Timesheets for Small Contractor Crews: What Information Should You Capture?

The Short Answer

A useful contractor timesheet captures seven things for every entry: who worked, which job, what task they did, start and stop time, drive time to get there, any unpaid breaks, and a short note on anything unusual that happened. Without the job attached, a timesheet is just a number — it can't tell you if a job was profitable or where the hours actually went.

Most small crews already track time in some form. The problem isn't the tracking — it's that the data they capture is too thin to use for anything beyond cutting a paycheck. A weekly total of 38 hours tells you what to pay someone. It tells you nothing about why a kitchen remodel ran four hours over budget or whether your fence-install crew is consistently faster than your price book assumes. If you want timesheets that actually help you run the business, you need more structure on the way in.

Who Worked

Obvious, but worth stating: every entry needs a name, not an initial or a guess based on who was scheduled. On multi-person crews, it's common for someone to clock in for a teammate who's running late, or for one person's hours to get logged against the wrong crew member. That's fine for payroll in the short term, but it quietly ruins any attempt to track individual productivity or figure out who to put in charge of a second crew down the road.

Which Job

This is the single most important field, and it's the one most paper timesheets and generic time-clock apps skip or make optional. Every hour needs to be tied to a specific job, not just "Tuesday" or "painting." If a crew member splits a day between two addresses, that's two line items, not one. Job-level time is what turns a timesheet into job costing data — it's the only way to compare what a job actually took against what you calculated the labor cost at when you estimated it. A timesheet with no job attached can tell you total payroll for the week. It can't tell you which jobs made money and which ones didn't.

What Task

Within a job, note the task: demo, prep, install, punch list, cleanup. This matters most on jobs you bid by phase or by room, like interior painting priced per room or a cabinet repaint. If prep consistently takes twice as long as you estimated across several jobs, that's a pattern you can only see if task-level time is separated out. Lump it all into "labor" and the pattern disappears into the total.

Start and Stop Time

Actual clock times, not rounded guesses entered at the end of the week. Rounding to the nearest half hour is fine; rounding a whole day from memory on Friday afternoon is how timesheets become fiction. Start and stop times are also your backup documentation if a customer disputes how long a crew was on site, or if a change order needs to be justified with real hours worked.

Drive Time

Separate drive time from on-site labor time. They're both paid, in most cases, but they cost different things and should be tracked differently. On-site time is what you're billing the customer for (directly or through your rate). Drive time is overhead you need to account for when you're estimating travel time and fuel costs for service jobs or deciding how far out from your shop you're willing to send a crew. Blend the two together and your real labor cost per job looks artificially low — you'll keep underpricing jobs that are actually 45 minutes each way.

Breaks

Unpaid lunch and any other breaks need their own line, even if it's just a start and stop time for the break itself. This protects you on wage-and-hour compliance (a surprising number of small contractors get this wrong without meaning to) and keeps your labor cost numbers accurate. A crew member who's on site for nine hours but working eight is a very different cost than one who's actually working nine.

Notes on Anything Unusual

A short note field for anything that threw the day off: waited 40 minutes for a permit inspector, customer wasn't home at the scheduled time, discovered rot behind the drywall and had to call the office, truck broke down. This is the field crews skip because it takes an extra ten seconds, and it's the field that saves you the most time later. When a job comes in over budget, the note is usually the fastest way to find out why without having to track down the crew member and ask them to remember a Tuesday from three weeks ago.

Why a Weekly Total With No Job Attached Is Useless

If all you capture is "Mike, 38 hours, this week," you can run payroll. That's it. You can't answer any of the questions that actually help you price and manage jobs better:

• Did the fence install take longer than the 14 labor hours you bid, and if so, where did the extra time go?
• Is your two-person crew faster on exterior painting prep than your price book assumes, meaning you could be bidding tighter and still winning?
• Which jobs are quietly losing money because the labor hours ran long but nobody flagged it until the invoice went out?
• Is one crew member consistently slower on a specific task, or is it the job type that's the problem, not the person?

Every one of those questions depends on time being logged against a specific job and task, not just totaled for the week. This is also the backbone of calculating real profit on a job after expenses — labor is usually the single biggest variable, and if it's not broken out by job, your profit number is a guess.

None of this requires a complicated system. It requires picking a format — paper, spreadsheet, or an app — and being consistent about which fields are mandatory before an entry counts as complete. The crews that get the most value from timesheets usually aren't using fancier tools; they're just capturing the job and task fields every single entry, not just when it's convenient.

Where Trusso Fits

Trusso ties time entries directly to the job they were worked on, so hours roll up into job costing automatically instead of sitting in a separate spreadsheet somebody has to reconcile by hand. Crew members log time from their phone against the job they're scheduled for, and the data feeds back into whether a job came in on budget — the same place your estimates, scheduling, and crew management already live. It won't fix a crew that doesn't fill in the notes field, but it removes the excuse of "I'll write it down later." Plans run flat-rate at $29/mo for an owner plus 2 crew, $59/mo for up to 10, or $99/mo unlimited, with a 14-day free trial and no contract.

Get these seven fields right and your timesheets stop being a payroll formality and start being a tool for pricing the next job better.