You cannot manage a three-crew job from a yellow pad that lives in the superintendent’s truck. Hours walk out the gate, cost codes get guessed on Friday, and your PM finds out the stair crew is over budget after the pour. Time tracking only works when the field can do it in under a minute and the office can trust the codes.
Pick Cost Codes the Foreman Will Recognize
If your code list looks like a CSI manual, nobody in a lift will use it. Collapse the list to the twenty activities you actually cost: layout, deck, pour, strip, in-wall, trim, punch. Map those to your accounting codes in the office so the field never sees the long list. When a new activity appears, add a code in the meeting, not in a surprise email.
Capture Time Where the Work Happens
Asking people to remember ten hours of mixed tasks at 3:30 p.m. is how you get fiction. Give the lead a phone workflow that tags a person to a code when the task starts. Geofence the site if you have to, but do not make clock-in a gotcha. The point is a clean daily total, not a surveillance program that makes the craft walk.
Review the Daily Cost the Next Morning
A time system that nobody reads is a timesheet with extra steps. The PM should look at yesterday’s hours against the production unit before the 10 a.m. standup. If the deck crew burned 80 hours on 4,000 square feet, you have a conversation while the forms are still up, not at the monthly review. That loop is the whole reason you bought the software.
Do Not Let Subs Invent Their Own Reality
T&M tickets and extra work need the same codes and the same daily sign-off. If a sub tracks time in a separate app, import it or do not pay it. Dual systems are how you double-pay a weekend crew. Put the rule in the subcontract: no daily ticket, no extra.
Train Once, Then Audit
One toolbox talk is not training. Stand with each lead for a full day the first week. Then audit ten random entries every Friday for a month. The errors you will find are wrong codes and people clocked to the wrong job, not theft. Fix the codes and the habit sticks.
Time tracking is not an IT project. It is how you see production while you can still change it. Keep the codes short, capture the hours in the field, and read the report the next morning. That is the version that survives contact with a real job.
Close the Week Before Payroll Runs
A time system that is still open on Monday morning will fight payroll and your job-cost report at the same time. Set a hard Friday cutoff and a Monday exception window that a PM has to approve. People will learn to close their week if the alternative is a conversation, not a silent correction in the office. That one rule does more for data quality than another training slide.
When a code is wrong, fix it with the lead, not only in accounting. The lead who sees the correction will not make the same miss twice. The lead who never hears about it will keep sending you fiction. Time tracking sticks when the field sees that the numbers come back to them as production, not as a gotcha from payroll.