How to Track Hours Across Multiple Job Sites and Subcontractors

If you're running a general contracting shop, your crews are almost never in one place. One truck is at a remodel across town, two framers are on a new build, and a subcontractor you hired last week is somewhere you haven't driven past yet. The question that keeps landing on your desk is simple and annoying: whose hours belong to which job, and can you trust the answer enough to put it on an invoice.

This guide is about the mechanics of that, not the sales pitch. We'll cover how to make each punch land against the right site and the right job, when a whiteboard is genuinely fine, where it stops working, and the specific setup that turns multi-site tracking from a weekly reconciliation chore into something you configure once.

01

The real problem is attribution, not tracking

Most crew owners already track hours in some form. The part that breaks across multiple sites is attribution: knowing that Miguel's 6.5 hours on Tuesday were on the Oak Street kitchen and not the Riverside deck. When hours aren't tagged to a site as they happen, you rebuild that mapping from memory at the end of the week, and memory is where billing leakage lives.

There are two separate tags you actually need, and they're not the same thing:

• Worksite: the physical address where the work happened. This is what a geofence can watch, and it's what you point at when a client asks where your crew was.
• Project or job: the thing you bill and bid against. One project can span several worksites, and one address can host several jobs over its life.

Keep those two straight and multi-site tracking gets a lot calmer. Conflate them and you end up with a report that tells you where people were but not what it was worth.

02

When a whiteboard or spreadsheet is genuinely enough

Be honest with yourself before you buy anything. If you run two or three sites, the same small crew moves between them together, and you bill time-and-materials where a rough number is acceptable, a shared spreadsheet with a column for the job is completely workable. Paper timecards with the site written at the top have run plenty of profitable shops.

The spreadsheet approach has a real ceiling, and it's worth naming so you know when you have hit it. If you want the honest walkthrough of that method and where it stops holding up, we wrote it up separately.

The spreadsheet breaks when crews split across sites on the same day, when people forget which job they were on, when a subcontractor sends hours in a format that doesn't match yours, or when a client disputes an invoice and "it says so on my sheet" isn't proof. If none of those are happening yet, stop reading and go run your business. If they are, keep going.

03

How to make each punch land on the right site and job

Here's the setup that removes the weekly reconciliation, in the order you would actually do it. The idea is to make the correct attribution the easy path so nobody has to remember anything at the end of the day.

1. Enter each address once as a worksite. You define the job sites your crews visit, with a location for each. This is a one-time setup, not a daily task.
2. Create a project for each thing you bill or bid. A project can cover one address or several, so a phased build that moves down the block stays one line in your reporting.
3. Tag punches to a site and a job at clock-in. When an employee punches in, the punch is stamped with where they are and which job it belongs to, so attribution happens at capture instead of from memory later.
4. Optionally geofence the sites that are stationary. For a fixed job site you can lock clock-in to the location, so a punch has to originate at the site to count. Leave your genuinely mobile people unfenced, which we cover below.
5. Let the per-site rollups do the arithmetic. Because every punch already carries its site and job, your reports and exports total by site and by project without you rebuilding anything.

The point of doing it in this order is that the only recurring action is the tap to clock in, which your crew already does. Everything else was configured once. That's the difference between a feature and a chore.

04

Geofenced worksites are a deterrent, and mixed crews need per-person rules

For a stationary job site, geofencing raises the bar: clock-in has to come from the site's location, which discourages punching in from the truck two blocks away or from home. It's a strong deterrent, not a foolproof lock, because the location still comes from the worker's phone. Treat it as a guardrail that catches the casual case, not a tamper-proof seal.

The trap with multiple sites is that not everyone should be fenced. A framing crew that stands on one slab all day is a good fence candidate. A supervisor who visits four sites, a driver, or a materials runner will trip a fence constantly and start hating the app. Clox lets you set enforcement per employee, so your stationary crews are geofenced while your mobile people are not, using the same system.

We're deliberately not re-explaining how geofencing works or the fraud it addresses here. If you want the full mechanism and how location enforcement holds up, the geofencing pillar covers it end to end.

05

Per-site rollups for billing and bidding

Attribution only pays off if you can read it back cleanly. Because each punch already carries its site and job, the numbers total themselves. You get labor hours by worksite for the client invoice, and labor hours by project for your own margin math and your next bid.

That second number is the one that quietly makes you money. When you know the real labor cost of the last three kitchens you did, your next kitchen bid stops being a guess. Multi-site tracking done well isn't just a payroll input; it's a feedback loop into how you price.

What each tag answers

06

When the numbers get disputed, you want proof, not a spreadsheet

On a multi-site job, invoices get questioned more, because the client didn't personally watch your crew the way they might on a single small remodel. When a client pushes back on hours, "my sheet says so" is an assertion. A record that can't be altered undetectably is closer to evidence.

Clox keeps a signed, hash-chained ledger of punches, so the record's integrity can be checked after the fact. This is about the record not being quietly edited later, not about proving the GPS reading was truthful in the first place. Anyone can verify a record on the public page, and there's a fuller writeup of proving hours in the spoke below.

You can see the verifier itself at getclox.com/verify without an account.

07

Subcontractors are a coordination problem, not a feature

Here's the honest part. Your own crew on your own app is a solved problem. Subcontractors who run their own tools are not, and no software toggle changes that. If a sub tracks time in their app and hands you a total, you're trusting their number the same way you always have, and their punches will never appear in your ledger.

There's no magic here, only two workable arrangements, and you should choose deliberately:

• Put the subcontractor's people on your system for the duration of the job, so their punches land against your sites and jobs like everyone else's. This gives you one clean record and one export, at the cost of onboarding them.
• Keep the sub on their own tools and treat their invoice as an external cost against the project. Cleaner for them, but you're back to trusting a total you didn't capture.

Anyone you do bring onto the system clocks in the same way. The mobile app works even in a dead zone, which matters more than it sounds like on a fresh site with no service, and syncs when signal returns.

If a site runs a shared tablet at the trailer instead of everyone's phones, kiosk mode with a PIN covers that too, which is common when a sub crew doesn't want the app on personal devices.

08

One export at the end, split by site and job

The payoff of tagging at capture is that payroll and billing stop being a merge job. Hours come out already split by worksite and project, ready for the client invoice and for your payroll run. Clox exports to Gusto, ADP RUN, ADP Workforce Now, Paychex Flex, QuickBooks Online (CSV), and QuickBooks Desktop (IIF), with optional live QuickBooks Online sync and Zapier.

09

What this costs you in setup vs. what it saves

The whole argument for doing this properly is time arithmetic. The hours your office spends each week untangling which crew was at which address, plus the labor that quietly lands on the wrong job, is the reconciliation tax. Put a rough number on it: your crew size, an honest guess at the minutes lost per person per day, and their rate.

For the broader picture of how all of this fits together across a field operation, start from the pillar. It covers the whole field operation; this post covers one part of it.

10

Set it up once

Multi-site tracking isn't hard once attribution happens at the moment of the punch instead of at the end of the week. Enter your sites and jobs once, fence the crews that stand still, leave the ones that move alone, and let the rollups and exports do the arithmetic. You can start a free trial and set up your first two or three worksites in an afternoon. It runs 14 days with no card, and there's a 30-day money-back guarantee if it doesn't fit how you work.