Stop Paying for That Expensive Time Tracking Software, Use a Shared Spreadsheet Instead

We were burning $180 a month on some fancy time tracking tool for our crew of 8, and it still required manual entry at the end of the day. I switched us to a simple Google Sheet with color coded tabs, one per job site, and it cut our admin time by half. The trick is locking the cells so guys can only fill in their hours and notes, and checking it every Friday morning. Has anyone else downgraded their software and gotten better results, or are we just lucky with a small crew?

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taylor_fox14d ago

Did you guys run into any pushback from the crew when you first switched things up? I tried something similar a while back and got a lot of grumbling about "big brother" vibes from people who didn't want their hours so visible to everyone on the sheet. The locking thing sounds smart, but I'm curious if you had to do any training or hand-holding those first couple weeks to get people to actually use it right. Seems like the kind of thing that works great until someone accidentally types over a formula and messes up the whole column for everyone else.