Time Card System
My brother runs an excavation company. Its usually just him but he has workers from time to time. Sometimes me, or nephews of ours. Sometimes friends or just someone he hired. He was having his workers keep track of their times on a piece of paper, printed with a grid for the week. They put in when they get to work and when they leave. Maybe sometimes they’d remember to do it, but usually they’d make it up before they turned into him.
He didn’t want to spend money on some other time trackers subscriptions. He doesn’t always have employees so it would make it a waste of money some of the time. So he asked me to try something. I came up with a free method using Google Forms.
I designed a Google Form that was versatile enough to let users clock in and out or initiate or finish lunch. It also knew who you were when filling it out, asked some quick questions about where they were working so my brother could keep track of not only their hours but also hours at different jobs doing different tasks.
The responses would go into a spreadsheet that I then automated to filter results and fill into other spreadsheets, 1 per employee that looked like my brother’s old paper timesheet, a grid of the week with hours each day. It calculated, start and end and lunch hours. It also calculated their earnings based on their pay rate.
At one point I had it texting them when they hadn’t clocked in at a certain time, or reminding them to clock out if it was after 5 PM.
I set that up 7 years ago and he still uses it to this day. Just gives his employees the link to the form and they do it in their phones.