Simplifying Time Tracking With WorkMax®: A Customer’s Experience

There are times when manual construction time tracking works, such as when managing small field teams or handling less complex projects one at a time. 

Crews write down their hours, someone in the office works through the numbers and payroll gets processed. It’s not perfect, but it gets the job done.

Then the business starts to grow.

More crews. More jobs. Work spreads across multiple cities or even states.

At that point, manual time tracking creates friction. The office staff is left sorting through spreadsheets and handwritten timecards just to piece together payroll.

While hours coming in late or incomplete can happen even with smaller teams, growth makes the issue harder to spot and control.

Ultimately, it creates an environment where everything takes more time, more steps and more effort than it should.

That’s when contractors start looking for a better way — and where a construction time tracking solution like WorkMax TIME starts to make a real difference.

WorkMax in the Real World

WorkMax TIME is a construction time tracking solution that helps contractors capture and manage labor data in real-time from the jobsite.

Instead of relying on handwritten notes, spreadsheets or delayed inputs, it brings time tracking into a centralized system that reflects how work actually happens in the field.

For Mandi Steensen, Vice President of Nystrom Electric and a current WorkMax user, time tracking wasn’t always centralized or automated.

As more jobs and crews were added, gaps in their existing time tracking process became harder for her to ignore, setting the stage for a shift in how time was captured and used across the business.

From Manual Delays to Digital Expediency  

Manual time tracking creates a compounding problem for growing contractors: fragmented hours, late entries and missing details that stack up and slow payroll down every week.

This was the exact situation Steensen experienced before her company moved over.

For Steensen, her team relied on stacks of paper timecards and manual data entry. As they began to work on more jobs at the same time, small inconsistencies began to slow things down.

 A missing detail here, a late timecard there and Steensen and her office staff end up revisiting work that crews had already moved past.

“We were very pen and paper before,” said Steensen “Our guys would turn in physical timecards each week on the day of payroll, and then we would manually go into a spreadsheet and calculate all of their labor hours.”

WorkMax removed that lag by capturing hours in real-time directly from the jobsite as employees clock in and out on their mobile devices, giving Steensen and the office employees a clearer, more immediate view of how time was being spent in the field.

Payroll Simplified

Inaccurate time data slows payroll down — and as crews and jobs multiply, small errors become harder to catch before they cause real delays.

A few missing entries, a correction that needs to be made or a timecard that doesn’t quite line up can slow down the entire process.

What seems minor during the week turns into a longer review at the end, as the office works to confirm that everything is complete and accurate before running payroll.

As operations grow, these problems become more frequent.

For WorkMax users, payroll is no longer built from fragmented or delayed information. Time is captured as the work happens, creating a more complete and consistent record from the start.

Instead of trying to reconstruct hours after the fact, the office is working from data that already reflects what actually took place on the jobsite.

That level of consistency makes payroll more manageable, and for some teams, that means they can bring it back in-house, rather than outsourcing it to a third party.

“Payroll has been cut down to probably four hours a week at the very most,” Steensen said. “WorkMax works very well with our payroll module. In order to create efficiencies, to bring payroll in-house, we couldn’t have done that without WorkMax.”

Connecting Time Tracking to Accounting

Time tracking data that stops at payroll leaves job costing and financial reporting working off incomplete numbers.

Getting hours right is only part of the equation. The real challenge is making sure that data is carried all the way through the rest of the business, so job costs and financial reporting stay aligned across projects.

For Steensen and her team, connecting the dots between time tracking and accounting became much easier after integrating WorkMax with their accounting platform.

With both systems working together, time captured in the field now flows directly into payroll and job costing. Ultimately, eliminating extra steps and giving the team a clearer, more immediate view of labor costs, actual productivity versus expected outcomes, and the potential for unanticipated overtime.

Real-Time Reporting to Analyze Jobsite Trends

End-of-week reporting gives teams a recap, but by then the window to act on labor overruns or scheduling drift has already closed.

During this time, hours are pulled together, and the office team starts building a picture of how labor hours were allocated across jobs.

If something doesn’t look right, there’s not much to do except make note of it and move on.

As project volume grows, that lag becomes harder to ignore. What starts as a few extra hours or a task taking longer than expected can quietly lead to:

• Higher labor costs
• Unexpected overtime
• Project timelines drift from the original plan

With WorkMax, reporting starts to take shape much earlier. As time is recorded in the field, teams can see how hours are spent across jobs in real-time.

That changes how reporting is used. Instead of serving as a recap, reporting becomes something teams can reference, analyze and act on while work is still underway.

“The most valuable functionality is just streamlining our processes from the guys in the field to those of us in the office,” Steensen said. “The application allows us to pull real-time reporting [to make informed decisions fast].”

What Improved Time Tracking Looks Like Day-to-Day

Contractors who move from manual timecards to a system like WorkMax don’t change how work gets done — they change how cleanly everything behind it runs.

The work itself hasn’t changed. Crews are still in the field, projects still need to stay on schedule and coordination across teams is still critical to successfully completing jobs.

What’s changed is everything that happens in the background.

Time is captured as work happens. Payroll processing happens faster and with fewer follow-ups. And teams aren’t stuck chasing down information at the end of every week.

It just feels different. More organized, more predictable and less reactive.

And once you experience what that looks like with WorkMax, it becomes a lot easier to see whether your current process is really working for you or if it’s just something you’ve been managing around.

“It’s been the best of any experience I’ve had previously at other companies I’ve worked for… I’m glad we chose to go with WorkMax when we did,” Steensen said.

Want to see how WorkMax can help you simplify your time tracking? Speak to an expert today!