Time Tracking for the Trades: Pick the Right Setup for Your Crew
On a trade crew, the hours already exist. They just live in a group text, a foreman's memory, and the back of a delivery slip, and Friday is the night you rebuild the week out of all of it. The fix isn't a stricter honor system. It's moving the moment the record gets created, from memory at night to one tap on-site. But the right setup isn't the same for every trade. A fenced framing crew, a pest route with a dozen stops, a tree crew with no signal, and a solar install that has to cost its labor all need different things. This guide sorts that out. Find the kind of crew you are, and the setup follows.
JULY 6, 2026 · BY THE CLOX TEAM
If you run a trade crew, the hours already exist. They live in a group text, in a foreman's memory, on the back of a delivery slip, in "I think we were there till about four." The job isn't tracking time. The job is turning all of that back into a number on Friday, one that you can pay against, bill against, and defend if someone asks. That rebuild is the tax you pay every week, and it comes out of your evening, not your crew's.
Every trade feels this, but they don't feel it the same way. A framing crew stands on one slab all day. A pest tech hits eleven addresses. A tree crew works a canyon with no bars. A solar install has to land its labor against a specific job so the next bid isn't a guess. The right time-tracking setup isn't one-size-fits-all, and this page sorts that out. Figure out which kind of crew you are, and the setup follows.
How to read this page
The four sections below are sorted by the one thing that actually drives your setup: a single fenced site, a route of many stops, dead-signal work, or costing labor to a job. Find the one that matches your day, then follow the trade link to the guide written for it.
01
The Friday rebuild, and why it happens
The problem underneath almost every trade is the same: the record of the hour is created after the fact, from memory, by the person who worked it. Someone texts "7 to 3:30," and that text is now your source of truth. You didn't see the start. You're not going to argue about fifteen minutes on a Sunday night. So the number gets rounded up, a little, every day, by everyone, and you pay it.
The fix isn't a stricter honor system. It's moving the moment the record gets created. Instead of writing the hour down at night from memory, the worker starts it with one tap when they actually get to the site, and the time and place are captured on the spot. Now Friday isn't a rebuild. It's a review of a sheet that's already right.
If you want the full method for that, the how-to-track-employee-hours guide walks through it step by step, and the field-crews guide covers what that looks like for a mixed crew.
Before you pick a setup, it helps to put a real number on what the rounding costs. Move the sliders to your own crew size and rate.
What does time-skimming cost your crew?
Whatever number you land on, that's the recurring cost of creating the record from memory instead of on-site. The rest of this page is about which on-site setup fits your trade.
02
1. One fenced site all day: electrical, framing, drywall, concrete, roofing
If your crew shows up to a site at 6:45 and stays on it, your whole problem is the edge of that site. The gap you're paying for is the parking lot, the truck, the coffee run, the fifteen minutes between "clocked in" and "tools out." The lever is a fence around the slab. A worker has to be standing inside the perimeter to start the clock, so the punch from the truck down the street never gets created.
This is the highest-leverage setup for trades that plant on one job. Draw the perimeter once, decide which crews it applies to, and the clock only starts on-site. We don't re-explain the mechanics here; the geofencing pillar covers exactly how the fence is drawn and enforced, and the honest limits of it. The short version: location comes from the phone, so treat the fence as a strong deterrent, not a guarantee.
The tell for this group
You could point at the one address the whole crew is at today. If that's your day, fence it. Read the trade guide for the specific enforcement window, break, and overtime shape your crew runs.
03
2. Many stops a day: pool, pest, cleaning, landscaping, property maintenance
Route trades don't have one edge to defend. A pest tech hits a dozen addresses, a pool route runs twenty stops, a cleaning crew does six houses before lunch. A single fence around the shop tells you nothing, and fencing every customer's yard is a losing game. The number you're actually missing isn't "were they on-site," it's "how long was the real stop versus the drive versus the sitting."
For a route, the setup is about capturing each stop as it happens and tagging it to the customer or job, so the day reads as a list of real stops instead of one blur from clock-in to clock-out. That turns into two things you didn't have before: an honest per-stop time you can price against, and a record of which addresses actually got serviced. A schedule keeps the day structured, and the clock-in ties to it.
The tell for this group
You bill by the visit or the property, not by the day, and no two days have the same map. If that's you, the lever is per-stop capture and tagging, not one fence.
04
3. Dead-signal work: concrete, tree care, rural framing, fencing
Some crews work where the bars run out. The bottom of a trench, inside a steel building, a canyon full of trees, a fence line three miles down a county road. The trade doesn't matter as much as the reality: the phone loses signal for hours, and any app that needs a connection to save a punch is going to lose the punch. Then you're back to memory, which is the whole problem you were trying to leave.
The setup for these crews has one non-negotiable: the punch has to be recorded on the phone the instant it's tapped, with its real timestamp, and held there until signal comes back and it syncs. No connection required to start or end a shift. The record exists on the device before it ever reaches a server, so there's no version of the day where the shift just disappears. That's what kills "the app glitched and lost my hours."
More on how this holds up in the offline guide.
The tell for this group
You have watched a phone sit at "no service" on a job before. If your crew works past the edge of coverage, offline-first is the feature you check before anything else.
05
4. Costing labor to a job: solar, HVAC, low voltage, flooring
Install trades have a different pain. The hours aren't really the point; the point is whether the job made money. You bid a solar array or an HVAC change-out at a certain number of labor hours, and if the crew ran long and you never caught it, the next bid inherits the same bad guess. Time tracking here is not about catching a padded fifteen minutes. It's about landing every hour against the right job so you can compare what you bid to what it actually took.
The setup is projects and worksites tagging: every punch lands against a job, hours stack up by project as the crew works, and the real labor cost per job is sitting there when you bid the next one. That's the number that turns your last install into your next estimate. Here's the shape of it on a single job.
A simple bid-hours-vs-actual read on one install. The gap on day three is exactly the thing you want to see before you bid the next one, not after.
Eight hours over on a job you bid at fifty-two isn't a rounding error, it's your margin. Seeing it land on the phases that ran long tells you where to pad the next bid. Clox stacks these hours by project as the crew clocks in, so the actual column fills itself. For the estimating side of this, the small-crew job-costing angle goes deeper.
The tell for this group
You quote jobs in labor hours and you have been burned by an install that ran long. If that's you, the lever is tagging every hour to the job, not fencing a site.
06
Most crews are more than one of these
A concrete crew is a fenced-site crew and a dead-signal crew. A solar installer costs jobs and works fenced sites. That's fine, because these aren't separate products, they're settings on the same clock. You fence the sites that stay put, you tag the jobs you cost, and the offline capture is always on underneath because it never hurt anyone. Turn on the parts that match your day and leave the rest.
The common floor under all four is the same: one tap on-site creates the record, so Friday is an approval instead of a rebuild. When the week is done, the hours are already totaled by person and by project, overtime and breaks are already figured, and the whole thing exports straight into the payroll you already run.
Clox exports to Gusto, ADP RUN, ADP Workforce Now, Paychex Flex, and QuickBooks Online as a CSV, and QuickBooks Desktop as an IIF, with an optional live QuickBooks Online sync and Zapier if you want it.
07
Find your trade and start
Pick the section above that matched your day, follow the trade link, and read the guide written for how your crew actually works. Each one goes past the setup into the real 6:45 reality of that trade, the unit you bill by, and the specific Clox mechanism that fits it.
When you know which setup you need, put it on one real job before you roll it out. Clox is free for 14 days with no card to start, and there's a 30-day money-back guarantee if it doesn't fit your crew.
You can start a free trial and have a site fenced or a job tagged this afternoon. The app is on the App Store and on Google Play, and anyone on your crew can also clock in from a phone browser at app.getclox.com, so you can test it on a real crew today.