Time tracking software for construction does one job for the person adding up the week: it takes each worker's start and finish times, takes the breaks off, turns hours and minutes into decimal hours, splits the week at 40 and puts the result against a rate, so the owner knows what the crew cost before the money leaves. On a crew of four or five that is arithmetic rather than a system. Five people, five days, a lunch off each day and a rate per person is twenty five lines of adding, and the mistakes that cost real money are the same three every week: minutes added as though they were decimals, a lunch taken off twice, and overtime worked out on the day instead of the week. The free construction crew timesheet on this site does that week in the browser with no account: enter the times, it takes the breaks off, converts the minutes, splits the hours at 40 and prints the sheet the foreman signs. The paid product saves the same sheet against the employee and the pay period, so a question about a job in March has one answer.
What construction time keeping software does that a blank sheet does not
Three things. It has to convert, because a card written in hours and minutes cannot be multiplied by a rate until the minutes become decimal hours. It has to take the unpaid break off every day, once, in the same place, so nobody is guessing on Friday whether the lunch was already deducted. And it has to total the week per person before it splits anything, because the split that matters happens at 40 hours in the workweek and nowhere else. Everything past those three is convenience: a copy of last week's crew, a job name against the hours, a sheet the foreman signs. If a tool does not do the three, the foreman is still doing them on the back of the card.
Time tracking for construction workers: a worked week for one framer
The card reads 7:00 to 3:45 with a half hour lunch, Monday through Thursday. That is 8 hours 45 minutes on the card, less 30 minutes, which is 8 hours 15 minutes, or 8.25 decimal hours a day, so 33 hours over the four days. Friday runs 7:00 to 6:00 with the same lunch, 11 hours less 30 minutes, 10.5 hours. The week is 43.5 hours. At 28 dollars an hour, the first 40 hours are 1,120 dollars of regular pay. The 3.5 hours over 40 are paid at one and a half times 28 dollars, which is 42 dollars an hour, so 147 dollars of overtime pay. Gross for the week is 1,267 dollars.
From hours to the loaded cost per hour
The gross is what the framer is owed. What the job cost is larger, because the employer carries payroll burden on top of the wage, and the crew card asks the owner for that as a factor rather than guessing it. Carry the week above at a burden factor of 1.3 and the loaded cost is 1,267 dollars times 1.3, which is 1,647.10 dollars. Over the 43.5 hours worked that is 37.86 dollars an hour, rounded to the cent, against a wage rate of 28. That loaded figure, not the wage, is the number to bid the next job with, and the crew timesheet on this site prints it per worker and for the crew together.
Overtime is a property of the week
Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, overtime for a covered nonexempt employee is owed on hours worked over 40 in a workweek, at not less than one and a half times the regular rate. The workweek is a fixed and regularly recurring period of 168 hours, seven consecutive 24 hour periods, and it does not have to start on Monday. Two things follow for a construction crew. A twelve hour Tuesday is not overtime by itself; it only becomes overtime if the week ends above 40. And a crew working across two jobs is still one employee with one weekly total, so the split at 40 happens after the jobs are added together, never inside one of them.
Keeping construction timesheets after the week is paid
The sheet is not finished when the pay run is. Federal recordkeeping requires an employer to keep, for each nonexempt worker, the hours worked each day and the total hours worked each workweek, along with the basis on which wages are paid and the regular hourly rate, and to keep payroll records for three years. A printed card in a truck satisfies nobody a year later. Saving the week against the employee and the pay period, with the times as entered and the decimal hours the tool produced, is what turns a pile of cards into an answer, and that saving is what the subscription on this site does.
Questions people ask about time tracking software for construction
Does a small construction crew need software at all?
Not to be legal. It needs the hours per day, the weekly total per person and a record. Software matters when the adding takes an hour every Friday and the errors start costing more than the tool.
Can timesheets for construction workers handle two jobs in one week?
Yes. Enter the hours per day against the job they were worked on, then let the week total per person decide the overtime, because the 40 hour split belongs to the employee and not to either job.
What rate should the burden factor be set to?
The one your own books support, from the wage plus the employer costs you actually carry on it. The tool asks for the factor rather than assuming it, because the honest number differs by trade and by state.
Is the construction crew timesheet free?
Yes, the crew timesheet runs in the browser with no account and prints the week. Saving each week against the employee and the pay period is the paid product.