Timesheets for trades: logging hours against the job
Almost every timesheet problem in a small trades business is the same problem: the hours are written down days after they happened, by someone guessing.
Last updated: August 2026
Friday afternoon is the enemy
Ask most engineers to fill in a timesheet on Friday for the week just gone and you will get a document that is tidy, plausible and wrong. Not dishonest, just reconstructed. Tuesday becomes “about four hours” because Tuesday was four days ago and something went wrong on Wednesday that pushed it out of mind.
The errors are not random, either. Reconstructed time rounds to comfortable numbers, forgets the half hour spent finding a parking space, drops the second visit that only took twenty minutes, and quietly omits the job that went badly. Those are exactly the hours you most needed to see.
Log against the job, not against the week
The single change that fixes most of this is recording time against a job at the point you are doing it, rather than against a week at the end of it.
It is faster, because you are answering a question you already know the answer to. It is more accurate, because you are not remembering. And it produces something a weekly grid never can: a per-job number you can compare against what you charged.
A timesheet that only tells you an engineer worked 38 hours tells you what to pay them. A record that tells you which jobs those 38 hours went into tells you which work is worth taking.
What a useful record actually contains
- Which job. Not the customer, not the day: the job, so the time can be compared with the quote.
- The date. Obvious, and the first thing lost when hours are entered in a block.
- How long. Honest, including travel and waiting if that is what you have agreed to count.
- A short note, when the number is surprising. Six hours on a two-hour job is data. Six hours on a two-hour job with “access: had to wait for the landlord” beside it is information you can act on.
Where Dispatch fits
Dispatch has time logging built in. It is opt-in for each engineer, so it is off until it is turned on, and switching it on is an individual choice rather than something imposed silently on a team.
Once it is on, engineers log time against the jobs they are working on, and their own hours are visible on an Hours screen so they can see what they have recorded rather than trusting that it went somewhere. A week's hours can be produced as a PDF timesheet, which is the format that suits sending on to whoever needs it: a bookkeeper, an accountant, or your own records.
Because time is logged against jobs, it sits with everything else on that job: the original fault report, the quote, the photos and the invoice. That is the part a standalone timesheet app cannot do, and it is the reason the hours are worth collecting at all.
Turning hours into better quotes
This is the return on the discipline. Once a few months of honest per-job time exists, you can answer questions that were previously guesswork: whether a particular kind of job is consistently underpriced, whether one type of customer absorbs more time than it should, whether the travel on a distant job wipes out the margin.
Most trades and service businesses discover at least one job type they had been quoting at a loss without knowing it. Fixing that is worth more than the timesheets cost to keep. When you come to reprice, quoting for a job and taking a deposit covers the other half.
Agree the rules before you switch it on
Time recording goes wrong when people are unsure what counts, so settle the following with your team first, because the questions matter more than the answers and consistency matters more than either:
- Does travel count? Either answer works. An unspoken answer does not.
- What about collecting materials? Usually yes, and usually against the job it was for.
- How do you handle a return visit? Logging it against the original job keeps the true cost of that work together.
- What happens to time on a job that was quoted and lost? It still happened. Knowing what unsuccessful quotes cost you is useful in itself.
Be straight about why you are collecting it, too. Engineers assume time recording is surveillance unless told otherwise, and it lands very differently when the stated purpose is pricing the work properly rather than checking up on people. For who can see what in general, see roles and permissions.
Questions
Timesheets FAQ
How do I log time against a job?
Time logging is opt-in, so an engineer turns it on for themselves first. From then on, hours are recorded against the job being worked on rather than against the week as a whole, which keeps the time with the job it belongs to.
Where do I see the hours I have logged?
On the Hours screen in Dispatch, which shows what you have recorded so you can check it rather than hoping it saved.
How do I get a weekly timesheet?
A week of logged hours can be produced as a PDF timesheet, which is a convenient format to keep or send on to a bookkeeper or accountant.
Is time logging switched on for everyone by default?
No. It is opt-in for each engineer, so it stays off until it is turned on, and one person enabling it does not enable it for the rest of the team.
Why log time against a job rather than on a weekly timesheet?
A weekly total tells you what to pay someone. Time recorded against jobs tells you what each piece of work actually cost, which is what lets you find the job types you have been quoting at a loss.
Keep reading
More guides for trades and service businesses
Log time against the job, as you go
Time logging is built into Dispatch and off until an engineer turns it on. Hours sit on the job, and a week can come out as a PDF timesheet.