Time tracking
Hours that land on the right job, signed by the worker who worked them.
Most time clocks are built to prove somebody showed up. A commercial sub needs something harder: hours that land against the right job, that a worker has personally certified, and that job costing reads without anybody retyping them. SubMark runs the clock, rolls the week into a timesheet, puts that timesheet in front of the worker to sign, and holds the signature against the hours he signed for.
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- Clock in and out against a job, or have a foreman log each worker’s hours from the office.
- The worker signs his own week — on his phone, in English or Spanish.
- Change the hours after he signed and the sheet says so, by itself.
Why paper time cards cost you twice.
Friday afternoon is a transcription job
Nine foremen hand in nine sheets in nine handwritings, and somebody in the office types them into payroll. Every hour gets touched twice, which is two chances to put it on the wrong job and no chance to catch it.
The hours you pay and the hours you cost are different numbers
Payroll gets the total because payroll has to. Job costing gets whatever somebody had time to allocate. By month-end the two disagree, and the job that looks healthy is the one nobody finished coding.
Nobody signed anything
A worker disputes a week eight months later, or a wage complaint lands, or a GC back-charges you for hours your foreman says were never worked. A spreadsheet is your word against theirs. A time card in a banker box is a filing problem.
The sheet gets corrected after the fact, silently
A foreman fixes a Tuesday. Reasonably — the worker was on the other job. But if the worker already signed for 48 hours and the sheet now says 44, nothing anywhere records that the number moved after he agreed to it. That is the gap that turns a small correction into a bad-faith allegation.
Your crew does not read the form
An attestation printed in English, handed to a crew that works in Spanish, is a signature you cannot really rely on. Everybody knows it. Nobody fixes it, because fixing it means maintaining two forms.
How a week of hours moves through SubMark.
The clock, the timesheet, the signature and the cost are one chain. Nothing in it asks the office to retype an hour that the field already recorded.
- 01 Hours get recorded, one of two ways
A worker picks a project and hits CLOCK IN, then CLOCK OUT when he is done. Or a foreman logs the crew from the office side — one entry per worker — for the mornings when nine people are not each going to do it themselves. Both land in the same place.
- 02 Each punch lands on the job it was worked on
A punch carries the project, and the phase on jobs that track phases. Clocking out writes the hours to the labor log at the worker’s rate that day, so a later raise does not rewrite last month.
- 03 The week rolls into a timesheet
Hours group into a weekly sheet per worker, ending on the day you set in Pay Period Settings — Thursday, Sunday, whatever your payroll runs on. Turn on auto-generate and the sheets build themselves every week for everyone who logged hours.
- 04 The worker signs his own week
Send one signing link that covers every unsigned week a worker has, and he signs on his own phone. Or run an in-person signing session and walk a crew through it on one tablet, with a supervisor countersigning. Either way he sees every day — times, jobs, hours — above the pad before he signs, not just a total.
- 05 In English or in Spanish, his choice
The attestation, the printed-name prompt and the sign-here instruction all have a Spanish version. A signature on a certification the signer actually read is worth having. One on a form he did not is worth very little.
- 06 The office approves it
Sheets move Draft to Pending Approval to Approved, with Rejected for anything that has to go back. Approve them one at a time or in bulk. An approved sheet is a payroll record, so the system stops you deleting it.
- 07 Change it after he signed and the sheet says so
The hours he signed for are stored with the signature. If the sheet is edited afterwards, it tells you the hours changed, what he actually signed for, and to reject it so he can re-sign the corrected week. The correction stays legitimate because it is visible.
- 08 The same hours become cost
Job costing reads these hours. Not an export, not a monthly reconciliation — the same record. Labor shows at the logged wage rate, so apply your own burden on top before you make a margin call on it.
Everything above ships today and none of it is a tier you upgrade into. The core modules are on in every trade pack from setup; a few extras, like the invoices inbox, are a switch in Settings. The full list is on the product page.
In the app
What the week actually holds.
These are the screens and the words a worker and an office manager see, so you can check this page against the trial:
- Punch Clock
- Pick a project, CLOCK IN, CLOCK OUT. An open session shows as running with the elapsed time and what it has been running since; a closed one reads Complete.
- Today’s summary
- Who is clocked in right now, against which job, and total hours today — on one screen, refreshed as the day goes.
- Weekly timesheet
- One sheet per worker per week, with a Week Ending date. Statuses are Draft, Pending Approval, Approved and Rejected.
- Pay Period Settings
- The day your week ends, the standard Time In, Break In, Break Out and Time Out printed on every sheet, and an auto-generate weekly timesheets switch so nobody has to remember to build them.
- Worker signature
- Printed name plus a signature on the pad, under a certification that the hours shown are a true and correct record of the time he worked that week. Available in English and Spanish.
- Signing link
- One link per worker that covers all of his unsigned weeks at once, opened on his own phone. A needs-signature view shows who is still outstanding across every week.
- Signing session
- The in-person version: walk through a stack on one device, with a single supervisor countersignature.
- Changed-after-signing warning
- If the hours move after he signed, the sheet names the figure he signed for and tells you to reject it for a re-sign.
- Upload Signed Timesheet
- For crews still on paper: photograph or drag in the wet-ink sheet against a worker, a week and an optional project. A paper sheet is marked as one, and the system will not ask for a second signature on it.
- Signed timesheets archive
- Every sheet by worker and week ending, showing status, when the worker signed and whether it was countersigned. Also on each worker’s own profile.
- Payroll report
- The week in one table: workers, Total Hours, ST Hours, OT Hours, Gross Pay, by pay type and across projects. Exports to Excel.
The clock records the project a worker picks. It does not record where his phone was standing — there is no GPS and no geofence, so there is nothing for a crew to feel surveilled by and nothing for you to switch off.
Straight answer
What it does not do.
A product page that only lists wins is a product page you stop trusting in week two. These are the gaps, in our own words, before you find them yourself.
- It is not payroll. SubMark produces the hours, the signatures and the weekly figures your payroll runs from; it does not cut checks, file taxes or talk to a payroll provider directly. The payroll report exports to Excel and that export is the handoff.
- Hours land on the job, and on the phase on jobs that use phase tracking. There is no cost-code picker on a punch, so a four-way split inside one job is a phase question, not a clock question.
- T&M hours are not these hours. A T&M tag is priced in the office off your rate lists and signed by the GC on site; it does not feed job-costing actuals. Billable hours and cost hours stay separate on purpose, and conflating them double-counts the extra.
- Job costing reports labor at the logged wage rate. There is no burden in that figure — no payroll taxes, insurance or benefits — so the labor number you are reading is wage cost, not loaded cost.
- There is no offline mode. The web app runs on a phone, but a basement mechanical room with no signal is still a basement with no signal — which is exactly why foreman entry from the office exists.
- The clock has two punches, in and out. There is no break punch: the break times printed on a timesheet are your company’s standard schedule from Pay Period Settings, not a record of when each worker stopped.
- Approval is a status, not a freeze on the underlying hours. An approved sheet cannot be deleted, and an edit after signing is flagged, but the office can still correct a week; the record of the correction is the control.
Which trades feel this most.
Same problem, different shape. Each trade page leads with that trade's own phases, schedule of values and wording.
Drywall & Framing
Labor is the job. The biggest headcount on site, split across floors, and the one trade where a week of miscoded hours moves the margin visibly.
Electrical
Rough-in hours spread over fourteen months vanish unless they land against the right job the week they are worked.
Concrete
Pour days run long and start early, and the overtime on them is the number you most need to see before the week closes.
Questions
Time tracking: what a sub’s office actually asks.
Do workers have to clock themselves in?
No. A worker can clock in and out himself, or a foreman can log the crew from the office side, one entry per worker. Most commercial subs run both: self-clocking where there is signal and a phone, foreman entry on the jobs where the GC takes phones at the gate. If a system only supports one of the two, it has made that decision for you.
Does it track my crew’s location?
No. There is no GPS and no geofence. The clock records the project the worker picked and the time. On a commercial job a geofence covers the GC’s whole site anyway — three other trades, the lay-down yard and sixteen floors at the same coordinates — so it is a convenience feature, not a cost control.
What do my workers actually sign?
A certification that the hours shown are a true and correct record of the time they worked that week, with their printed name and a signature on the pad. They see every day of the week — times, jobs, hours — above the signature line first, so they are signing a record rather than a total. The whole thing is available in Spanish.
What happens if we fix a worker’s hours after he signed?
The sheet tells you. The hours he signed for are stored with his signature, so an edit afterwards raises a warning naming the figure he agreed to, and prompts you to reject the sheet so he can re-sign the corrected week. Corrections are normal; silent ones are the problem.
Can I still use paper time cards?
Yes, and you can get them into the same archive. Upload Signed Timesheet takes a photo or a file of the wet-ink sheet against a worker and a week ending. SubMark marks it as a paper sheet, so it will not chase a second electronic signature on something already signed by hand.
Does this run my payroll?
No. It produces what payroll needs: hours per worker per day, straight time and overtime, gross by pay type, for the week your pay period actually ends on. That exports to Excel and goes to whoever runs your payroll. There is no direct payroll integration.
Do these hours show up in job costing?
Yes — the same record, not an export. Job costing reads the logged hours at the wage rate each worker was on that day. That is wage cost, not loaded cost, so add your own burden before you treat the labor figure as a margin number.
What does it cost per field worker?
Nothing. Field users — foremen, crews, the time clock, daily logs — are free and unlimited. Pricing is one company subscription with your first three office users included, then a per-seat price for each office user after that. That is deliberate: a clock half the field uses produces hours you still have to reconcile by hand.
Read next
Choosing a construction time clock app as a commercial sub
Eleven questions to ask a vendor first — including the two about offline entry and burdened rates that most demos skip.
How to track labor hours by job and cost code
Pick the grain your foremen will actually split, then stop. Four codes they use beats forty they guess at.
How to calculate your labor burden rate
The arithmetic that turns the wage-rate number on this page into the loaded cost you should price from.
Put one week through it.
Start the trial, clock a crew for a week, and send one worker the signing link. The thing to watch for is how little of that week the office had to retype.
14-day free trial, no card needed. See the whole product →
$249/mo for your company, your first 3 office users included, $39/mo each after that. Field crews are free and unlimited. See what's included →
The rest of the job
Change orders
From the day the field finds the change to the day it is in the schedule of values, with an audit trail at every step.
T&M tickets
Priced in the office off your own rate lists, signed on site, and several tickets roll into one change order.
Schedule of values
One SOV per job, built from your trade’s own breakdown, locked when the first draw goes out, and approved change orders added to it automatically.
Draw tracking
Fifteen jobs, nine GCs, nine cutoff dates and nine submission methods — in one calendar and one log, with drawn, certified and received as three different numbers.
Retainage tracking
Five or ten percent of everything you have ever billed, sitting somewhere, on jobs some of which finished last year.
Daily logs
The record that wins an argument nine months later, written in two minutes by a foreman who wants to go home.
Lien waiver tracking
Which waivers went up the chain, which the GC has received, and which draw is sitting still because one of them has not.
Job costing
The overrun you can still do something about, instead of the one you find in the end-of-job autopsy.
Crew scheduling
Who is on which job on Monday, across every job — and a flag the moment the same crew is promised to two of them.
QuickBooks
Bills and card purchases pull back as job costs. Draws and POs push across with a click. Your books stay your books.
Safety records
Toolbox talks signed off per person, scored site inspections, and certification and COI expiries you see 30 days out instead of on the day.