Top 11 time tracking software for small businesses in 2023

As a small business owner, it’s important for you to understand how your employees spend their work hours. You may also need help managing employee timesheets, scheduling shifts, etc.

That’s where advanced time trackers come in handy. With features like accurate time tracking, productivity monitoring, and payroll automation, these tools can definitely make your life a little easy. 

But with tons of time tracking software for small businesses on offer, which one should you opt for?

In this article, we’ll look at the best time tracking software for small businesses, along with the benefits of using one.

Let’s get started.

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11 best time tracking software for small businesses

Businesses need to ensure they stay compliant with local timekeeping regulations and that their employees stay productive. But for small businesses, time tracking is all the more critical to keep a close eye on your bottom line. 

As a result, a time tracking software solution is the need of the hour.

So here are the top time tracking apps perfect for small businesses to track their team’s work hours and boost productivity:

Time Doctor is an all-in-one employee time tracking and performance management tool. It’s used by major companies, like Verizon and Ericsson, as well as small businesses, like Firehouse Subs, to boost employee productivity.

Time Doctor has advanced time tracking and employee monitoring features, making it the perfect productivity for small businesses. The tool is available as a mobile and desktop app.

Key features

Let’s explore some of Time Doctor’s key features that make it a valuable tool for small businesses:

A. Time tracking

Time Doctor offers manual and automatic time tracking modes for the user’s convenience. 

To use the manual time tracking mode: 

• Create or add a new task under the relevant project.
• Press ‘Start’ when you wish to begin tracking time.
• Press ‘Stop’ to take a break or stop tracking time. 

The automatic time tracking mode doesn’t have any user interface. It runs silently in the background when employees start their systems.

It doesn’t impact the employees’ workflows and helps them concentrate better without worrying about tracking time manually. 

B. Idle time tracking

This Time Doctor feature helps you track the time an employee remains idle. It calculates idle time as minutes spent without any mouse and keyboard activity.

With this feature, Time Doctor sends your team members a gentle reminder to re-focus on their current task after a few minutes (can be specified by the admin) of inactivity.

Note: Time Doctor isn’t a keystroke logger. The software will only check if a user pressed any keys or mouse buttons to determine idle time.

C. Screencasts (Optional)

Time Doctor’s screencasts feature helps you see whether your team members are working on a particular task or not. It takes screenshots of a user’s computer screen at regular intervals.

When your employees are aware that their screen activities are being monitored, they will avoid engaging in non-work-related activities.

Note: Screenshots are only taken when a team member indicates they’re working, and the admin can delete or blur them to maintain privacy. This feature is optional and can be enabled or disabled for each user.

D. Extensive productivity reports

Time Doctor allows you access to comprehensive real-time reports that help you gain insights into your team’s productivity.

Some of these reports include:

• Hours tracked report: Check how many hours your employees have worked per workday, week, or date range you select.
• Timeline report: View how much time your team member spends working daily or weekly.
• Web and app usage time reports: Get thorough reports of the time your team spends on different applications and websites.
• Activity summary report: Check active minutes, active seconds, unproductive, or mobile time of each employee’s time.

E. Payroll management

Along with time tracking, Time Doctor provides powerful payroll management features. 

Additionally, you can integrate Time Doctor with a payment gateway of your choice to pay your employees via Gusto, Paypal, ADP, or Wise.

You can also customize payroll details, such as:

• Pay period. 
• Payment method.
• Payment currency.

F. Productivity ratings

The app lets you set productivity ratings for different websites and apps, depending on the type of work.

The different productivity ratings are:

• Productive.
• Unproductive.
• Neutral.
• Unrated.

For example, if your team uses LinkedIn to run social media campaigns, you can mark the website as productive.

G. Robust Chrome extension

You can take advantage of Time Doctor’s powerful Chrome extension to integrate it with other productivity and project management tools like Asana, Trello, etc.

With this feature, your employees can use the Time Doctor’s timer button to log time on other productivity apps — so that they don’t have to toggle between multiple tabs or windows. 

Time Doctor offers a 14-day free trial (no credit card info required). Paid plan starts at $7/user per month.

Customer ratings

• G2: 4.4/5 (270+ reviews)
• Capterra: 4.5/5 (390+ reviews)

Check out Time Doctor’s features page for more details.

Toggl Track is a simple time tracking app which allows you to start tracking time with just a few clicks.

Key features

• Provides an easy-to-use manual time tracker to keep track of your work across the day.
• Offers timesheets that populate logged time automatically through Google Calendar integration.
• Allows you to export your time tracking data on any accounting software for invoicing.
• Provides integration with popular apps like Evernote and Github to streamline the workflow.

Pricing

Toggl Track offers a limited free plan. The paid plans start at $10/user per month.

Customer ratings

• G2: 4.6/5 (1490+ reviews)
• Capterra: 4.7/5 (1770+ reviews)

3. Timesheets.com

Timesheets.com is an employee time tracking and timesheet software useful for small businesses having both salaried and hourly employees. 

Key features

• Offers an easy-to-use time tracking solution for payroll, billing, and job costing.
• Allows you to track time-off balances and review usage history.
• Provides billing reports for effective payroll processing and timesheet approvals.
• Offers integration with accounting software like QuickBooks and Sage.

Pricing

Timesheets.com offers a free plan. Its paid plans start at $4.50/user per month.

Customer ratings

• G2: 4.2/5 (460+ reviews)
• Capterra: 4.7/5 (720+ reviews)

QuickBooks Time (formerly known as TSheets) is a powerful time tracking and employee scheduling software for small business needs. 

Key features

• Tracks billable working hours and automatically adds them to invoices using the QuickBooks Online app.
• Helps you to create custom and professional invoices, as well as sales receipts.
• Provides income and expense forecasting for 30 or 90 day periods.
• Offers integrations with payroll management solutions like Gusto, ADP, Square Payroll, etc.

Pricing

QuickBooks Time offers a 30-day free trial. Its paid plans start at $10/user per month.

Customer ratings

• G2: 4.5/5 (1390+ reviews)
• Capterra: 4.7/5 (5520+ reviews)

5. Harvest

Harvest is a free time tracking software for small businesses that also has additional features like budgeting and invoicing.

Key features

• Enables you to track employee time consistently using automated reminders.
• Lets you track expenses and automatically convert them into invoices.
• Provides visual time tracking reports to check how your team is spending time on each project.
• Helps you optimize your entire workflow by offering integrations with dozens of other productivity apps like Jira and Zendesk.

Pricing

Harvest offers a free limited plan for a single user. The app’s paid plan starts at $12/user per month.

Customer ratings

• G2: 4.3/5 (730+ reviews)
• Capterra: 4.5/5 (460+ reviews)

6. Hubstaff

Hubstaff is a simple time tracking and task management software suitable for small businesses. The app is available on all major platforms like Android, Mac, Linux, and Windows operating systems.

Key features

• Offers a manual time tracker to help your team track time on each task and project.
• Takes screenshots of employee screens to monitor employee productivity.
• Provides job sites (also known as geofencing) which allows your team to track time from a designated area.
• Helps you determine the productivity levels of your employees with 17 different customized reports.

Pricing

Hubstaff offers a free plan for a single user. Its paid plan starts from $7/user per month.

Customer ratings

• G2: 4.3/5 (390+ reviews)
• Capterra: 4.6/5 (1220+ reviews)

7. Buddy Punch

Buddy Punch is an online punch clock app to track time for your team members. The app has an intuitive drag and drop user interface and also provides cloud-based scheduling.

Key features

• Offers a cloud-based time clock that pre-populates reports for payroll.
• The time clock app allows your employees to clock in and clock out using their browser, Android, or iOS app.
• Supports paid time-off (PTO) tracking.
• Provides integrations with other payroll features such as QuickBooks, ADP, Paychex, & SurePayroll.

Pricing

Buddy Punch offers a free trial with all its paid plans. Its paid plans start at $2.99/user per month.

Customer ratings

• G2: 4.8/5 (120+ reviews)
• Capterra: 4.8/5 (660+ reviews)

8. TimeCamp

TimeCamp is a powerful time tracking software designed to help small businesses monitor and optimize their team’s efficiency.

Key features

• Offers automatic time tracking for uninterrupted workflow.
• Has GPS tracking to monitor your remote teams.
• Offers payroll management functionality.
• Provides integrations with other tools like ClickUp and Google Calendar.

Pricing

TimeCamp offers a free limited plan. Its paid plans start at $7/user per month.

Customer ratings

• G2: 4.7/5 (170+ reviews)
• Capterra: 4.7/5 (540+ reviews)

9. My Hours

My Hours is a cloud-based time tracking software designed for small businesses and freelancers. 

Key features

• Provides time tracking using a simple timer, or you can manually add time entry in the timesheet.
• Helps you classify a client task as billable or non-billable.
• Lets you decide how much time you need to spend on a project with smart project budgeting.
• Helps you set hourly rates per project, per task, or per team member.

Pricing

My Hours offer a free plan with limited functionality. Its paid plans start at $7/user per month.

Customer ratings

• G2: 4.6/5 (160+ reviews)
• Capterra: 4.8/5 (720+ reviews)

Clockify is a time tracking and timesheet tool that offers free features forever for small businesses to track work across various tasks and projects. 

Key features

• Provides time tracking using a stopwatch. You can also enter and edit hours manually.
• Lets you set hourly rates for every task, project, or employee.
• Allows you to create tasks and projects for your employees and categorize them by clients.
• Offers a detailed billing report that can be exported as PDF, Excel, or CSV.

Pricing

Clockify offers a free plan with unlimited projects and users. Paid plan starts at $4.99/user per month. 

Customer ratings

• G2: 4.5/5 (100+ reviews)
• Capterra: 4.7/5 (2900+ reviews)

nTask is an effective project management and time tracking application that helps its users to make sure that their tasks and processes are performed perfectly, managed efficiently and time-tracked accurately to the last second. 

Key features

• The application provides time tracking and timesheet management features to make sure that your activities and processes are time tracked and delivered on time
• Task management and project management features that the application has to offer are amazing as they keep your and your team members’ work in check and everything gets done properly
• Kanban boarding and Gantt charts to make sure that you have a clear view of all of the task dependencies that are a part of the project development process, and also to give you a look at the project from a different angle
• Risk management to make sure that you have a bird’s eye on all of the scope creeps and risks that may or may not affect your project from the very start

Pricing

• nTask offers a limited free plan. The paid plans start at $3/user per month

Customer ratings

• G2: 4.3 
• Capterra: 3.9

While time trackers are great for all businesses, what makes time tracking software crucial for small businesses?

We’ll explore that in the next section.

Why does your small business need time tracking software?

In this section, we’ll discuss three reasons why you should invest in the right time tracking software.

• Accurate timecards: A time tracking tool helps your employees log their time and attendance with more accuracy compared to manual timesheets.
• Better workflow: When employees don’t have to manually add their work hours, they can focus better on their primary tasks.
• Improved payroll efficiency: If the payroll team has accurate time data, it makes their task easier during client billing and employee payments. 

So, what are the things to consider while investing in time tracking software?

Let’s find out next.

5 things to consider before choosing a time tracking software

In this section, we’ll take a look at different aspects you should consider before investing in time tracking software for your business.

• Time tracking needs: A time tracking app should have all the basic time tracking features to meet your needs. This can include manual time tracking, automatic time tracking, and idle time tracking.
• Ease of use: An intuitive and user-friendly interface is extremely important so that every team member can learn to use it quickly. 
• Additional features: Additional features like detailed productivity reports and screenshots can be helpful if you want to monitor employee productivity in detail.
• Scalability: If you’re planning to scale in the near future, consider investing in a time tracking tool to accommodate larger teams.
• Affordability: You also need to look out for time tracking software that is affordable. This way, you can track employee productivity without making a big dent in your company’s budget.

Wrap up

Time tracking software helps small businesses manage and record employee hours effectively. This translates to better productivity and accurate data insights.

Now that we’ve highlighted the best time tracking apps for small businesses, you can choose one that suits your needs.

If you’re looking for a user-friendly and affordable time management tool for your organization, Time Doctor is the ideal solution. 

So why not sign up for Time Doctor’s free trial to boost your team’s productivity right away?