If the shift ends and they still haven’t punched in, it becomes a no-show.

Depending on what actually happened, you can choose to send the employee a reminder, add or correct their time card, approve a punch, or report them as absent.

You can also filter Attendance Notices by problem type to see if the same issue keeps cropping up across the team. To investigate further, open the Time Entries report to see whether the same employee has a pattern of, for example, late or wrong-location punches.

Pros

• See punch problems as they happen, so you know what action you need to take now.
• Filter Attendance Notices by type and check if teams or employees have the same recurring issue.

Cons

• Only admins can choose when missed clock-in and clock-out alerts are sent, not managers.
• Attendance Notices show problems only for the last seven days, and you need to run a report to look further back.

Pricing

When I Work costs $2.50 per user per month for a single location or schedule and $5 per user per month for multiple locations or schedules.

5. Workyard – Best for clocking whole crews in and out

On construction sites, roofing jobs, and larger landscaping projects, one foreman is usually responsible for managing a crew. Instead of requiring a crew of eight to punch in and out themselves, having the foreman do it for everyone saves time and keeps everyone’s timesheets consistent.

Workyard’s Team Actions feature does just this. First, create a Team on the platform and add crew members before assigning a foreman as their supervisor. You can set up permanent teams or, if a special job comes in requiring a different mix of workers, put together a temporary team for it.

At the start of the day, the foreman opens the Clock In feature on their app and punches in each crew member on their team if they turn up for the shift. Someone arriving late can simply be punched in separately when they arrive.

Foremen can also add a timed break for all or selected crew members, with Workyard clocking them back in when it ends.

At the end of the day, the foreman clocks out employees as they leave. That’s useful because, if someone stays late to, for example, pack away tools and equipment, they stay clocked in and are only punched out when they actually leave.

After every group clock-in, break, or clock-out, the foreman can refresh the Team screen to check if everyone has the right status.

I was impressed that Workyard records these actions in areas with poor or no reception too. It stores the clock-ins, breaks, and clock-outs on the foreman’s device while it’s offline, then automatically syncs the data once the phone gets a signal.

Pros

• It simplifies clocking all or selected crew members in and out by making it the foreman’s responsibility.
• In areas with poor reception, the app stores all punch and break data before automatically syncing it when it gets a signal.

Cons

• Only admins can create permanent Teams, meaning foremen can’t set up their own regular crews.
• If staff need to clock in on a shared iPad when the foreman isn’t there, you need Workyard’s Pro plan or higher.

Pricing

Workyard doesn’t publish its prices online, instead requiring users to sign up for a free trial after which a customized quote is provided. The site does note that plans start at $6 per user per month billed annually.

6. Factorial – Best for giving different teams different ways to clock in

Construction and home services firms, manufacturers, and distributors often have an office team, warehouse or production team, and a field team. With teams scattered across different locations using different devices, it’s difficult to get everyone recording their hours in one place.

Factorial manages this complexity well. First, get admin to create a separate setup for each team and add employees to each group. Then choose one of the following ways to record their hours:

• Computer: Office and home-based staff record their start and finish times on the computer they already use for work.
• Shared tablet or computer: Put a device by the door in your warehouse or production area so employees can enter their ID as they arrive and leave.
• Mobile app: Technicians, installers, drivers, and other field workers use their phones, with Factorial recording their GPS location at each punch if you turn on geolocation.
• QR code: Display a QR code at a fixed site for staff to scan with their phones as they arrive and leave.
• Face recognition: Staff look into a shared camera. If Factorial recognizes them, it records their time without them entering an ID.

I like how you don’t have to build every team’s setup from scratch. Let’s say your company has three or four field teams on the road. Take the settings for the first group and paste them into the settings for other teams, only changing anything that needs to work differently for them.

Factorial also accommodates hybrid staff who may work from home, the office, or another work location. When they clock in, they choose where they’re working. If they select the office, they can also pick the workplace and work area they’d be using.

Pros

• Let each team clock in and out the way that works best for their situation.
• Copy and paste one team’s setup to another team, changing only what’s needed to match the needs of the new team.

Cons

• You can’t use both QR code and GPS location clock-ins in the same setup.
• If you use a tablet as a shared time clock, each tablet needs to be set up separately for the place where it will be used.

Pricing

Factorial’s plans start at $8 per user per month. Other than this minimum price, the company doesn’t publish its general pricing, so you’ll need to contact the sales team for a customized quote. The clock-in features covered in this review are part of its Time Tracking product.

7. Clicktime – Best for locking timesheets at payroll cutoff

Payroll teams at smaller professional-services firms need to pull and process hours from various teams to pay people on time, but their hard work can be undone if managers can go back and change timesheets they’ve already signed off on. Even a small change at this stage can leave some employees short, while others are paid for hours they didn’t work.

ClickTime gives admin and payroll teams the power to lock one team’s timesheets as soon as they’re ready, while leaving other teams’ timesheets open for changes.

You can lock several records at once or filter the list by period, people, division, or status before choosing which ones to close. I like how this can also be delegated to individual managers, so a client services manager can close their team’s records without being given access to the office team’s timesheets.

Once locked, employees can’t add, change, or delete time from that period. Managers without the right permissions can’t change it either. That means the figures used for reports and payroll stay the same unless an approved manager unlocks the timesheet.

If a genuine mistake comes to light later, admin can unlock the affected timesheet, correct it or let the employee do so, then lock it again. ClickTime recommends re-locking the timesheet as soon as the change is done.

After the information is exported for payroll, you can find any timesheets for that period that are still marked Open and lock them too. That stops one missed record from staying editable after all other timesheets have been closed.

Pros

• Changes can be made to timesheets after the deadline only with admin permission.
• Managers can lock down their own team’s timesheets so admin and payroll can process them straight away.

Cons

• ClickTime allows only one timesheet period, so you can’t make one team’s timesheets weekly and another’s monthly.
• Locking a timesheet blocks attempts to make further changes, but it doesn’t mean the hours have been officially approved.

Pricing

For a team of 30 or more, ClickTime’s Team plan is the first plan large enough. It costs $15 per user per month billed annually and supports up to 200 users.

8. Harvest — Best for spotting hour overruns in projects

A project overrun can quickly eat into the margins of a small agency or consulting firm. Harvest helps you find out where these slips are happening while the project is still running, so you can correct what’s causing them as soon as it happens.

When you win a new project, allocate an hour budget to it. You can then divide that budget between different tasks or between individual team members. For example, if you expect a website project to take 150 hours, you could give 20 to the planning team, 30 to the design team, 50 to the development team, and 50 to the copywriting team.

Harvest counts hours logged on a project against its budget in real time. Bring up the budget bars on the project screen to see how many hours each job has used. I like how you can compare hours across different jobs without having to open each project one by one.

Harvest can also alert you when your selected budget level is crossed, like when a project reaches 75% of its 150-hour budget.

If you want to find out why the project is using its hours too quickly, open Project Analysis. Its progress graph shows how much of the budget has been used over time. Switch to the hours-per-week graph to see how many hours staff added each week. It also separates billable and non-billable hours, so you can see if work you can’t charge for is contributing to the overrun.

The Tasks and Team tabs break the hours down further. Click a task to see who logged the time, then open their individual time entries to see which work is pushing that part of the project over budget.

Pros

• Set separate hour budgets for tasks or team members to see which parts of the job are eating up more time than planned.
• Get alerts whenever a project has passed the budget-use level you’ve chosen.

Cons

• Although alerts warn you about potential hour breaches, staff can still log more hours than budgeted.
• Harvest doesn’t have a budget report, so you need to check budget use on the Projects screen or in Project Analysis.

Pricing

Harvest’s Teams plan costs $9 per seat per month billed annually. The company offers a 30-day free trial.

Feature comparison

Platform	GPS/location tracking	PTO requests	Project/job tracking	Timesheet deadline reminders
Buddy Punch	✅	✅	✅	✅
Timely	✅	❌	✅	✅
OnTheClock	✅	✅	✅	❌
When I Work	✅	✅	✅	❌
Workyard	✅	✅	✅	✅
Factorial	✅	✅	✅	❌
ClickTime	❌	✅	✅	✅
Harvest	❌	❌	✅	✅

How I chose the tools on this list

When choosing vendors to review, I focused on the issues that complicate timekeeping for SMBs as teams grow. The primary features I was looking for were:

• How simple it was for staff to record their hours even when different teams worked different shifts or in different places
• Ease of checking, correcting, and approving timesheets before they’re used for payroll or client billing
• If missing, wrong, or disputed time records were plainly visible and fixable for managers
• If it supported quick transfer of reliable information from staff and managers to admin

Also key was how simple each system is for staff and managers to use. In my 17 years of experience running SMBs, I’ve seen that apps with complex interfaces get used less consistently and are harder to roll out throughout the business.