Time Tracking App for Trades: 24-Point Test

Starting with one tap, even with gloves on

On the scaffolding in November, nobody takes off their gloves to tap through three menus. So don't check whether a feature exists, but how many touches it costs. The test question is: how many taps does it take from an unlocked phone to a running timer on the right job?

Two taps is good. Three is still acceptable in daily practice. Anything beyond that leads to times being booked from memory in the evening — and then the app is just an expensive timesheet. What helps: a large start button, the most recently used job as a default selection, and a stop function via widget or lock screen.

Job time instead of mere presence

A punch clock answers when someone was at the company. For the invoice, you need to know what they worked on. That's what project time tracking delivers: every entry is assigned to a job, a customer, and ideally a service, such as "install radiator" or "time-and-materials work."

The switch is what matters. An electrician who's on two job sites in the morning and doing customer service in the afternoon needs to be able to switch jobs without stopping and restarting the timer. If the app first requires ending the current entry, gaps of two or three minutes appear that no one can account for afterward.

Booking offline, syncing later

Basement shells, underground garages, and attics under reinforced concrete are dead zones. A job-site app must store entries locally with the device's timestamp and sync them later. Three things belong in the test:

1. Put the phone in flight mode, start the timer, stop it after 20 minutes, turn flight mode off. Does the entry arrive completely at the office?
2. Does the app visibly show that something hasn't been transmitted yet?
3. What happens if the office edited the same job in the meantime?

If an entry is lost at step 1, the app is out for job sites — no matter how good the rest looks.

Travel time, breaks, and downtime as separate entry types

Travel time is billed or not, depending on the customer and agreement. If you mix it with work time on the job, you can no longer separate it later. The same applies to breaks: an automatic break-deduction rule saves taps, but it must be visible and correctable in the overview. Otherwise you'll be arguing at month's end about 30 minutes that nobody consciously logged.

Many businesses round to quarter hours because that's what the paper timesheet dictates. The problem arises when every single entry is rounded down. As an illustrative calculation: If actual durations are evenly distributed, rounding down loses on average half the rounding unit — so at 15 minutes, that's 7.5 minutes per entry.

A fictional calculation example for a business with six technicians:

If the app rounds commercially to the nearest quarter hour, the effect balances out on average. Then no hours disappear, but individual invoices fluctuate. The decision rule from this: Record to the minute and round only at the invoice stage — and there only as agreed with the customer.

The control question to ask every provider is therefore: does the app store the raw time, or only the rounded value? Only with raw times can you recalculate later if a customer disputes an invoice. And if the same rounded-down time is also used for payroll, the minutes are missing not only from the invoice but also from the technician's pay slip. Have such rounding rules checked by an employment lawyer before you configure them in the app.

Eight criteria, 0 to 3 points each. Test each criterion with a real job, not the provider's demo job site.

Evaluation:

• Below 14 points: cross it off.
• 14 to 19 points: only if you have a written workaround for every weakness that the office can still sustain in December.
• From 20 points: shortlist.
• Deal-breaker rule: A zero on criterion 3 (offline) or 4 (corrections) eliminates the app, no matter how high the total. Lost entries and untraceable changes can't be fixed after the fact by anything.

Criterion 4 is most often underestimated. A change log sounds like bureaucracy, but it's the only thing that shows, in a disputed invoice or a query about working hours, who changed what and when.

The rankings online mix three very different product types. The comparison at energieheld.de distinguishes, for instance, between all-in-one solutions with an app and universal trade apps; the overview at softwareabc24.de lists trade software and general time-tracking tools side by side. This breakdown can help with your decision:

According to meisterox.app, general apps like Clockodo, Timebutler, or TimeTac offer solid basic functions like clocking in and out, project assignment, and report export. Whether that's enough hinges on criterion 6: anyone billing time-and-materials hours pays for every missing invoice handoff with office work.

MeinGewerbe belongs to the third type: recording work hours per project and employee in the browser on desktop or smartphone, evaluating them as proof of hours, and billing directly. Anyone who needs scheduling for twenty technicians or warehouse management is better served with trade software.

Prices and free tiers change frequently. Don't take any price figure from a comparison list — check the provider's pricing page on the day you decide, and calculate with your actual number of users, not the entry-level price for one person.

If you test now, you're testing under the conditions where apps fail. That's an advantage.

Cold, darkness, wet screens

Smartphones sometimes shut down in frost earlier than the battery indicator would suggest. What matters then is what happens to the running entry: does it keep running after a restart, or is it gone? Also test whether the app can be used with a wet screen and touch gloves, and whether the contrast is still sufficient in the dusk from 4 p.m. onward.

Bad weather and downtime

Rain and frost days don't belong in "break" and don't belong on a customer job. Create a separate entry type for weather-related downtime. If your trade uses Germany's seasonal short-time work allowance (Saison-Kurzarbeitergeld) in winter, clarify in advance with your tax advisor or the Federal Employment Agency (Agentur für Arbeit) which proof of hours is required and in what form — then check whether the app can produce exactly that evaluation.

Year-end closing of time accounts

At year's end, overtime balances, remaining vacation, and open time-and-materials reports come up. Check three things:

• Does the app show the balance per person as of a given date?
• Can the entire year be exported and archived as a file?
• Are all time-and-materials hours approved by mid-December so they can still be billed this year?

A rule of thumb for timing: Ideally, start the rollout by mid-November. In the last two weeks before Christmas, vacation days are missing, year-end invoices are pressing, and nobody has patience for a new app.

Most false starts show up in the first two weeks — if you know what to look for.

A frequent cause is often not the technician but the preparation: the app is rolled out on a Monday, but no jobs have been set up in the system yet. Then everyone books to something random, and the first week's data is worthless.

1. Day 1 – Office: Set up all current jobs, services, and entry types (work, travel, break, downtime). Assign roles.
2. Day 2 – two volunteers: One experienced and one young technician book with both the app and a paper timesheet in parallel. Only for this week, only for comparison.
3. Day 3 – flight mode and glove test on a real job site. Note errors, don't argue them away.
4. Day 4 – Office bills: Create an invoice for one piece of time-and-materials work from the app hours and send the payroll export to the payroll office.
5. Day 5 – Reconciliation: Compare paper against app. If the totals deviate by more than 5%, find the cause before the rest of the team starts.

After two more weeks with the whole team, look at one number: the share of entries changed after the fact. If it's above 10%, something's wrong with the process — usually missing jobs or too many taps.

Time tracking doesn't end when you stop the clock. The path continues through approval in the office to the invoice line item. For hourly work, a time-and-materials report is often added: proof of the hours worked and materials used, signed off by the customer. Check whether the app can generate this proof as a PDF and whether an on-site signature is possible.

Materials belong to the same job. The receipt from the wholesaler that the technician gets at the counter at lunchtime otherwise ends up in the glove compartment instead of on the invoice. How to capture and file such receipts directly on your phone is covered in the article Scanning and managing receipts: workflow, app check, and filing.

The ideal case: hours and material receipts are attached to the same job, the office approves them, and the invoice is generated from this data without a single manually retyped value.

This section and the FAQ below refer to German law, since MeinGewerbe is aimed at businesses in Germany. Working hours are personal data, and location data even more so. Before starting, you should clarify three points in writing:

• What data is recorded — only times and jobs, or also location? If location, only while booking or continuously?
• Who has access and how long the data is retained.
• What contract exists with the provider — ask for a data processing agreement and about the server location.

If your business has a works council (Betriebsrat), it has a right of co-determination over the introduction and use of technical systems designed to monitor employees' behavior or performance (Section 87(1) No. 6 BetrVG, German Works Constitution Act). So discuss the rollout with them beforehand. The question of whether and in what form you must record working hours belongs with your chamber of trades (Handwerkskammer) or a specialist employment lawyer — not in a comparison table. The first FAQ below summarizes the current legal position.

Is digital time tracking mandatory for trade businesses in Germany?

Recording, yes; digital, not necessarily — as of 29 September 2026. On 13 September 2022, Germany's Federal Labour Court (Bundesarbeitsgericht) ruled that employers must record the start and end of their employees' daily working time under Section 3(2) No. 1 of the Occupational Safety and Health Act (ArbSchG) (BAG, 1 ABR 22/21). According to the same decision, this does not have to be done electronically in every case; depending on the work and the business, paper records can be sufficient. The Working Hours Act (ArbZG) itself currently only requires employers to record working time exceeding eight hours per working day and to keep these records for at least two years (Section 16(2) ArbZG); a reform introducing mandatory electronic recording has been announced but not yet promulgated. The rules are stricter in construction and for mini-jobs: there, the start, end, and duration of daily working time must be recorded by the end of the seventh calendar day after the working day and kept for at least two years (Section 17(1) MiLoG in conjunction with Section 2a SchwarzArbG). Have your chamber of trades or a specialist lawyer confirm which of these applies to your business. In practice, what mainly speaks for the digital form is that hours reach invoicing and payroll without retyping.

Which app is the best for time tracking?

There's no universally valid ranking, because a two-person business has different requirements than a business with scheduling. Use the 24-point test: apps with 20 points or more that don't score zero on offline operation and change logging make the shortlist. The final decision comes after five working days with real jobs.

What free trade software is available?

Several providers have free tiers or trial periods; overviews such as the one at softwareabc24.de list candidates. Which tiers currently apply and where their limits lie is shown only by the provider's pricing page. With free tiers, check above all the number of users, export options, and whether you can fully take your data with you if you switch.

What's the best time tracking for the job site?

For the job site, four properties matter more than the range of features: booking without a network connection, starting with at most two taps, job assignment with switching without stopping, and operation with gloves. Test exactly that in November in a dead zone. An app that loses entries there is out, no matter how good it looks in the office.