QuickBooks Time review (2026): pricing, features and who it's for

Are you already paying for this?

Intuit sells time tracking twice. It is a paid product on its own, and it is baked into the two upper payroll tiers. Workforce Premium is $88 a month plus $10 per employee. Workforce Elite is $134 plus $12. Time tracking comes with both.

So before you compare anything, open your account and see which payroll plan you are on. A five-person shop that buys Premium payroll and then adds this separately spends $70 a month, or $840 a year, on something already sitting in the plan.

The reverse is worth a look too. If you are on the base payroll plan and eyeing this product, price the upgrade instead. Base payroll plus this, at five people, is $82.50 plus $70, which is $152.50 a month. Workforce Premium at five people is $138 and includes the tracking. Moving up costs less than bolting on, and it adds same-day deposit and local tax filing. Do that sum before you buy, because Intuit will not do it for you.

What field crews like about it

The core promise is clock-in from the job site, and the trade owners who use it back that up. Kevin S., an accountant at a utilities firm with field crews, has run it since it was still TSheets. Many long-time trade users still call it that. He says his people were wary of the app at first, then leaned on it, and that his crews find it easy to track time in the field wherever they are.

A manager or admin can select a whole crew and clock them in from one phone, switch their jobs, put them on break and clock them out. There is also a kiosk mode: a shared tablet at the shop where each person taps a 4-digit PIN. Between the two, a crew where half the guys do not want an app on their own phone still gets tracked. Only an admin or a manager can edit someone else's time, which is the right default when you set up roles.

The payoff lands at the other end. Approved hours flow into QuickBooks for payroll and for invoicing. A tech's Tuesday becomes both a paycheck line and a billable line with nobody typing it twice. If your books are in QuickBooks Online, no standalone crew app gets that close. That is the whole case for this tool, and it is a strong one for the right shop.

Where the punch fails in the field

The catch is coverage. Patrick K., a vice president at a construction firm, has used it more than two years and hits sync trouble when the signal is weak. He clocks in from a spot with spotty mobile coverage, the punch does not stick, and he fixes it by hand later.

He is not alone. samantha H., an admin at another construction outfit, reports the app glitching out in the field, which forces her workers to close it fully and restart before it behaves. Kevin S. mentions the software running slow at busy times of day. Three separate trade reviewers describe the same shape of problem: a punch that fails or lags right when a crew is out on a site with no strong signal. For a shop that lives and dies by accurate hours, that means someone in the office chasing corrections every week.

A quick word on where these reports come from. They sit on Capterra, where ratings skew high, so read the praise there with that in mind. What makes these cons worth your attention is that independent shops hit them without prompting, and their crews work the same field conditions yours do. samantha's team still came out ahead, though. She moved over from a tracker that got too pricey for what it did, and says this one gives her more value for the money.

Can a worker turn the GPS off?

Yes, and an owner spells out how. HILLARY H., a bookkeeper, rates it three stars and lays out the gap plainly. A worker can turn location services off after clocking in and switch them back on before clocking out. The record then shows a clean punch with no proof of where they stood in between.

GPS location is stamped on clock-ins on both paid plans, which is better than most. But stamping is not stopping. GPS tells you afterwards where someone was. A geofence blocks the punch until they reach the site, and geofencing lives on Elite only, at $40 a month plus $12 per user. If your problem is a tech clocking in from his driveway, Premium records it and Elite prevents it. For five users that gap is $30 a month, or $360 a year. Jenica S., in security work, likes the GPS when it behaves but says the pings glitch and get confusing.

Job costing splits the same way. Premium tracks time against customers and job codes. The report that shows what a job ate against what you quoted is Elite only. So a shop buying this to find out which jobs lose money should budget for Elite from the start, at $100 a month for five people, plus the accounting plan underneath.

What it costs as you grow, and who should skip it

Per-user pricing is the complaint owners raise most. Jenica S. calls it very good but pricey and says the extras add up. Larger crews feel it hardest. Angie T., who runs 25 to 30 people, tried it and found it was not cost-effective at that headcount. Hallye N. lists high per-user pricing among her cons.

The growth is the reason. The base fee covers one admin, and everybody else is a per-user fee. Ten people on Premium is $120 a month. On Elite, ten people is $160. The free 30-day trial covers the monthly base fee and not the per-employee fees. So on a five-person crew the trial is a discount, not a free month. Read that before you plan around it. The commitment itself is light: month to month, cancel any time, which beats the multi-year contracts some crew tools still ask for.

Support runs by chat or a callback request through your QuickBooks account, weekdays 6am to 6pm Pacific. Intuit does not publish a direct number for this product, so plan on a callback rather than reaching someone mid-crisis. One long-time user reports that support quality dropped after TSheets folded into QuickBooks, with reps who know the product less well than the old team did. We treat that as one owner's account rather than today's fact, but it fits the callback-only setup.

Where that leaves you. Buy it if your books are in QuickBooks Online, your crew clocks in at customer sites, and you want the hours to reach payroll and invoices untouched. Buy Elite, not Premium, if you need the geofence or job profitability. Skip it if your accounting is somewhere else, because you would also be buying a QuickBooks Online plan, which turns a $70 time clock into a much bigger monthly number. Skip it too if you are on Workforce Premium or Elite payroll already, because you have it, and nobody at Intuit is going to call and tell you so.

What owners actually say