A crew member starts their shift on their phone: on Home they tap the Start Your Day card, then the big round Clock In button. The office watches and corrects those hours on Time Tracking, under Field Management.
Before the clock appears
Two things have to be true, and both are the office's job.
- The person is on a crew. Until they are, their Home page reads You're not on a crew yet. Add them under Crews.
- That crew has a job scheduled for today. Otherwise Home reads No jobs scheduled for you today, with no way through to the clock.
The second one catches people on a rain day. If the crew is coming into the yard anyway, put something on the schedule for them, or add the yard time afterwards with Manual Entry.
Owners and admins can clock in too. Turn on Crew View Mode on your own Profile page, on the Account tab, and your Home becomes the crew's Home. You still have to be on a crew. Crew view also takes Time Tracking out of your sidebar, so use the Switch back link in the You are viewing as crew member banner before you fix anybody's hours.
Clocking in
- On Home, tap the card at the top: Start Today's Route when the office has planned a route, Start Your Day otherwise.
- Tap Clock In, the large round button in the middle. The dot above it reads GPS ready once the phone has a location fix. With no fix they can still clock in, and the shift is recorded without a location.
- The shift starts, and a running timer appears in the top bar next to Job 1 of 3.
Tapping Clock In on an already open shift drops them back into it with the timer still running, which is why somebody can tap it at 11am and see three hours on the clock. A second device is told they are already clocked in elsewhere.
Clocking in needs a signal. Clocking out does not. On a weak signal the Clock In button keeps trying for up to about a minute and says so on screen. A clock-out is held on the phone and sent when there is signal again, stamped with the time of the tap.
Breaks and fuel stops
Break and Fuel sit beside the timer in the top bar. A break is kept as its own entry and is not counted in the day's total on Time Tracking, so on a day with breaks the percentages in the Time Breakdown by Type panel there add up to more than 100. Fuel time counts as admin time.
Fuel is not shown at all when QuickBooks is connected. The assumption is that fuel is coded in the books instead. If the button vanished after you connected QuickBooks, that is why, and it is not a fault on their phone.
Clocking out
- Tap the clock button at the right-hand end of the top bar, the small one with no words on it. A crew lead finishing the route also gets a Clock Out button on the Route Complete summary.
- The panel shows Clocked in at and the Total work time so far. Leave it on Use Current Time, or tap Enter Time if they finished at 4 and only remembered at 6. Enter Time uses today's date and can be earlier than now, never later. A time before the clock-in is refused with “Clock-out time cannot be before clock-in time”.
- Tap Clock Out. The screen answers You're clocked out with the time.
A queued clock-out looks open to you for a few minutes. Clocking out in a canyon works, but nothing reaches the record until the strip at the top of the crew member's route screen reaches Saved. Until then their phone says the shift is over while the office still sees Active, so leave the entry alone and look at the row again in a few minutes. A correction saved first costs you the real time, because the held clock-out only lands on an entry that is still open. While a change is unsent the strip says so and offers Retry, a tap on their phone rather than yours. If it says a change could not be saved and to call the office, that one needs fixing from your end.
What the office sees
Owners and admins see Time Tracking; an employee sees it only if an owner switches it on for them on their Permissions tab. The page shows one day at a time, chosen with the Date picker, one row per person. Week Total and Overtime This Week cover the Monday to Sunday week around that date, with overtime anything over 40 hours in the week for one person.
Everything labelled “Today” on this page means “the date you picked”. Total Hours Today, Today's Summary and Today's Time Entries all follow the Date picker rather than the real today.
Opening the page also closes any shift left open from a day before today, at the end of its own day. That is a real change to the timesheet, so the figures can look different the second time you open the page. If one cannot be closed, an amber banner names the dates to fix by hand.
The Crew column and the (no job) labels are unfinished rather than misconfigured. Crew reads a dash on every row and its filter narrows nothing, and entries read Work (no job) or Break (no job) because nothing attaches a clock-in to a job yet.
Correcting an entry
- Set the Date to the day the shift started and find the person's row.
- In the Actions column, click the button reading 1 entry or 3 entries. The row opens, one line per entry.
Click the entry count in the Actions column and the row opens. Every entry has its own Edit link at the end of its line. - Each line shows the type, the times, the hours and any note, with an Edit link at the end. A line reading Active instead of a clock-out time is an open shift. Click Edit on the one you want.
- Change what is wrong on the Edit Time Entry form. Total Hours in the Summary panel recalculates as you type.
- Click Save Changes. Delete, at the top of the form beside Cancel, removes the entry outright and asks you to confirm first.
Saving, deleting and cancelling land you back on that entry's day with the person's row already open. A browser reload opens the page on today again, and changing the Date by hand closes any open row.
Break (minutes) always opens at 0, whatever break was taken. Nothing on the entry remembers a break, and whatever the box says is taken off the clock-in to clock-out span when you save. An entry first saved as 8:00 to 5:00 with 60 minutes of break, so 8 hours, comes back as 9 hours the next time anybody saves it. Type those minutes in again before you save.
Time nobody clocked goes in through Manual Entry at the top of the page, or Add Entry on the table. Pick the person in Employee, and Job / Activity holds your open jobs plus internal options such as Yard Work (internal). Nobody can be clocked in live on someone else's behalf. The Approved tick box on the form is one entry at a time, with no bulk approve, and nothing refuses to count unapproved hours. Ticking it on a finished shift stops the employee changing that entry, although an owner or admin still can.
When somebody forgets to clock out
A shift left open for 16 hours is treated as a missed clock-out. ArborDash closes it at the end of the day the shift started rather than 16 hours after the tap, adds the note “Auto-closed: missed clock-out” and caps the recorded hours at 16. Every owner and admin gets a notification titled Missed Clock-Out Detected naming the person and the day; it opens Time Tracking on today, so set the Date to the day it names.
The entry opens with an amber card headed This shift was closed automatically, saying the Clock Out time below it is a placeholder, so those hours are wrong until somebody types the real time in: on an overnight shift they can come out as a couple of hours, or as almost none. Save a real clock-out time and the note becomes “Missed clock-out, corrected.”, and the amber tag on that entry line back on Time Tracking turns green.
The tag only turns green if you changed the Clock Out time, the hours come out above zero and you have not rewritten the note, so check Total Hours before you save. Picking an internal activity from Job / Activity puts the activity name in front of the note and leaves the tag grey, although the entry is corrected.
Edge cases and refusals
A shift that ran past midnight
It is one entry, filed on the day the shift started. Set the Date to that day, type the real clock-out time and save. There is no clock-out date to set, because a clock-out earlier than the clock-in is read as the next day, so 10:00 PM to 2:00 AM saves as four hours and the Summary shows 4.0h before you save. Look for “Overnight shift, ends Sun, Sep 27” under Clock Out and a smaller “next day, Sun, Sep 27” in the Summary. Without them, the shift is being read as ending the same day.
The hours stay filed under the start date, which is where Time Tracking and the payroll figures look for them. A clock-out identical to the clock-in is refused, so set a different time, or clear Clock Out if the shift is still open. A stretch of 24 hours or longer needs an entry per day.
When a correction does not save
| What you see | What it means |
|---|---|
| Time entry not available, with no form on the page | The entry was deleted, or the link is out of date. Reopen it from the person's row. |
| A red banner reading “Nothing was saved.” | The entry may have been deleted while the form was open, or the account may not have permission to change it. The entry is unchanged. |
| “This entry would end before it starts, so it was not saved” | Nothing was written. Check the Date field first, then the two times. |
| The table reading Time entries could not be loaded. | The day could not be read at all. Not the same as No time entries for this date., which means nobody worked that day. |
Getting the hours to payroll
ArborDash does not run payroll. Payroll Export, at the top of Time Tracking, gives you a spreadsheet to hand over: pick a Pay Period (This week, Last week or Custom date range, worked out from the date the page is showing), read the Export Preview, then click Download CSV. On a period with no hours the preview reads No time entries in this period. and Download CSV stays greyed out. The same figures are in Reports as Labor Cost / Payroll Prep.
Set an Hourly Rate for each person first, or every pay column comes out at zero. On Team, open them, and on the Profile tab click Edit on the Basic Information card. That one button also opens the Employment card below, where Hourly Rate and Pay Type live. The file is an estimate, not a pay run: gross is hours times rate, with anything over 40 hours in a week at time and a half, and ArborDash does not file taxes or pay anybody.
What hours do not do
- They never change what a customer is charged. Eleven hours on a job you quoted at $1,400 still invoices $1,400, because the invoice is built from the services and prices.
- They do not land on the job. A clock-in is not attached to a job, so the Labor line in Cost Breakdown reads $0.00 unless somebody added time against that job by hand.
- Travel is never automatic. Nothing the crew can tap creates a travel entry, so Travel Time stays at 0.0h unless the office types it in.