Best Time Tracking App for Construction Crews (2026 Prices)

The best time tracking app for construction depends on your crew size and what you already use for payroll. For most Canadian crews under 30 people, that's ClockShark, busybusy, QuickBooks Time, Workyard or Connecteam — five apps I checked against their own 2026 pricing pages, not marketing copy.

Not sure what to fix first? Take the 60-second quick fix and get one fix you can use this week.

You've got guys writing hours on the back of a job ticket, or texting you "in at 7, out at 3:30" from memory at the end of the week. Payroll eats an extra hour every two weeks just untangling it, and you've got no real record of who was on which job when.

A proper crew time clock app fixes that in one install: GPS-verified clock-ins, time logged against the right job, and a timesheet that goes straight to payroll instead of through your head first.

What a Crew Time Tracking App Actually Needs to Do

Before you pick one, know what you're actually buying. A time tracking app for trades isn't just a digital stopwatch. For a construction or trade crew, it needs to do four things:

• GPS verification — confirms someone actually clocked in from the job site, not from their couch
• Job and cost-code tracking — time logged against a specific job, not just a day total
• Payroll export — timesheets that flow into Wagepoint, QuickBooks Online Payroll, or whatever you run, without you re-typing anything
• Supervisor approval — a foreman signs off on hours before they hit payroll, catching errors before they cost you money

If an app is missing any of those, you'll end up running it alongside a spreadsheet anyway, which defeats the point. The best employee time tracking app in Canada isn't always the same pick a US crew would make — payroll export and provincial overtime rules change the answer.

Time Tracking Apps for Construction and Trades, Compared (2026)

Here's what each one actually costs as of 2026, pulled from each vendor's own pricing page. ClockShark, busybusy and Workyard list in USD; QuickBooks Time's Canadian site lists in CAD. Convert before you compare line to line.

busybusy's free tier and Connecteam's free-under-10 plan are worth testing first if you're a very small crew — both let you run real GPS time tracking at zero cost before you commit to a paid plan anywhere else. If you need quoting, scheduling and invoicing too, not just time tracking, our comparison of job management software for small contractors covers that broader category.

1. ClockShark — Best All-Round GPS Time Clock for Small Construction Crews

ClockShark was built for field service and construction crews specifically, not adapted from an office tool. It handles GPS-verified clock-in/out, drag-and-drop scheduling, and job and task tracking, so your crew's hours land against the right job automatically.

The Standard plan runs $40 USD/month as a base fee plus $9 USD per active user per month. Pro, which adds paid time off, multi-department controls and advanced job costing, runs $60 USD/month plus $11 USD per active user. For a five-person crew, that's roughly $85/month on Standard or $115/month on Pro.

One thing worth knowing before you sign up: ClockShark's published pricing carries a 3-year contract term, longer than most tools in this category. Ask about month-to-month before you commit if that matters to you. It connects to QuickBooks, Xero, Sage, ADP, Gusto, Paychex and MYOB, so getting hours into payroll is usually a sync, not a re-type.

2. busybusy — Best Free Time Tracking App for Construction Crews

busybusy is the one to try first if you're not ready to pay for anything yet. The Free plan includes GPS clock-in/out, location reminders, break tracking and digital timecard signatures, with no user cap published.

If you need more — custom permissions, supervisor tools, clock-in photo verification — Pro runs $9.99 USD per user per month billed annually ($11.99 month-to-month), and Premium adds team messaging and daily project reports at $14.99 USD per user per month annually ($17.99 month-to-month). It syncs natively with QuickBooks Online, so for a crew just getting off paper timesheets, busybusy is the lowest-risk way to start — you can run the free version for months before paying for anything.

3. QuickBooks Time — Best If You're Already on QuickBooks Online

QuickBooks Time, formerly TSheets, is Intuit's own time tracking tool, and the pitch is simple: if your books already run through QuickBooks Online, this is the version with the fewest moving parts between a clock-in and a paycheque.

On the Canadian pricing page, Premium runs $30 CAD/month as a base fee plus $10 CAD per user per month. Elite, which adds project cost reporting and mileage tracking, runs $55 CAD/month plus $15 CAD per user per month, with a 30-day free trial either way.

The catch: QuickBooks Time isn't sold on its own anymore. You need an active QuickBooks Online subscription, or QuickBooks Payroll, to run it, billed separately on top of the numbers above — an extra cost to factor in if you're not already in the QuickBooks ecosystem.

4. Workyard — Best for Fully Automatic GPS Tracking

Workyard's whole pitch is that your crew shouldn't have to remember to clock in at all. It runs continuous, geofenced GPS tracking through the shift and flags anyone who clocks in from off-site, which matters if "I forgot to punch in" is a recurring excuse on your crew.

The Starter plan runs $6 USD per user per month and covers the basics: automatic time tracking and GPS. Pro, which adds scheduling, task management and labour cost reporting, runs $13 USD per user per month. Above that, Autopilot and Enterprise are custom-quoted. There's no permanent free plan, but you get a 14-day trial to test it against a real week of job-site chaos first.

5. Connecteam — Best All-in-One for Mixed Field and Office Teams

Connecteam is worth a look if you want time tracking bundled with scheduling, team chat and HR documents in one app, rather than running separate tools for each. The Small Business plan is free for up to 10 users, forever, with every feature included — genuinely useful if you're a small outfit.

Past 10 users, pricing splits by "hub." The Operations Hub, which includes the GPS time clock, starts at $29 USD/month for your first 30 users on the Basic tier, $49/month on Advanced, and $99/month on Expert, billed annually (monthly billing runs higher). The Communications and HR hubs are priced separately on the same tiers — a great deal under 10 people, and still reasonable for time tracking alone past that, but the cost stacks up faster than a single-purpose app like ClockShark or Workyard once you want all three hubs running together.

Overtime Rules Change by Province — Get This Right Before You Automate It

A time tracking app will calculate overtime exactly as you configure it, including exactly wrong if you set it up wrong. Every province sets its own rules, so don't assume the default settings match where you operate.

In BC, employees get time-and-a-half for hours worked over 8 in a day, up to 12, and double time past 12 hours, regardless of how many hours they worked that week. There's also a weekly rule: time-and-a-half after 40 hours in a week, calculated Sunday to Saturday, counting only the first 8 hours of each day toward that weekly total. Check the full rules on gov.bc.ca's overtime pay page.

If you run crews in more than one province, don't trust an app's default overtime rules to be right everywhere — set the rule per province, and check it against your own province's employment standards office before your first payroll run through the new system. If you're about to put your first employee on payroll at all, our guide to hiring your first employee in Canada is a good starting point, since overtime rules apply from employee number one.

GPS Tracking and Your Crew's Privacy

Every app on this list tracks location. That's the point — it's how you know someone clocked in from the job site and not from home. But GPS tracking of employees isn't a free pass under Canadian privacy law, and it's worth doing this part right from day one.

Canada's federal Privacy Commissioner has looked at employer GPS tracking before, in a case involving company vehicles. The finding: GPS tracking is fine for things like dispatch, scheduling and safety, but employers shouldn't use it to routinely monitor or evaluate individual employees' performance, and workers need to be told beforehand what it's being used for. Read the full case summary on priv.gc.ca. In practice: tell your crew you're switching to GPS-verified time tracking, say it's for payroll accuracy and job costing, and don't use the location history for anything beyond that. Most of these apps only track location during a clock-in, not around the clock — check that setting, and make sure your crew knows it too.

Which One Fits Your Crew

• Solo or two-person crew, just want off paper timesheets: busybusy Free or Connecteam's free Small Business plan — no cost, real GPS tracking, no reason not to start today.
• 3–10 people, want scheduling and job costing with your time clock: ClockShark Standard is the straightest line to a working system built for exactly this.
• Already running QuickBooks Online for payroll: QuickBooks Time, so there's no export step between a clock-out and a paycheque.
• Crew keeps forgetting to clock in: Workyard's automatic, always-on GPS tracking removes the habit problem entirely.
• 10–30 people, want time tracking plus scheduling, chat and HR docs in one app: Connecteam's Operations Hub, and add the other hubs only if you'll actually use them.

A Worked Example: What Switching Off Paper Actually Saves

Here's an example (numbers are illustrative, not a real client's) to show what this is actually worth. Say you run a four-person framing crew doing around $850,000 a year, still writing hours on paper tickets that get re-keyed into payroll every two weeks.

Paper timesheets round in the worker's favour almost every time, not because anyone's cheating, just because "started around 7" becomes 7:00 on the sheet. If that rounds up by even 15 minutes a day across four people, that's an hour of paid, unworked time every single day — at an average all-in labour cost of $35/hour, roughly $175 a week sitting in rounding error nobody's watching. A GPS time clock closes that gap just by logging the real clock-in time. Add the office side: if re-keying paper timesheets into payroll costs two hours every pay period, a tool that exports straight to Wagepoint or QuickBooks Online Payroll gets that block of time back every two weeks, on top of the labour savings above.

One more rule before you commit: run the free trial or free tier first, and put one real pay period through it, clock-in to payroll export, before you pay for anything. If your crew fights the app or the GPS keeps missing clock-ins, switch before you've trained everyone on it — not after. Once you've picked one, don't revisit the decision for at least a year; re-training your crew and re-connecting payroll costs more than most people expect. Our piece on building a job checklist your crew will actually follow covers the same adoption problem from a different angle.

What to Set Up in Your First 30 Days

1. Add every active employee and set their GPS permissions. Make sure the app's location tracking is scoped to clock-in/out, not all-day, unless you've told your crew otherwise.
2. Build your job and cost-code list. Time needs somewhere to land. Set up your active jobs before your first crew member clocks in.
3. Set your province's overtime rules manually. Don't assume the default matches BC, or wherever you operate — check it against gov.bc.ca or your own province's employment standards office.
4. Turn on supervisor approval. A foreman reviews and approves hours before they hit payroll — this catches errors before they cost you money, not after.
5. Connect it to your payroll. Wagepoint or QuickBooks Online Payroll, whichever you run. Do this before your first real payroll cycle through the new system, not during it.
6. Run one full pay period through it before you trust it completely. Compare the export against what you'd have calculated by hand. Fix what's wrong before you scale it to the whole crew.

If your bigger problem is that job costs are murky even once hours are tracked properly, our guide on gross margin for trades businesses is a good next read.

Not sure which platform fits your crew, or want help setting it up right the first time? contact TradeBrain and let's figure it out together.