Field Time & Travel Clock: Bill and Pay for the Hours You Actually Worked

The problem this kills

It's the end of the day and your technician is filling in a timesheet from memory. Three jobs, two long drives, a parts run, and a forty-minute wait at a gate — and now they're guessing. "Call it two hours at the Henderson site, maybe ninety minutes of windshield time." Those guesses become your payroll and your customer invoices. Round up and you overpay or overbill and lose a customer's trust. Round down and you eat hours your tech actually worked. Either way nobody can prove what really happened, and disputes turn into a coin flip.

The mess compounds. Travel time and on-site time get blurred together, so you can't tell billable hours from windshield time from the forty minutes a tech sat idle waiting for a customer to show up. Overlapping entries sneak in. A job gets a start with no stop. The numbers don't reconcile, and the office spends Friday afternoon chasing techs for clarifications. You don't need a developer to fix this — you need a clock the tech taps in the field and a clean, approved timesheet at the end of it.

What you'll build

A mobile-friendly internal web tool that acts as a per-job clock. The tech logs in on their phone, sees the day's assigned jobs, and taps Start travel when they leave for a site and Stop when they arrive — then Start on-site and Stop when the work is done. Need to log a parts run, a lunch, or idle waiting time? They tag it as non-productive. Every tap captures a real timestamp against a specific work order, so the day builds itself into a daily timesheet that cleanly separates billable, travel, and non-productive time — rounded to your rules.

At day's end the app flags problems before a human ever sees them: a segment that overlaps another, a start with no stop, a missing on-site time for a job that has travel. The supervisor opens one screen, sees each tech's assembled day with the flags called out, fixes or queries anything off, and approves. Only after that approval does the tool export the hours as a clean CSV in the exact columns your payroll and billing systems expect.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The downloadable plan is a step-by-step file you paste into an AI coding agent. It opens by interviewing you about your business — how your techs track time today, where the day's jobs come from and how work orders are named, your exact definitions of billable vs travel vs non-productive time, your rounding and overtime rules, and the messy edge cases like split jobs, two techs on one work order, or a tech who forgets to clock out — and then it tailors the data model, the rounding logic, the overlap checks, and every later step to your answers. This is not a generic template: the agent reads a short spec back to you and waits for your thumbs-up before it builds anything. From there it walks the agent through the job import, the mobile clock, the daily-timesheet assembly with overlap and missing-stop flags, the supervisor approval screen, and the payroll/billing CSV export — each step with a ready-to-copy prompt. There's also a fallback so you can build and use the whole thing today with no integration to your field-service software at all.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This tool feeds payroll and customer invoices, so it ships with the controls that keep those numbers defensible: login so only your crew and office can use it, row-level security so each company only ever sees its own jobs and hours, a complete audit trail of who clocked, edited, approved, and exported every entry and when, a hard human-approval gate so no hours reach payroll or billing until a supervisor signs off, and duplicate guards keyed on tech + work order + segment so the same stretch of time can't be logged or exported twice.

Who it's for

Field technicians, payroll clerks, billing coordinators, and service managers at HVAC, plumbing, electrical, refrigeration, restoration, low-voltage, and property-maintenance operations — anyone who pays people and bills customers for hours in the field and is tired of reconstructing the day from memory. If you can describe how you decide what's billable and how you round, you can build this.

You've got this — start with the plan, paste the first prompt, answer the interview, and you'll have your first tech clocking real travel and on-site time this afternoon.