Timesheet app for contractors
The best timesheet is the one your crew never fills in.
A timesheet is not the goal. It is a workaround for the fact that nobody was recording hours while the work was happening, so someone has to reconstruct them afterwards. Punchless records the hours as the day happens and hands you the finished sheet. What you review on Friday is a document, not an assignment.
What a contractor timesheet is really feeding
Three different systems depend on the same numbers, which is why timesheet errors get expensive quickly.
Payroll
The obvious one. Wrong hours mean wrong pay, and wrong pay means either an overpayment you will not claw back or an underpayment that costs you a technician.
Job costing
Labor is usually the largest line on a job. If hours land on the wrong job, your margins are wrong on both, and you carry that error into the next bid you base on it.
Billing on time and materials
On T&M work the timesheet is the invoice. A customer who queries three hours on a Tuesday needs an answer better than a number written down two days later.
Estimating the next job
Your bid accuracy depends on knowing what similar work actually took. Reconstructed hours make historical data confidently wrong, which is worse than having none.
Overtime exposure
Overtime is earned across the workweek. If you find out on Friday, you have already paid for it. Seeing it accumulate is the only way to have any say in it.
Proving it later
In a wage dispute, an audit or a lien claim, contemporaneous records carry weight that reconstructions do not. Times that all fall on the half hour tell an obvious story.
Timesheets that get filled in
- Written up at the end of the day, or the end of the week
- Hours assigned to jobs from memory
- Chasing the two people who never hand theirs in
- Everything rounds to the nearest half hour
- Job costing inherits every error
Timesheets that arrive finished
- Built continuously as the day happens
- Hours attributed to the site where the work occurred
- Nothing to chase, because nothing is owed
- Real times, to the minute
- Job costing reads the same approved record as payroll
How the sheet builds
01
Your jobs are already the geofences
Customer addresses, the shop, the yard and the supply house each get a radius you set. Nothing about the day needs to be described in advance.
02
Hours attach to jobs as they happen
Arriving at a site opens an entry against that job. Leaving closes it. A day across six jobs produces six attributed blocks, not one total that somebody has to divide later.
03
Drive time is visible and separate
Travel between sites is recorded distinctly from work at a site, so you can decide how to treat it under your own policy rather than having it silently folded into job hours.
04
You approve, then everything downstream uses it
A manager reviews the week, corrects exceptions, and approves. Approved hours feed payroll export, job costing and, on the Pro tier and above, the invoice. One number, one source, no re-keying.
Worth knowing before you switch
Are you tracking employees or subcontractors?
Punchless is built for employees you schedule and supervise. If your crew is genuinely independent 1099 subcontractors, tracking their movements can cut against the independence that classification depends on. That is a question for your accountant or counsel, not for us.
How deep does your job costing need to go?
We attribute hours per person per job site. We do not break labor down by cost code within a job. If your bidding depends on cost-code-level labor, tools like Workyard do that better and we would rather tell you now.
Does it need to reach your accounting system?
Approved hours export to QuickBooks, ADP, Gusto, Paychex or CSV. If your accounting lives somewhere unusual, check the export format during the trial rather than assuming.
What happens to historical timesheets?
They stay where they are. Punchless starts building history from the day your crew installs the app, so export anything you need from your current system before you close it.
Who reviews and how often?
Automatic entries are drafts until approved. Weekly review before payroll works for most contractors. Deciding who owns that step is the main operational change you are making.
Common questions
What is the best timesheet app for contractors?+
It depends on which problem is costing you more. If your hours are broadly accurate and you need deep cost-code job costing, a construction-focused platform will serve you better. If your hours are wrong because they are written down after the fact, you need capture that does not depend on anyone remembering, which is what Punchless does. Be honest about which of those is your actual problem before comparing feature lists.
Can a timesheet app work without employees filling anything in?+
Yes. Punchless generates the timesheet from GPS geofence crossings at your job sites. A technician does not open the app to record time; arriving and leaving is the record. A manager reviews the finished sheet and approves it.
How do hours get assigned to the right job?+
By location, at the moment the work happens. Each job site has a geofence, so entering one opens an entry against that job and leaving closes it. Nobody selects a job from a dropdown, which removes the most common source of misattributed labor in job costing.
Does it separate drive time from work time?+
Yes. Travel between sites is recorded distinctly from time at a site, so you can apply your own policy on whether and how travel is paid or billed. Having the two separated at capture is what makes that policy enforceable rather than theoretical.
Can I use this for 1099 subcontractors?+
Technically it will record anyone who installs the app, but you should think carefully first. Worker classification partly turns on how much control you exercise over how and when work is done, and tracking a subcontractor's movements may work against the position that they are independent. Ask your accountant or employment counsel before you do it. We are not qualified to advise on classification.
Does it do job costing?+
It gives you accurate hours per person per job site, which is the input job costing needs, and those hours flow into billing on the Pro tier and above. What it does not do is break labor down by cost code within a job. If that distinction matters to how you bid, it is worth confirming during the trial.
Next
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