The Best Way to Set-Up Time Tracking
Tracking time effectively makes the payroll integration with QuickBooks or Gusto much, much easier. It also helps you accurately calculate the real cost of labor – whether it's site work, admin tasks, or anything in between. JobTread's time tracking tool is fairly robust (as of early 2025), although there are some limitations.
Let's look at our recommended set-up first and then turn to common questions we here from our clients at Smith + Co.
Our Recommended Set-Up
Our recommended set-up has three parts:
- Dedicated cost type for all time tracking
- Dedicated cost group for all admin tasks on a job
- Dedicated job for all admin time tracking
Let's look at each in turn.
Dedicated Cost Type for All Time Tracking
Underneath Settings > Job Costing, you'll find a panel with your "Cost Types." If you've gone through our JobTread Set-Up in 7 Days, you'll know that a Cost Type helps you set the defaults for margin, markup, time tracking, and taxability status. That's determined in this panel.
We recommend using only one cost type for time tracking. You can either use the default Labor cost type or you can create your own (like "Management.")
Why do we recommend this? As you're building out your estimate, you'll be adding a lot of different line items. But when it comes to tracking time, your team only will need to track time against a few of them. Instead of forcing your team to scroll through dozens of line items to find the right one, you'll want to narrow their scope to just a few. That's where a cost type comes in!
Choose one cost type to be active for time tracking so when you're creating your job budgets or estimates, you can easily identify which line items are available for time tracking.
Dedicated cost group for all admin tasks on a job
The next step we recommend is creating a dedicated cost group for time tracking all administrative tasks on a job.
You can keep your non-admin line items where they belong. Put the framing labor in a framing group. Keep the rough plumbing in the plumbing group. You can keep your actual job-related labor in the most relevant group.
However, we recommend creating a group for all of your "admin-related" tasks. These are line items like project management, site work, travel time, maybe even trash haul depending on how your estimates are set-up. You might end up with a group that looks like this:
You may not estimate the time required in this sub-group of cost items, but it will be a helpful way to keep all of your administrative tasks on the job close together so you have easy access to see all the admin time costs together.
Dedicated job for all admin time tracking
Create an "Admin Job" for all time tracking that is not job-specific. This is a simple way to log all administrative time entries that are not related to a specific job. You might put sick time hours, business development, company meeting time, or any other "administrative" task time here.
This is different from the job-related group mentioned above. Anything that is directly related to the job should be logged there. By logging time at the job level, you're accurately capturing real costs of the job. But there are other "overhead" expenses, like time spent in company meetings, that aren't related to any particular job.
That's why you'll want to create an admin job to capture all of that time tracking entries. When you create this job, you'll want to make sure all the cost items added have the right cost type (mentioned in #1).
And you'll want to ignore the "profitability" numbers on the Admin Job – it doesn't matter. You don't need to estimate costs in the Admin Job. It's just a gathering spot for any time tracking that isn't job-related.
Those are our three recommendations for creating a really robust time tracking set-up for your team. Now let's turn to common questions we hear from clients.
Common Q&A
Does JobTread allow you to track PTO?
Not really. Upvote this feature request to help tell the product team that they should do this. If you're automatically integrating with QuickBooks or Gusto, any time logged under a "Holiday Time" cost item you create, for example, would show up as additional time worked. That's not ideal.
If you're using a PEO or some other payroll solution where you're manually uploading hours, a standalone cost item like "Holiday Time" may work – but it's not a perfect solution.
Does JobTread prevent overlapping entries when time is entered manually?
While clocking in and clocking out is the easiest way to help your field team track their time, it's likely they will need to enter manual time at a later date. You will want the admin person who approves time to keep a keen eye, because JobTread does not currently prevent overlapping entries.
That means a worker could enter in time (manually) for 12:00 to 1:00pm, twice. When running payroll, it would pay them for 2 hours worked even though it's a duplicate entry.
Currently, JobTread does not prevent this from happening. Vote for this feature request to help tell the product team that they should develop this. In the meantime, someone on your team will need to double-check time entries before approving them.
Why can't my team member log time on a job?
If you're seeing this error:
The most common culprit is that you have not added cost items to the budget with the right cost type. That's why we recommend setting up a reusable cost group template (more here) that you will use and re-use on many jobs. That template should automatically include the cost items you'll use to track time.
However, if you're seeing this error:
That means you have not added fully burdened hourly rates to the user in their settings. JobTread does not know how much cost it should track for every hour entered. You can set this by going to your Settings > Members and then clicking "0 Rates" and adding their fully burdened hourly rate.
If you need any help setting up time tracking in JobTread or troubleshooting any errors, reach out to our team at Smith + Co. We'd be happy to help.