QuickBooks Time Expert Review, Pricing, Alternatives - 2023

From Intuit, the makers of one of the most popular accounting software tools of ever, comes Quickbooks Time. It provides a centralized clock-in/clock-out platform for businesses with employees that report for work in the same location.

Intuit is best known for its accounting suite and payroll solution for small businesses, Quickbooks. In 2018, they acquired Tsheets to include time tracking to the list of services they offer. In addition to time tracking, Quickbooks Time also functions as a scheduling software which helps you manage tasks and employees to get productivity at its best possible level. 

Quickbooks excels in scheduling and team management. Administrators can schedule work for their staffers from the schedule section on the dashboard. To schedule shifts, all you need to do is choose the time and day, team member you want to assign it to, and share it when you’re ready. Your team members will be immediately notified of these changes.  

Quickbooks ‘Who is Working’

Another interesting feature that can help managers with their scheduling process is the “who is working” window. This lets you see who is working and who is available, which is useful for quickly assigning tasks to those ready to work. Quickbooks Time also syncs with third-party calendar applications such as iCal, Google calendar, and so on. This feature can be used to import events from your calendars and register them as entries on our timesheets.

With Quickbooks TIme, employers and managers do not have to handle every single task or project. They can simply set permissions and add members as workers, managers, admins, or anything in-between. This feature is useful for designation work and creating a structured hierarchy within your organization. 

Quickbooks Time Kiosk & Geofencing Features

Perhaps the most standout Quickbooks Time feature is what they call the Time Kiosk. This functions as a traditional time clock where everyone has to clock in and out from. Quickbooks has digitized this concept  for businesses that still require something of the sort. 

Examples of  businesses that would benefit from the implementation of this feature include restaurant businesses, construction businesses, hospitals, and any organization that has a central work location, really. 

This time kiosk can be set up on a tablet and mounted at the entrance of your business organization. The manager would have registered the employees of the organization using their biometric information (facial recognition). So a worker would be immediately clocked in when they go to use the central device. Employees are also allowed to set up a four-digit pin as added log in security.

Quickbook’s geofencing feature allows you to build a virtual fence around your job sites. If you are a home services business for example, you will appreciate this feature as Quickbooks Time will automatically clock your employees in when they reach a set job site. Using GPS technology, you can also monitor mobile employees as they are on the go.

Quickbooks Reports & Leave Management

Quickbooks offers three top reports - payroll reports, projects reports, and approval reports. They also provide other reports to give you an overview of how your team tracks time. The payroll report gives you a breakdown of how much time your employees tracked with respect to their hourly rates. This report can be filtered by date ranges and/or team members and exported as CSV and PDF files. 

The project reports employs more visualization to display tracked data as pie charts. This report contains information on how much time was spent on each task, how much time your employees dedicated to the project, and so on. 

The approval report makes it possible to view detailed information on timesheets that are approved and those that are yet to be approved. Within this report, you can decide to approve the timesheet or send it back to the employee for correction.

Quickbooks Time also allows you to set up and customize your paid and unpaid time-off policies. Employees can request for paid time off from their devices and the admin personnel can approve from their end.

CA technologies, KICK ventures, Apex IT, Vantage Credit Union, and thousands of small businesses.

• Time clock kiosk: Quickbooks Time stands out as the only software offering this feature. Quickbooks Time clock kiosk works as a traditional punch clock, providing a digital central clock-in-and-out solution. 
• Geofencing and GPS tracking: Quickbooks Time uses GPS technology to track your employees' location while they are on the job, and uses geofencing to remind them to clock in when they get to the job site. 
• DCAA compliance: If your business frequently handles government contracts, this feature ensures your timekeeping stays compliant with Department of Labor and Defense Contract Audit Agency laws.

Quickbooks Time also offers:

• Project management 
• Scheduling 
• Reporting 
• Time off management

Naturally, Quickbooks Time integrates well with Quickbooks' proprietary accounting, payroll, point of sale, and bookkeeping softwares. Giving you the flexibility to have a well-rounded setup that addresses all the necessary facets of typical business administration.

However, you can also use Quickbooks Time with other accounting and payroll software. It integrates with tools like ADP, Square, Gusto, Salesforce, OnPay, PowerBI, and more.

Quickbooks Time offers two pricing plans. The good thing about Quickbooks pricing is they almost always give some form of discount at any given time. Usually, you will get a 50% discount for 3 months when you buy any of Quickbooks Time plans. You also get a 30-day free trial. The plans are as follows:

• Premium: This plan costs $20 base fee per month plus an additional $8 per user, monthly. ‍
• Elite: For this plan, you pay a base fee of $40 per month plus an additional $10 per user, monthly.

Quickbooks Time is best for businesses that are already using any of Quickbooks' services. If you also have a central location where your employees do business, this software will come in handy to help cut costs.

QuickBooks Time has a support portal with numerous resources for customers to self-serve. Customers in need of assistance can also contact the QuickBooks Time support team via phone or live chat.

Quickbooks Time used to be TSheets, which was founded in 2006 by Matt Rissell and Brandon Zehm. Matt was a businessman selling ink and printer cartridges from his franchised Cartridge World stores. 

The idea of creating a time tracking application came to him when he was looking for a way to accurately track the time his employees were clocking in and out but couldn’t find any suitable solutions online. He placed a call to his then friend and software architect, Brandon Zehm, and the two worked together to create a cloud-based time tracking solution for his store. 

On the very first payroll after he implemented this solution, his bookkeeper saved up to $2,000 – which they would have lost as a result of time theft. It was then that Matt realized that there could be a way to market the product and get more out of it. Two years later in 2007, Matt sold his store and devoted his time solely to TSheets.  

Tsheets grew rapidly due, in part, to their relatively affordable price at the time plus the enormous burden they took off the shoulders of bookkeepers.

 They were acquired by Intuit in 2018 for a sum of $340 million and rebranded to Quickbooks Time. Now, Quickbooks Time is the most used time tracking application in the market. As a matter of fact, it is estimated that every 0.5 seconds an employee tracks time with Quickbooks Time somewhere in the world.

Is Quickbooks Time free if you use Quickbooks?

Unfortunately no. They used to offer free basic time tracking if you were subscribed to Quickbooks online (QBO) but they discontinued that feature in 2021. Now you need to subscribe for both QBO and Quickbooks time to be able to use both platforms. Good news is, Quickbooks time natively syncs with QBO.

Can you use Quickbooks time as a standalone app?

Definitely. Quickbooks time is a standalone tool with standalone pricing.