Comparing The 9 Best Timesheet Software [2024 Guide]

The right timesheet software will help you reduce time theft, ensure your time cards are accurate, and provide the transparency you need to optimize your operations.

To help you find the right timesheet software for your business, we scoured the market to find tools that are simple to use and effective at improving accountability and streamlining payroll.

We reviewed dozens of apps to narrow the choices down. The result: the nine options for the best employee timesheet software below.

1. Buddy Punch

Kicking off our list is our very own Buddy Punch. Our reason for ranking our software so highly on employee accountability, design simplicity, and payroll streamlining is simple: we designed it specifically with those traits in mind.

Back in 2013, we were managing 20 different employees at three different locations. We quickly learned that our manual methods of time tracking weren’t going to cut it as we continued to expand. We turned to looking through time trackers to find a solution to our problems, but we were disappointed by the options.

So we set off to create our own.

Using our own experiences as well as the experiences of our clients, we were able to focus on management features that later became essential to Buddy Punch’s design. 

Time tracking

Employees clock in and out using the Buddy Punch app, which is available on computers, phones, and laptops. That data is then compiled into timesheets that auto-calculate employee hours, overtime, and pay.

Before running payroll, admins can approve those timesheets themselves, or they can delegate approval to employees’ managers or supervisors. This ensures that when it’s time to run payroll, all of your time data is reviewed and accurate.

When employees forget to clock in/out, they can edit their timesheets. Admins receive those edit requests and can approve or deny them. This is helpful because admins don’t have to go in and make edits when employees are forgetful.

Finally, employee hours can also be attached to specific jobs, projects, locations, or departments. This is helpful if you work on client projects and need to track time per client for invoicing, or if you have multiple locations and want to run reports on labor costs per location.

Payroll

When it’s time to run payroll, you have multiple options. Buddy Punch offers payroll services itself that you can use to pay your employees via direct deposit. 

However, if you already have a payroll provider, Buddy Punch likely integrates with it. Integrations are available for QuickBooks, Gusto, Rippling, Paychex, ADP, and more. Once an integration is set up, passing your timesheet data to your payroll provider is as simple as clicking a few buttons.

If Buddy Punch doesn’t integrate with your existing provider, you can download payroll reports in Excel, CSV, and PDF formats and then upload them to your payroll provider.

Employee accountability

Beyond simplifying time tracking and payroll, Buddy Punch also offers a lot of features that keep your employees accountable, reducing time theft and labor costs:

• GPS on punch: If your employees work remotely or in the field, you can capture their locations when they clock in and out to make sure they were on the job site.
• Real-time GPS: If your employees travel as part of their work, you can use real-time GPS to monitor their movements over the course of the workday.
• Geofencing: If you want to make sure employees are on-site when they clock in/out, you can set up geofences that prevent them from clocking in or out when they’re not on location. This works best for field workers working at specific job sites.
• IP address locks: You can also prevent employees from clocking in and out when they’re not on your office’s Wi-Fi. This is best for office workers who clock in and out from their computers on your business’s network.
• Photo clock-ins: Require employees to take a picture of themselves when clocking in and out. You can review those photos on their time cards to make sure that the person clocking in was the person who was billing those hours.
• Facial recognition: If you want to make things even more secure, you can combine Buddy Punch with FaceID to prevent punching unless employees pass a facial recognition validation step.
• Overtime alerts: If you want to prevent unexpected overtime costs, you can set up alerts that notify you when employees are getting close to overtime hours.
• Automatic breaks: Automatically remove unpaid break times from employees’ hours at the end of the day so they don’t have to clock in and out for every break.
• Punch limiting: Block employees from clocking in before they’re scheduled to work.
• Automatic clock-outs: Automatically clock employees out at the end of their shifts.

Some of these features work best when you’re also using Buddy Punch’s drag-and-drop scheduler to create employee schedules. Schedules are distributed to all employees when they’re published, and using the scheduler also lets you use Buddy Punch as an attendance-tracking system.

Paid time off tracking

One of the biggest hurdles for office admins, bookkeepers, and HR professionals is trying to remember to include paid time off in timesheets. With Buddy Punch, you don’t have to.

Buddy Punch can be used to calculate accrued time off. Employees can see how much PTO they’ve earned in the Buddy Punch app, and they can make requests for time off that are sent to their managers for approval. Once the request is approved, PTO is automatically added to the employee’s timesheet.

Pricing

Buddy Punch is one of the lowest-cost apps on this list given its breadth of features, with pricing starting at $3.99 per user per month plus a $19 base fee.

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. Clockify

Clockify is a time and project tracking tool that allows you to track not only the amount of time employees spent working but also what specifically they worked on and for how long. Its ability to streamline the work spent on invoicing your customers makes Clockify very useful for businesses that deal with clients. 

Clockify’s free time clock doesn’t come with a lot of hidden fees. It comes with unlimited users and projects. You don’t have to pay more to set custom rates for different projects. You can also export the time card data into CSV, PDF, or XLS formats at no extra expense. 

Unfortunately, despite the amount of free features, the rest of Clockify’s more advanced features are under their paid plans. If you need more than what the free plan provides, then you’ll have to invest in them. If you only need these basic tools though, Clockify can be the perfect option. 

Pricing

Clockify’s free plan boasts a large number of capabilities, such as unlimited users and projects, mobile and desktop apps, reports and exporting, idle detection and reminders, and 80+ integrations with other project management tools. 

But if you need other features such as time-off tracking or single sign-on, you’ll have to investigate the other pricing plans, which can get complicated because many features are contained within different plans.

3. ClickTime

ClickTime is a combined timesheet and resource planning platform that helps agencies keep track of project work for clients. It helps with improving your planning and forecasting to make sure that your projects stay on budget. 

Employees are able to log their tasks as either billable or non-billable, which allows higher-ups to identify the non-billable tasks that are increasing labor costs the most. 

ClickTime also automatically takes all of your data and puts it alongside your future plans to create ways for you to understand how much time and how many tasks it’ll take to complete bigger projects, how many hours have been worked in contrast with how much was predicted, and how much work is assigned to each team member.

Pricing

ClickTime’s pricing starts at $12 per user per month for up to 25 users and includes time tracking, reports, and email reminders. However, most of the platform’s more unique resource management and budgeting features are only included as part of its $27/user/month plan.

4. ADP

ADP is unique on this list as one of the only tools that features a time clock with advanced biometric features like facial recognition, fingerprint scanning, and voice recognition. It features these natively — most of these other services only have facial recognition via an integration with another app. 

Employees can also use ID badges to clock in and out on ADP devices, so if you need these kinds of things, ADP is absolutely worth considering.

ADP also features GPS tracking and geofencing, employee scheduling, and overtime calculations, as well as integration with ADP’s other services — it’s a full workforce management platform that includes fully functional payroll and HR suites. 

Pricing

No public pricing is available for ADP; you have to talk to someone on their team to get a quote.

5. Hubstaff

Hubstaff is unique on this list as it offers both location- and activity-tracking features in one app. It can be used to log GPS locations when punching in, create geofences, and track locations in real time. 

It also allows you to track and monitor employee activity and productivity, such as tracking the websites and apps that an employee uses when working, identifying when employees are idle while on the clock, and capturing screenshots of what they’re working on throughout the day.

This means that Hubstaff is useful for a range of businesses, especially those that have field and office workers. It provides the tools you need to prevent time theft for any type of worker and job responsibilities. 

Pricing

Hubstaff’s plans start at $4.99 per seat per month with a two-seat minimum. That plan includes activity levels, limited screenshots, and limited app and URL tracking. Its location-tracking and geofencing features are only available in a separate add-on package that costs an additional $4 per seat per month. 

6. Paymo

If you just need a simple tool that can be used to manage projects as well as track time, Paymo might be what you need. It comes with the usual features of a project management tool, like Gantt charts, Kanban boards, to-do lists, and task calendars — as well as time-tracking, team scheduling, and timesheets. 

You can use Paymo to send online invoices and create estimates from project plans, as well as track expenses, measure employee performance, and see which one of your clients is the most profitable. It even integrates smoothly with tools like Slack, Typeform, Lambda test, and Google. 

Paymo’s free plan can be accommodating for smaller teams with simpler needs. With the free plan, you can also add unlimited employees and tasks for up to five clients and 10 projects, which can be sufficient for smaller agencies. 

Pricing

Paymo has a free plan that’s available for up to five clients and 10 projects; paid plans start at $5.90 per user/month.

7. Connecteam

Connecteam is useful if you only need a time clock app, but you can also combine those features with their human resources management tools. 

Connecteam features GPS tracking and geofencing in their timesheet software. Managers can create and assign shifts to employees, as well as send notifications to them and handle shift swaps. The system even supports things like overtime calculations, break management, and custom workweeks. 

Combining the time tracking and the HR package gets you all of your HR features into a single platform — you can make onboarding checklists, store all employee documents, run performance reviews, and create courses for training and certification. 

Pricing

While all of the time clock, communications, and HR tools are part of the Connecteam platform, the different features are packaged into three different suites that all have their own pricing. A free plan is available on each package for up to 10 employees, then paid plans start at $29 per user, per month, per suite.

8. Toggl Track

All of the other apps on this list only offer web-based apps, which means they will work on any device with an internet connection. But if your employees are using devices that don’t have internet access, Toggl Track can provide what you need — it’s one of the few time clock systems that offers a Windows desktop app. 

This means that employees can use the system whether or not they’re connected to the internet, so time can be tracked whether the employee has Wi-Fi or not. 

When it comes to time-tracking features, Toggl Track is designed for tracking employee time and productivity. It has a feature that detects when employees are idle when clocked in, and it can send employees notifications to remind them to clock in and out when they need to. 

This can save on labor costs, as well as help you avoid having to manually change time cards for employees. 

You can also track employee work hours automatically, attach employee time entries to specific tasks and projects, and use other integrations to fuse your time-tracking data with tools like Trello, Asana, Slack, and Google Calendar. 

Pricing

Toggl Track has a free plan for up to five users; paid plans start at $9 per user/month.

9. TimeCamp

TimeCamp is another great option for agencies and consulting businesses. It can be used as a combined time clock, project management, and team communication system when combined with their other product, TimeCamp Planner. 

The time clock feature offers both automated and manual options to do its job. Its automatic tracking feature monitors what applications, websites, and documents are used by employees to create timesheets without manual input. 

Employees can also log their hours as either billable or non-billable. Custom hourly rates can be assigned to projects and tasks, and TimeCamp can generate invoices based on those billable hours that are tracked. 

TimeCamp offers browser extensions for Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge; it’s one of the only apps on this list with a specific Edge extension.

Pricing

TimeCamp does have a free plan for both of its products. TimeCamp’s free plan includes timesheets for unlimited users, and TimeCamp Planner’s free plan includes unlimited users, tasks, and projects. 

For more advanced features, you’ll need to update to paid plans, which start at $2.99 per user per month for Time Camp and $2.99 per user per month for TimeCamp Planner.

Choosing the best timesheet software for your business

Even though we’ve managed to narrow down the options for timesheet software that are worth considering, figuring out which one is best for your business is going to be a matter of trial and error. Examine their features to determine what you do and don’t need, then test drive the apps you’re considering in a free trial.

If budget is your biggest concern, you might like Clockify — though your use of features will be heavily limited with the free plan. If you’re a large business with complex needs and as much budget as you want, you may want to go with ADP.

But if what you’re looking for is a versatile tool with features that you can enable or disable as you see fit, a design that’s simple enough that team members can fully understand it after just a few minutes, and a customer support team that’s ready to assist you, then you really can’t go wrong with Buddy Punch.