Technicians log time against the job as they work, and you get labor cost per job that is accurate enough to price from: regular, overtime, drive time, and standby, each at the right rate, ready for payroll and ready for costing. No Friday reconstruction, no round numbers that quietly hide an hour.
The live Taskade Genesis app on this page shows a working time record. Open a week, see how entries roll into jobs and into payroll, then use it and a running copy is yours in about ten seconds. Try the finished system rather than a description of it.
That app is the Time Tracker, a live Taskade Genesis app you can click through and clone in about ten seconds. It is not a full job costing system out of the box, so treat it as the starting point: clone it, then carry its time entries across and describe the rest of this build to Taskade Genesis.
The build is a real time record. Each entry carries the technician, the job, the date, the start and end time, the category, and any notes. Entries roll up two ways at once: by job for costing, and by person and week for payroll. The agent flags what needs attention rather than making you hunt: overlapping entries, a shift with no lunch on a day that requires one, drive time that exceeds the plausible distance, and jobs with labor logged but no work recorded. Approvals are explicit, so the numbers that reach payroll have been seen by a human.
Read the data in whichever layout fits:
- Table view for the approval pass, every entry with technician, job, hours, and category
- Calendar view to see the week per technician and spot gaps or overlaps
- List view for one technician timesheet in order
- Board view to move weeks through submitted, reviewed, approved, and exported
- Plus Mind Map, Gantt, and Org Chart across the 7 project views
Automations close the week. With Taskade automations, a job marked complete prompts the technician for any missing time, an unsubmitted timesheet gets a reminder before the payroll cutoff, and approval exports the period. Across 100+ bidirectional integrations, calendars pull scheduled hours in while email and Slack push reminders and approvals out. See task complete triggers and scheduled automations.
The AI agents in the app carry 34 built-in tools including persistent memory, file analysis, web search, custom slash commands, and multi-agent collaboration. The Timekeeping agent learns your normal patterns per service type, so an entry that is far outside the usual range for that work gets a gentle question rather than being discovered three weeks later in a margin review.
Use the app, invite the crew and your bookkeeper, and the entries, the approvals, and the cost history are yours.
Explore live time tracking apps in the Community Gallery, start a build at Taskade Genesis, or read the finance app guide. Labor cost feeds job profitability by crew, and after-hours hours arrive from the on-call rotation.
Two habits distort field labor data more than anything else: reconstruction and rounding. Reconstruction happens when a technician fills in the week on Friday, and it is always tidier than reality. Rounding happens when everything becomes a neat hour or half hour, which quietly hides the twenty minutes at the supply house and the forty-five minutes lost to access. Capturing time on the job card as work happens removes both. The numbers get less flattering and far more useful, and the first honest month is usually the one that explains a margin question the owner has been carrying around for a year.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do technicians log time without it being a chore?
They start and stop on the job card itself, which is already open on their phone, so time capture is two taps rather than a separate app. The entries that cause disputes are the ones reconstructed at the end of the week, and this removes that step.
Does it handle overtime rules?
Yes. You describe your rules, whether that is daily overtime, weekly overtime, weekend premiums, or holiday rates, and each entry is categorized and priced accordingly. Anything ambiguous is flagged rather than assumed.
Can it separate drive time from on-site time?
Yes, and that separation is usually where the surprise lives. Once drive time is visible per job, the true cost of serving distant customers becomes an argument you can actually have with a price list.
What about time spent at the supply house?
Create a category for it. Non-billable time is still real cost, and hiding it inside job hours makes both the job costing and the payroll wrong. Most operators find non-billable time is a larger share than they expected.
Does this replace payroll software?
No. It produces clean, approved, categorized hours and exports them, so payroll runs on real data instead of remembered data. Payroll stays where it is.
Can a technician correct a mistake?
Yes, before approval, with the change recorded. After approval, corrections are adjustments rather than edits, which keeps the audit trail intact.
How does labor cost reach the invoice?
Approved hours flow into the billable lines with the right rate applied, which is covered in same-day invoicing.
How do we handle a technician who forgets to stop the timer?
The agent flags entries that are implausible for the service type or that overlap the next job, so the correction happens the same day while the technician still remembers. Catching it early is what keeps the data trustworthy without anyone policing it.
