The 11 Best Employee Time Clock Apps For Managers In 2023

Time clock apps are quickly becoming the go-to solution for managers striving to control when and where their team works and get a more accurate picture of what their workforce is doing.

These apps capitalize on the power of mobile technology and the omnipresence of Wi-Fi to create a unique tool for companies large and small.

To help you find the right software for your company, our experts at Inch have created a list of the best employee time clock apps for managers in businesses of all sizes.

Table Of Contents

  • How A Time Clock App Can Help Your Business
  • The Best Time Clock Apps For Managers
  • Tips to Help You Manage Your Time Clock App

How A Time Clock App Can Help Your Business

Keeps You Informed About Time And Attendance Issues

Keeping track of time and attendance for one employee may not be all that difficult. But, keeping track of time and attendance for two, three, four, five, or more employees can turn into a full-time job all by itself.

With automation and customized reporting, a good time clock app can give you insight into all manner of issues, including:

  • Recurring tardiness
  • Regular, repeated absences
  • Early clock-ins
  • Late clock-outs
  • Excessively long breaks
  • Time theft

Staying on top of time and attendance issues like these may help improve overall workflow and productivity and prevent attendance issues from affecting employee morale.

Provides Insight Into Labor Costs

A full-featured time clock app (like Inch) can provide a high level of detail that can help you control and optimize labor costs throughout your business.

For example, you may gain insight about:

  • The employees and departments that are costing your business the most in overtime
  • The employees, positions, and departments that are using the most time to complete a task
  • How your team’s labor time and cost per hour compares to the norms in your niche
  • How time spent on the job compares to overall productivity

High-level data like this can help you develop tighter control over the workflow, production, task completion, and total labor costs.

Makes For More Accurate Payroll

Some time clock apps allow you to program your payroll policies into the software so that tasks like payroll that fall further down the line run as smoothly as possible.

For example, an advanced time clock app may include features for tracking such variables as:

Setting up your time clock so that it tracks this information for you means that you may be able to spend less time struggling with payroll issues and more time focused on tasks that can improve the way your business runs.

The Best Time Clock Apps For Managers

1) Inch

Inch is a powerful voice-operated workforce management and optimization app that seamlessly incorporates a time clock into its broad and useful suite of tools.

On the employee side of things, Inch gives your team the power to clock in and out of their shifts from their phone or a designated terminal mounted in a vehicle or at each location.

Like its sister app, Sling, Inch gives you the option to set up geofences around your place of business or a remote worksite so that, if an employee is outside those limits, they won’t be allowed to clock in until they cross into the defined space.

That’s powerful control over when and where your team works!

2) Sling

Source: getsling.com

Sling makes the list of the best employee time clock apps for two very important reasons:

  1. It offers powerful employee clock-in/clock-out and time-tracking features
  2. It provides other tools that help you streamline a large portion of your scheduling, communication, and employee-organization work

First and foremost, Sling offers a unique feature that turns any phone, tablet, or computer into a time clock. It allows your employees to clock in and out of their shifts without clogging up a central terminal. Sling even notifies you when an employee is running late or forgets to clock in.

And if you’re worried about your employees clocking in early, Sling gives you the option to set up geofences around your place of business. If an employee is outside those limits, they won’t be allowed to clock in until they cross into the defined space.

And that’s just the employee time clock portion of the app.

You also have access to state-of-the-art scheduling tools that help you build your employees’ schedules within minutes instead of hours. You can manage time off, availability, and shift-trade requests without collecting, sorting, and collating a huge stack of paper.

Add to that the onboard artificial intelligence that will help you schedule overtime and avoid exceeding your labor budget, and you’ve got a powerful ally in keeping expenses under control.

Sling will even help you reduce absenteeism and late arrivals and keep track of overlapping shifts and double-booking.

3) Harvest

Source: getharvest.com

Time tracking can unlock key information about your business, but, as we mentioned above, remembering to do it and keeping everyone on track can be a challenge.

Harvest makes it easy to track time and expenses so you can access critical data without driving yourself (or your team) crazy.

Timesheets provide a wealth of information that can help you manage your diverse team more intelligently. Harvest collates this raw timesheet data into a visual summary of where your team’s time is going.

While Harvest does a great job keeping track of time on specific projects, it’s not an employee time clock app per se, nor does it tabulate attendance directly.

If you’re looking for an app your team can use to clock in and out and that will also help you with reporting, labor costs, and scheduling, Inch is the better choice.

4) Justworks Hours

Source: justworkshours.com

Disorganized record keeping, inaccurate payroll, and inconsistent protocols can quickly become expensive burdens for your company.

On the surface, asking employees to use a paper timesheet might seem to be the easiest option, but the reality is that this practice will hurt your business in the long run.

Using Justworks Hours, you’ll avoid costly labor disputes and expensive overtime and never have to run a correction payroll again. Plus, the app is easy to use, so you won’t get pushback from your team.

While Justworks Hours does offer messaging and communication features, it lacks the other organizational tools that make Inch such a powerhouse.

5) TSheets

Source: tsheets.com

For employees who work remotely or switch jobs or locations regularly, there’s the TSheets time clock app.

Using the devices they already have and are familiar with, your employees can track time quickly and easily with convenient clock in/out reminders, employee breaks, and overtime alerts to keep everyone on the same page.

Employees can clock in and out on their desktop, laptop, or mobile phone using iPhone or Android apps, text messaging, or dial in. Even offline or out of service, TSheets accurately tracks time and automatically syncs when back in range.

What TSheets won’t do is help organize work and keep your team members focused. It doesn’t offer built-in communications. And it doesn’t have a powerful, real-time task list. Only Inch has that.

6) Timesheet

With the Timesheet app, you can keep track of your on-the-clock remote team and receive instant alerts when they’re away from their job location.

Timesheet will even remind your employees to clock in and out so they never miss a shift when they’re available to work. Once they’re finished for the day or week, Timesheet allows them to approve their hours worked while they’re online, so there’s no delay in processing payroll.

Timesheet is great for managing individuals and teams spread across a wide area, but it falls short of the power of Inch in the task management, team communication, and data reporting departments.

7) Hubstaff

Source: hubstaff.com

If you have a business with a remote team, Hubstaff offers the basics to help you run your remote workforce better.

With Hubstaff, you get:

  • Time tracking
  • Online timesheets
  • Productivity monitoring
  • GPS tracking
  • Headache-free payroll
  • Team scheduling

You also get project budgeting and invoicing capabilities to help you manage the front and back end of all your activities.

Hubstaff is more of a project management solution, which means that it is nowhere near as powerful as Inch for ongoing, regular onsite and remote employee management.

If you’re looking for a more well-rounded solution that functions as an employee time clock and task-management channel, Inch is the choice for you.

8) Replicon

Source: replicon.com

With the Replicon app, you can get rid of Excel spreadsheets and paper time cards once and for all.

Centralized time and date gives you the ability to run payroll, bill clients, and reimburse expenses from one place. This allows you to manage your workforce’s time and attendance whether you’re on the go or in your office.

While Replicon is a useful employee time clock app, it lacks the expanded functionality that makes Inch the leader in the industry.

9) ezClocker

Source: ezclocker.com

Like many of the other time-tracking apps on this list, ezClocker allows your employees to clock in or out from their own device or a central kiosk running the software with a unique four-digit pin.

Team members don’t have to remember a complicated password or which email address they used as their username. Four digits is all they need.

Because ezClocker is a digital solution, it means that management doesn’t have to keep track of paper punch cards. Everything’s done online.

It also means there’s less of a chance that errors may occur because you don’t have to transfer hours from the paper time card into the computer — the data is already there.

10) Toggl

Source: toggl.com

Toggl is one of those time clock apps that is more of a project management tool than it is a time-and-attendance tracker, but it is possible to figure out when your employees worked based on the data the software provides.

Toggl keeps track of project time and gathers it together in one place for review. With that information, you can monitor the work and keep your team working productively.

Features include:

  • Powerful time management
  • “One button” time tracking
  • Automated timesheet population
  • Flexible reporting
  • Reports straight to your email
  • Actionable business intelligence

11) UKG

Source: ukg.com

UKG is a full-featured HR solution that also includes a time clock app. Because it’s designed for businesses of all sizes (from small to large to enterprise), the software offers an extensive list of features to choose from.

Some of the ones relevant to this article include:

  • Compliance tool
  • Remote monitoring
  • Employee self-service portal
  • Scheduling assistant
  • Employee time-off balances calculator
  • Integrations with payroll

Small-business managers may find UKG overwhelming because it comes with so many features that your organization won’t use for quite some time (if ever).

Tips To Help You Manage Your Time Clock App Process

1) Comply With All Regulations

To avoid issues with your time clock app and the data it produces, be sure to comply with all local, state, and federal regulations on the subject.

You may need to research issues such as:

It’s also a good idea to consult with an attorney who is familiar with labor laws in your area and industry so that your business maintains full compliance at all times.

2) Write Instructions

Even if you’ve been using a time clock app for years, it can be helpful to have written instructions available for your employees when they need them.

Often, the best place for these written instructions is in your employee handbook.

When instructions are readily available in the handbook, team members can access the information whenever (and wherever) they need it without having to interrupt managers or supervisors.

However you decide to “publish” your time clock app instructions, be as detailed as possible so that employees have all the information they need to track their work hours correctly.

3) Build An Onboarding Process

Whether you’re introducing a new time clock app into an existing workflow or training a new team member to use the existing software, an onboarding process can be extremely helpful for ensuring that everything and everyone works smoothly.

Your onboarding process may be as simple as a brief five-minute demonstration of the app, or it may be as complicated as several hour-long meetings on the subject.

Regardless, a formalized introduction and training program has many benefits.

It allows team members to see how things work. It gives them the opportunity to ask questions if they don’t understand. And it ensures that everyone receives the same information and has the same access.

4) Make Using The Time Clock App As Simple As Possible

There are many different ways to structure your business’s time-tracking and attendance activities. Whatever methods you choose, make using the time clock app as simple as possible.

For employees who use the software every day, starting and stopping their time should, ideally, only take a few seconds.

Keeping the time-tracking process as simple as possible means that your team members won’t get bogged down in an over-complicated process before, during, and after work.

5) Make The Most Of Automation

Many businesses find that making the most of automation is a great way to ensure that they are maintaining compliance with local, state, and federal laws.

Such automation can also help you and your employees maintain a streamlined time-tracking process and productive workflow in all corners of your business.

Apps like Inch often come with built-in automation features, including the ability to:

  • Set wages by employee or position
  • Receive impending overtime notifications
  • See how much each shift will cost your business
  • Maintain a labor budget
  • Create payroll report templates that populate with the latest data

Automation can even make it possible for employees to start and stop tracking time for a wide variety of tasks, projects, and positions with little more than one or two taps on the screen.

6) Prevent Time Theft

Time theft — when an employee deliberately or accidentally accepts wages for work they didn’t do — can be a real problem for many businesses.

When this occurs, the loss of both time and money may have a negative impact on your team and your business as a whole.

With the right time clock app, you can set up the software in such a way that the app does most of the monitoring work for you.

You can also take other steps to prevent time theft from occurring, including:

  • Discouraging long breaks
  • Defining time theft so that everyone knows what it is
  • Following through on consequences if it does happen
  • Incorporating biometrics into the process

For more information on time theft and how it may occur in your business, check out this article from the Inch blog: 10 Types Of Time Theft And How To Prevent Them.

Taking Time Clocks To The Next Level

As a time clock app, Inch is the best. But that’s not the only thing this little beauty does. In fact, Inch takes the time clock app to the next level.

Inch incorporates task management, time tracking, and so much more into one powerful solution.

Inch is designed to make it easier for managers and employees to get aligned on their to-dos, communicate with one another, and ensure that all tasks get completed on time.

Remote and on-site team members can perform a wide variety of tasks right from their tablet or phone, including:

  • Work from a shared task list
  • Get clarity on work that needs to get done
  • Receive voice-assisted reminder notifications
  • Clock in and out of tasks at different locations
  • Complete work assigned to them
  • Communicate with managers and each other

Whether you need time clock solutions for your team or help keeping your employees on task and focused, Inch gives you unprecedented control over an inherently complicated process and makes it easier than ever to create the best workflow for your business.

For more free resources to help you manage your business better, organize and schedule your team, and track and calculate labor costs, visit TryInch.com today

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