The 8 Best Clock In Clock Out Apps for Small Businesses

Clock in clock out apps help companies track employee hours effortlessly and run payroll quickly. But with hundreds of apps on the market, choosing the right one for your small business can be difficult. To help, I’ve compiled this list of the eight best clock in clock out apps for small businesses.

Who is this guide for?

This post is designed for small businesses owners, admins, and HR teams who’ve been using manual methods of tracking time (paper timesheets, punch clocks, spreadsheets) and are ready to upgrade to time tracking software. The apps we selected as the best are those that are easy to use for beginners but powerful enough to scale alongside your business as it grows.

Comparison of the best clock in clock out apps

Platform	Highlights	Features Included	Pricing
1. Buddy Punch	Best for affordability and ease of use	– GPS tracking – Geofencing – Facial recognition – Job costing	– Free trial available – $4.49/user
2. Hubstaff	Best for productivity tracking	– Automatic screenshots – Idle time detection – URL tracking	– Free trial available – $4.99/user
3. QuickBooks Time	Best for mileage tracking	– Automatic time tracking – Robust API – Clock in/out reminders	– No free trial – $8/user
4. Jibble	Best free plan	– Offline time tracking – Automatic screenshots – Slack integration	– Free plan available – $2.49/user
5. Clockify	Best for solopreneurs	– Pomodoro timer – Desktop apps – Project management integrations	– Free plan available – $3.99/user
6. Connecteam	Best for small businesses	– Team chat – Quizzes and courses – Internal help center	– Free plan available – $29/month
7. Homebase	Best for retail and service businesses	– POS system integrations – Tip manager – Employee scheduling	– Free plan available – $20/location
8. Toggl Track	Best for automatic time tracking	– Activity timelines – Privacy-first tracking – Desktop apps	– Free plan available – $9/user

What is a clock in clock out app?

A clock in clock out app is a tool that allows employees to punch into and out of work. The app compiles that clock in and out data into digital timesheets that employers can use to run payroll.

Other common terms used to describe clock in clock out apps are “time clock apps,” “time tracking apps,” “timesheet apps,” and “time card apps.”

Clock in clock out apps are used by all types and sizes of employers in every industry. While they’re most commonly used by businesses that employ hourly workers, they can also be helpful for businesses with exempt, salaried workers for attendance tracking, PTO accruals, productivity tracking, and project tracking/job costing.

The benefits of using a clock in clock out app

Using a clock in clock out app for employee time tracking has many benefits:

• Automate time tracking and payroll: Clock in clock out apps automatically track employees’ hours, calculate those hours, identify overtime, and calculate total pay. This speeds up running payroll since all of the calculations are done for you.
• Reduce payroll errors: Because clock in clock out apps calculate employee hours and pay for you, you’re much less likely to have the types of payroll errors that are caused by manually calculating time and pay.
• Reduce time theft: Many clock in clock out apps come with features that reduce or eliminate time theft, such as GPS tracking, geofencing, and facial recognition. This keeps employees from clocking in off-site or engaging in buddy punching.
• Reduce labor costs: Many time clock apps come with features that protect businesses from unexpected labor expenses. They may prevent employees from clocking in before they’re scheduled, automatically clock them out at the end of their shift, or send you an alert when an employee is nearing overtime.
• Invoice accurately: Most clock in clock out apps let you create job codes or project codes that enable you to track time spent on specific projects, which ensures that you are invoicing clients/customers for every minute spent on their projects.
• Improve productivity: Automating time tracking and payroll saves administrators, accounting teams, and business owners a ton of time. Plus, many time clock apps have employee productivity tracking features that can help you ensure you’re employees are working while they’re on the clock.
• Track time from anywhere: Most clock in clock out apps can be accessed from anywhere on computers or mobile devices, so field and remote employees can clock in and out from wherever they’re working.

However, you don’t have to take my word for it. Here are some testimonials from businesses explaining the benefits they saw from making the switch after moving from manual time tracking to clock in clock out apps:

Key features of clock in clock out apps

The features you’ll want to look for in a clock in clock out app will depend on your business’s specific needs and goals. For basic time tracking, you’ll want to make sure the app has features like:

• A way for employees to clock in and out: If your employees work in different places, make sure to find an app will allow them to clock in and out no matter where they’re working. You may need to look for options with mobile apps, a kiosk feature, or offline access.
• Ease of use: If your organization is going to be using a time tracking app for the first time, you’ll want to make sure the app is intuitive and easy to use even for less tech-savvy employees. The easier the app is to use, the easier it will be to get employees to use it for clocking in and out.
• Automatic timesheets: The best time clocks automatically calculate employees’ regular and overtime hours, compiling all clock in and out data into timesheets. This makes running payroll faster and easier — no more error-prone manual calculations and spreadsheets.
• Reports: The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) requires employers to keep time tracking records for three payroll years. Being able to download timesheet reports help you stay in compliance with this law. Additionally, reports can be helpful for job costing and billing clients.
• Payroll integrations: To simplify running payroll, you’ll want to look for an app that either offers an integration with your existing payroll provider or, if you don’t have an existing payroll provider, offers its own built-in payroll services.
• Data security: Time clock apps may contain private employee data like pay rates, locations, social security numbers, and addresses. To keep your team’s data secure, look for apps with role-based access controls, data encryption, and multi-factor authentication.

Beyond these basics, you may also want to consider a few more advanced features:

• Employee accountability features: Features like GPS tracking, geofencing, facial recognition, automatic screenshots, URL tracking, and idle detection ensure that employees are actually doing work when they’re billing time to your company.
• Project tracking features: Features that let you attach hours worked to specific customers, jobs, projects, or tasks make invoicing easier, allow you to evaluate a project’s profitability, and ensure you get paid for all of the time you worked on a project.
• Additional HR features: It’s often helpful to consolidate processes into one tool so you’re not paying for multiple software subscriptions. Time clock apps with features like employee scheduling, PTO tracking, and communication features can help you reduce your expenses.

Beyond this, look for an app that’s secure. Time-tracking tools often house sensitive data like employee PII and pay rates, so security is essential. Look for features like data encryption, role-based access controls, and regular backups to protect employee information.

The 8 best clock in clock out apps for small businesses

Here are the eight best clock in clock out apps for small businesses, along with information on their features, pricing, and what types of businesses they’re best for.

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Buddy Punch is my top overall pick because of its wide range of features, low costs, simplicity of use, and high customer ratings.

Why I chose this app

In my previous business, I managed 20 employees who worked across three different locations. I was using manual punch clocks for time tracking, but running payroll was an extremely time-consuming, error-prone process.

To solve the issues I was running into, I started looking into time clock apps, but none of the options on the market did exactly what I wanted them to do. So I paired up with my cofounder to build the app we needed, and Buddy Punch was born.

We’ve built Buddy Punch to solve all of the issues that business owners run into with time tracking, and we constantly make the app better by listening to our customers’ requests. Here’s one of my favorite customer reviews:

Clocking in and out

When your staff logs into the app, they’re presented with the option to punch in, punch out, or view their current time card. This makes it easy to get your team up and running using the system — no training is required.

Buddy Punch is a web-based tool, which means you and your team can use it on any internet-connected device. Access Buddy Punch on a computer that uses any operating system, or download its apps that are available for iOS, Android, and ChromeOS.

This makes the app work for you no matter where or how your employees spend their working hours:

• If all employees work in the same location, you can download the app onto a tablet and use it as a central time clock kiosk. Employees can clock in/out using a username and password, 4-digit PIN, facial recognition, or QR code.
• If your employees work in the field, they can download the app on their mobile phones to clock in and out. And if they can’t download the app, they can clock in and out by sending a text message.
• If your employees work in different offices or from home, they can log into the app on their computers to clock in at the start of their day and clock out at the end.

Setting up the app

For administrators, setting Buddy Punch up is also as easy as possible. You can add employees manually if you have a small team, or you can simply send us a spreadsheet that includes employee names and pay rates to have us onboard your entire team for you.

If you do run into issues, we’re here to help with excellent live chat customer support. Our customer support is rated 4.8 out of 5 stars on Captera, with customers citing quick response times and personalized support.

Employee accountability features

If time theft is a problem for your business — or if you suspect it might be — Buddy Punch has lots of features that prevent it and keep your employees accountable:

• GPS on punch: If your employees work in the field, you can capture their locations when they clock in and out to make sure they are 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 the app with FaceID to prevent punching unless employees pass a facial recognition validation step.

Features to reduce labor costs

Beyond saving you costs by preventing time theft, Buddy Punch also has features that will help you prevent unexpected labor expenses:

• 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.
• 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.
• Timesheet approvals: Have supervisors or managers review and approve their employees’ timesheets before you run payroll.

Pricing

Buddy Punch offers a free 14-day trial, or you can get a demo of the tool if you prefer. It’s one of the lowest-cost apps on this list given its breadth of features, with pricing starting at $4.49 per user per month plus a $19 base fee. Administrator users are free.

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Hubstaff is the most feature-rich of all of the time clock apps on this list. It has features for tracking time and monitoring employees no matter how they work: in person, on-site, off-site, remotely, in the field, etc.

Why I chose this app

Hubstaff has great productivity monitoring features for computer-based employees. With idle detection, you can see when employees are logging time but not actually doing anything on their computers. With screenshots, you can take random screen captures of employees’ computers to look at what they were doing.

It also has URL monitoring that lets you see exactly how much time employees are spending on time-wasting activities like scrolling through social media sites, reading the news, or watching videos on YouTube.

Automatic time-tracking

If employees forgetting to clock in and out is a problem, you can use the app’s automatic time-tracking feature to trigger clocking in and out based on computer usage. When an employee starts using their computer, it clocks them in, and when they stop using it, it clocks them out.

Robust feature set

Hubstaff offers features like GPS tracking and geofencing for field services teams, idle detection and URL tracking for computer-based teams, project tracking for teams that bill customers by the hour, and HIPAA compliance for healthcare companies. It truly offers every possible time-tracking feature you might need.

Pricing

Hubstaff offers a free 14-day trial. Its basic plans start at $4.99 per seat per month with a two-seat minimum and include time tracking and limited productivity tracking.

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While it’s one of the highest-cost apps on this list, QuickBooks Time is a great option if your organization relies heavily on other Intuit products like QuickBooks Online or QuickBooks Payroll. The app lets you easily share data between Intuit applications — no separate integration is required.

Why I chose this app

While a lot of the apps on this list offer real-time GPS tracking, that feature is typically used to monitor employees’ locations only. QuickBooks Time’s GPS tracking feature also calculates the miles employees travel while they’re on the clock.

This is a must-have feature if you have traveling employees who are reimbursed for mileage. It lets you collect that data automatically — no odometer checking is required.

Automatic location-based punching

Another helpful feature you’ll find in the app is automatic clock-ins and outs based on an employee’s location. If you set up geofences, you can have the system automatically clock an employee in when they get inside of the geofence and automatically clock them out when they leave the geofence, preventing missed punches.

If you don’t want to automatically clock employees in and out, you can also use geofences to send employees reminders to clock in and out when entering and exiting the geofence.

Robust API

Another great feature of the app is its API, which allows you to make quick, bulk changes to your data — adding or deleting employees, geofences, locations, job codes, and more. This is a great benefit for large companies with technical resources who can help automate payroll via the API.

Pricing

QuickBooks Time does not offer free trials or demos. For the first three months of your subscription, QuickBooks Time’s base plan is $8 per user per month plus a $10 per month base fee. After that initial discount, the base monthly fee jumps to $20/month. You must also have a QuickBooks Online subscription to use QuickBooks Time.

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If you want to upgrade your time-tracking from manual punch clocks, paper timesheets, and spreadsheets but can’t afford to pay a monthly subscription for a time clock app, Jibble’s free plan is probably your best option.

Why I chose this app

It is really hard to find a good free clock in clock out app. Lots of options on the market have free plans, but most of them are so limited that you have to upgrade to do just about anything you will need to do. Jibble is the exception, offering quite a few advanced features and a lot of flexibility with no monthly cost whatsoever.

Features included in the app’s free plan

The app’s free plan comes with lots of advanced features that other apps charge a premium for. You can implement facial recognition to prevent buddy punching, create up to two geofences, capture screenshots of what employees are doing on their computers, and capture GPS locations when employees clock in and out.

All of this is available for an unlimited number of employees.

Free plan limitations

You won’t be able to see a history of tracked time in the app’s free plan as it only works for one pay period at a time. You also aren’t able to export reports on the free plan. However, you can integrate with QuickBooks Online, Xero, and Deel on the free plan, so you can push your data to those platforms and access historical records there when needed.

Pricing

You can test drive Jibble by signing up for its free plan, or you can get a free trial of one of its premium plans. The free plan that can be used to track time for unlimited employees. Paid plans start at $2.49 per user per month.

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If you’re a freelancer who works on projects for multiple clients, Clockify offers a great free plan that likely has everything you need to create detailed invoices and ensure you’re billing your clients properly.

Why I chose this app

While Clockify’s free plan works for unlimited users just like Jibble’s, its features are so limited that it’s not a practical choice for multi-employee teams. But if you’re a one-person shop and don’t have to worry about things like FLSA and payroll, it’s a great no-cost option.

Project tracking

The great thing about this app for freelancers who work with clients is that you can add an unlimited number of tasks and projects to it on the free plan. This lets you easily track time spent on specific activities for specific clients.

Plus, Clockify is available on the web and mobile, it has desktop apps for all major operating systems, and it has browser extensions for all major browsers, making it easy to track time no matter where you’re working or what system you’re using to work.

Integrations with project management systems

You can see meetings you spent time in directly inside of the app using its integrations with Microsoft Outlook and Google Calendar, and you can also track time directly within other project management apps you use, like Asana, Trello, Jira, and ClickUp.

Pricing

You can test drive Clockify by signing up for its free plan, or you can get a free trial of one of its premium plans. The free plan includes unlimited users, projects, and tasks. Paid plans start at $3.99 per user per month.

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Connecteam’s small business plan is a great, free option for businesses with fewer than 10 employees. It comes with time tracking and lots of other HR features small businesses need to streamline all of their administrative operations.

Why I chose this app

On Connecteam’s free plan (available for up to 10 users), you get access to lots of different features to help with lots of run-the-business tasks. You can track time, create work schedules, create an employee directory, run employee surveys, build an internal knowledge base, track paid time off, store documents, and more.

Time clock features

As far as its time clock, you can add customers, projects, and locations to track time based on how your employees work. You can see employees’ locations when they clock in and out and send them automatic reminders to clock in and out based on their work schedules.

Finally, you can approve timesheets and integrate with a handful of payroll providers.

Free plan limitations

Other than only being available for 10 or fewer users, the app doesn’t put many limitations on the features available in its free plan for time tracking. However, many features included in paid plans — such as geofencing, real-time GPS tracking, and several customizations — are not included in the free plan.

Pricing

You can test drive Connecteam by signing up for its free plan, or you can get a 14-day free trial of one of its premium plans. The free plan gives you access to its Operations, Communications, and HR hubs for up to 10 users. Paid plans start at $29 per hub per month for up to 30 users.

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Homebase’s time clock application stands out because of its ability to integrate with popular point-of-sale (POS) systems, making it a great option for restaurants, bars, retail stores, and other in-person businesses.

Why I chose this app

Homebase offers direct integrations with Square, Clover, Toast, Shopify, PayAnywhere, and GoDaddy, allowing companies that are already using one of these POS systems to use it for clocking in and out as well. This eliminates the need to purchase a separate device to use as a time clock kiosk for in-person teams.

Location-based pricing

The app’s pricing model can also be appealing if you have lots of employees but only one or a handful of locations. Instead of charging per employee like the majority of other apps on the market, Homebase charges by location, which can make its monthly cost significantly less expensive.

Tip manager

For businesses where employees earn tips, the app has a tip manager add-on that simplifies calculating, pooling, and distributing tips among staff. It takes all of the credit card tips from your POS system, distributes them according to your instructions, and adds them to employees’ timecards to simplify payroll.

Pricing

You can test drive Homebase by signing up for its free plan, or you can get a free trial of one of its premium plans. The free plan is available for businesses with one location and fewer than 20 employees. Paid plans start at $20 per location per month.

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It’s easy for employees to forget to switch projects when they’re multitasking across multiple client projects over the course of one day. With Toggl Track’s automated time tracking, you can ensure all of your billable hours are accurately captured so you can invoice clients for every minute spent on their projects.

Why I chose this app

Toggl Track has a timeline feature that captures everything someone does on their computer while they work. This essentially automates time tracking. Employees can still clock in, choose projects, and switch projects manually, but if they forget to switch projects, they can refer back to the timeline to correct their timesheet.

Employees can also use the timeline at the end of the day to log time for all of the projects they worked on rather than clocking in and out and switching projects throughout the day.

Privacy-focused tracking

Though the app does track everything your employees do over the course of the day, that data isn’t shared with management unless the employee chooses to do so. This can make tracking time with the app more appealing to employees than the more invasive productivity tracking tools.

Client invoicing

When it’s time to bill your clients for the time you spend on their projects, you can easily generate invoices using your Toggl Track time data. It automatically aggregates all time employees spent on client projects into invoices that list the different tasks that were worked on.

Pricing

You can test drive Toggl Track by signing up for its free plan, or you can get a 30-day free trial of one of its premium plans. The free plan supports up to five users. Paid plans start at $9/user per month.

Industry-specific clock in clock out apps to consider

In the list above, I featured the apps that have the broadest appeal and work for lots of different types of industries. However, some industries have very specific requirements that may make the general options a poor fit for their needs. If you’re in an industry with highly specific time-tracking needs, you might want to consider the apps below.

Keep learning

What you’ve just read is only a single chapter in an entire guide to clocking in and out for employers. If you want more tips, use the links on the left (desktop) or bottom (tablet/mobile) to navigate to the other chapters and continue learning everything you need to know to set up an effective time-tracking system for your business.