Mobile time tracking

Crews clock in and out from a phone — no app to install, just bookmark the site to the home screen. Time tracking is one of those areas where the right tool pays for itself in a single payroll cycle: accurate hours, no Sunday-night spreadsheet reconciliation, and every hour tied to the right job for profitability tracking.

How it works

Crew opens constructionscope.net, logs in (one tap after the first time — the browser remembers the session), picks the job from their assigned list, taps Clock In. Time accumulates in the background. At end of shift, Clock Out. The hours appear on the foreman's review screen the moment the crew member taps.

Multiple jobs per day work too. Clock out of job A at 11am for lunch, clock into job B at 12pm. Each block of time is tagged with its job. No mental math at end of day, no "wait, was I on Bennett or Northline this morning?"

Adding to the home screen

First-time setup matters because crew members will only do it once and then forget about it. Walk them through:

• iOS Safari: open constructionscope.net → tap the Share button → Add to Home Screen. The site icon shows up on their home screen like a real app.
• Android Chrome: open constructionscope.net → menu (three dots) → Add to Home screen. Same result.
• After adding, they tap the icon to launch directly into the login (or the dashboard if their session is still valid). Faster than opening a browser and typing the URL.

Foreman approval

Friday afternoon, foreman opens Time & Materials and walks through the week. Each entry shows who, when, what job, and how many hours. Foreman can approve as-is, edit (correcting a wrong job assignment or trimming an obviously long lunch break), or reject (for entries that shouldn't have been logged). Approved hours flow into the next invoice as billable line items.

If your billing model is time + materials, the foreman approval IS the billable trigger — get into the habit of approving at end of week, not end of month. Customers expect timely invoices on T&M work, and weekly cadence also catches accidents (a crew member clocking the wrong job for three days) before they cause real billing problems.

Adoption tips

Time tracking is one of those areas where the tech is easy and the people work is hard. A few patterns from shops that got adoption right:

• Make their paycheck depend on it. "Payroll only processes hours that were clocked" eliminates the 'I forgot' problem after one pay cycle. Adoption hits 100%.
• Set up everyone's home-screen shortcut on the first morning together. Doing it for them is the difference between 'I'll do it later' (never) and 'it just works' (always).
• Don't punish honest correction. If a crew member clocks the wrong job and asks the foreman to fix it, fix it without comment. If they get yelled at for honest mistakes, they'll stop clocking in.
• Show them their own hours. Most crew members have never seen their week of work tallied this clearly. The transparency builds buy-in.

Troubleshooting

• "My hours didn't show up" — usually means they clocked into a job they're not assigned to, or the clock-in didn't save (no signal). Foreman can manually add hours to the right job; the audit trail records the manual addition.
• "The app logged me out" — sessions stay logged in for 24 hours of inactivity. If they're logged out, they tap the icon and re-enter their password once. Saved by the browser after that.
• "It says no jobs available" — they're not assigned to any active jobs. Office assigns them via the Job → Crew assignments screen. Takes about 5 seconds.