Contractor time tracking software earns its place if it does four things and stops: it takes the times the crew wrote down, rounds them by a rule you can defend, subtracts the unpaid break, and prices the week against each person's rate with the hours past forty carried onto a separate line. Everything past that is somebody else's product. A contractor is usually pricing two things off the same numbers at once, the pay owed on Friday and the labor that lands against a project, so the week has to add up cleanly in hours before it can be trusted in dollars. Start with the free weekly timesheet template on this site, which holds a row per day for each person, applies the break, splits the week at forty and prints the totals, with no account and nothing to install. When the crew grows past what you want to reprint every Friday, the subscription saves each week under the employee and the pay period, brands the sheet with your company details and exports the run for whoever writes the checks.
What time tracking for contractors has to get right
Four numbers per person per day: in, out, break, total. Get those and the rest is multiplication. The failure mode on a contracting crew is not the math, it is the collection: a card left in a truck, a Saturday morning nobody wrote down, a laborer who moved between two sites on Wednesday and logged the whole day to one of them. A tool that makes entry quick and totals visible while the week is still open catches all three, because a gap in Wednesday is obvious when Wednesday is a row with an empty total staring back at you.
Rounding, worked through
Say a carpenter's card shows 7:08 in the morning and 4:52 in the afternoon, with half an hour off at midday. Rounding to the nearest quarter hour under the seven minute rule, 7:08 is eight minutes past the hour so it rounds up to 7:15, and 4:52 is seven minutes past the quarter so it rounds down to 4:45. From 7:15 to 4:45 is 9.5 hours, and half an hour off leaves 9 hours for the day. Five days of that is 45 hours. At 28 dollars an hour the first 40 hours are 1,120 dollars. The 5 hours past 40 are paid at 42 dollars an hour, which is 210 dollars. The week is 1,330 dollars gross for that one carpenter.
The rule behind the rounding
Rounding is allowed and it is not a license to shave. The federal rule cited below permits recorded times to be rounded to the nearest quarter hour, and it expects the practice to work in both directions over time, so that a crew is neither systematically short nor systematically long. In practice that means one rule applied to everyone: nearest quarter hour, minutes one through seven down, eight through fourteen up, at both ends of the day. Write the rule at the top of the sheet, apply it the same way every week, and the totals will survive being questioned. Rounding only the start times is where it stops being defensible.
One rate is rarely one rate
A contractor with a helper at 19 dollars, a carpenter at 28 and a lead at 34 is running three rates through the same week, and the overtime multiplier applies to each person's own regular rate, not to an average. Keep a rate per person on the sheet rather than a rate per crew, and let the totals build per person before anything is summed. When the week is priced that way, the labor figure you carry across to a project is built from the same hours you paid, which is the only version of the number worth having.
Questions people ask about contractor time tracking software
Do I need a contractor timesheet app, or will a template do?
A printed template handles a crew of a few for as long as reprinting and filing it stays quick. Software earns its cost when saving, searching and exporting past weeks starts taking real time.
Can I round a contractor timesheet to the nearest quarter hour?
Yes, if the same rule runs both ways and applies to everyone. Minutes one through seven round down and eight through fourteen round up, at the start and the finish alike.
How is overtime figured when the crew works two sites in a week?
Overtime follows the person, not the site. Add all the hours that person worked in the workweek, and anything past 40 is paid at time and a half of their own regular rate.
What should a contractor time tracker keep after the week is paid?
The daily hours, the weekly total, the rate applied and the pay period, held per person so any past week can be pulled up whole rather than rebuilt from cards.