The Ultimate Guide to Human Resources for Construction | hh2.com

How Digital Time Cards Reduce Payroll Errors in Construction

Written by David Spivac | Mar 13, 2025 9:00:00 PM

Tracking time and attendance for each construction project is essential to ensuring you stay on track and within budget, but how your company tracks time is just as critical to your success. Traditional paper-based time tracking methods are inefficient and more prone to errors and time theft, leading to cost overruns, compliance issues, or even disputes with clients or subcontractors. 

Digital time cards help solve these problems, offering more accurate time keeping solutions and automating your time tracking and payroll processes for greater accuracy. Below, you’ll learn more about common payroll errors and how the right construction time and attendance software can prevent errors while also streamlining your payroll process.

Paper Time Cards in Construction: What They’re Costing You

Traditional time keeping methods are inefficient and more prone to errors, which can significantly impact your construction company’s operations and bottom line. When using this paper timesheets, you may experience:

  • Manual data entry mistakes can lead to incorrect pay calculations, which frustrates employees and may cause compliance issues. 

  • Buddy punching and time theft are more likely to occur with paper time cards, resulting in inflated labor costs for your company.

  • Missed or incorrect job coding from manual entry causes errors in project cost allocation and can hurt future project estimates. 

  • Overtime miscalculations and inaccurate prevailing wages can leave your construction company in non-compliance with Certified Payroll and other labor laws, resulting in fines or losses of future projects.

  • Lack of real-time data from paper timesheets leads to delays throughout payroll processing.

Reduce Payroll Errors With Construction Time and Attendance Software

Here’s the good news: you can prevent many of these common payroll errors by upgrading to digital time keeping solutions. These solutions help prevent errors by offering:

  • Automated Time Tracking: Real-time clock-ins with mobile or biometric verification improve the accuracy of timesheets and create a more efficient payroll process.

  • GPS and Geofencing Features: With location-specific fences on digital clocks, you can ensure workers are clocking in from the correct job site. This feature also prevents them from fraudulently logging time while offsite or on breaks.

  • Integration With Payroll and Accounting Systems: Digital construction time clocks eliminate manual entry and enable seamless data flow directly into your systems, so you’ll see time and labor information in real time. 

  • Overtime and Compliance Tracking: With its ability to auto-calculate overtime hours based on labor laws for each location, you can virtually eliminate miscalculations and compliance issues.

  • Custom Approval Workflows: Payroll managers can review and approve time entries instantly, ensuring payroll is always on time and accurate.

Benefits of Digital Time Cards for Construction Companies

Digital time cards and payroll automation for construction offers numerous benefits, including: 

Accuracy

Digital construction time clocks ensure greater accuracy in several ways. First, many digital time cards include location restrictions and photo capture features to prevent workers from logging time for others or punching in or out when not on site. Second, by eliminating manual entry, you can reduce payroll discrepancies by up to 80%.

Efficiency

You’ll no longer need to wait for employees to email, fax, or physically bring in their timesheets for approval. Instead, timesheet data automatically syncs with your accounting and payroll systems once a worker logs and submits their time. This step eliminated the need for manual data entry, speeding up your payroll processing time by up to 70%

Cost Savings

Your construction company can save time and cut costs by switching to digital construction time clocks. It allows you to eliminate manual data entry from payroll processing and offers automation to further cut down on administrative work. Digital timesheets also help reduce time theft, further enhancing cost savings and profitability. 

Improved Compliance

By reducing payroll errors and processing time, digital time tracking helps ensure wage law compliance through accurate and on-time payroll. And with a clear digital trail of data, it simplifies audits and job costing.

Mobile Accessibility

With mobile time clocks, construction workers can easily log their time from any device. With just a few clicks, employees can select the appropriate project, punch in or out, code their work, and automatically submit it to your payroll team for approval.

How Miller Construction Reduced Payroll Errors by 99%

Miller Construction, a commercial general contractor operating in Florida, relied on paper timesheets and spreadsheets, leading to an extremely chaotic and challenging payroll process. They first had to manually enter time tracking data into the spreadsheet before entering information into Sage, their accounting tool. This time-consuming process meant that last-minute construction projects weren’t always properly coded or entered correctly—with errors happening in every payroll.

Knowing they needed a better solution, they turned to hh2. With this construction time tracking software, Miller Construction was able to eliminate manual entry of payroll data, reducing payroll and coding errors by 99%. hh2’s integration with Sage also allowed them to seamlessly sync payroll data and automate payroll tasks, reducing time spent on payroll processing.

How To Choose the Right Construction Time Tracking Software

When selecting the right construction time and attendance software for your company, you’ll want to keep your unique needs in mind. First, you’ll want to ensure the software fits within your budget. Next, you’ll need to determine which features are must-haves for your company. Below are a few key features of time tracking software to consider.

Key Features To Look For

Mobile Accessibility

It’s common for construction workers to move between sites and projects on a daily or weekly basis, so you’ll want a digital time tracking solution that can move with your employees. Look for software with mobile solutions that let workers log and code their time on any mobile device. This feature simplifies time and attendance while ensuring greater accuracy.

GPS Tracking and Geofencing

To reduce time theft, you’ll want to use a construction time clock that includes GPS tracking or geofencing. This technology ensures that construction workers can only clock in and out when they’re on-site to cut down on any time fraud. It also prevents instances of buddy punching.

Integration With Accounting and Payroll Systems

To get the most out of your time tracking software, make sure it integrates with your existing accounting or payroll systems. This feature allows you to sync data in real time to ensure a more accurate and efficient payroll process. Top construction time keeping software seamlessly integrates with construction ERPs like Sage, Viewpoint, and ProCore.

Custom Workflows and Approval Processes

Every company has its own structure and way of managing payroll, and you need a software solution that recognizes that. Look for construction time tracking software with customizable workflow automation and payroll routing so it can adapt to your needs. This feature eliminates manual processes from payroll and helps reduce delays caused by bottlenecks.

With these features in mind, consider hh2’s Remote Payroll. Our construction time and attendance software is the ideal solution for construction companies. Remote Payroll’s flexible mobile app and geofencing features allow you to log time from anywhere while manual entry and time theft are virtually eliminated. And with its unmatched accounting integrations and customizable workflows, payroll is simplified and accurate.

Reduce Errors and Speed Up Payroll Processing With hh2

With digital time cards, your company can reduce payroll errors and eliminate time theft while improving overall cost efficiency. What’s more, moving to digital time clocks from a traditional time tracking method is simple when you use the right construction time tracking software.

hh2’s Remote Payroll allows you to track and code time from any device—even while offline—to ensure accuracy and eliminate manual errors. Plus, it seamlessly integrates with your accounting systems and offers custom workflow and approval routing to ensure accurate, on-time payroll and keep projects on track.

Ready to cut payroll errors? Try hh2 Remote Payroll today!