HVAC Time Tracking: Go digital with HVAC software.

How do you get better time tracking information out of your technicians? Build it into their process.

With all of the different responsibilities that come with owning and operating an HVAC company, keeping track of your technicians’ hours can sometimes become the most time consuming. Giving your technicians the ability to effortlessly clock in/out for the day (or into a particular job) can help out any company. 

HVAC technicians already have a ton of considerations during visits to customers, so you need to make keeping track of time one of the easiest parts of their day. As many companies have found, pen and paper time tracking only works so well and doesn’t allow for much editing on the fly. This practice forces technicians to make time tracking a separate part of their day. Conversely, an HVAC scheduling program like Smart Service integrates time tracking into their normal work flow. 

Smart Service has an entire section dedicated to time tracking. 

Within Smart Service you have the ability to view a specific employee’s time (or every employee’s time), and you can edit and manage each individual day or timestamp. When it comes to clocking in, your technicians have some options. For example, they can start time tracking when they begin to travel, and when they officially arrive and start the job itself. Because of this, you have the ability to closely monitor your team as your technicians make moves throughout the day. 

One of the biggest advantages of using Smart Service? Its integration with QuickBooks. With Smart Service you can edit, manage, and make sure your job times are correct, and then send that information off to QuickBooks so that you can process it with your payroll.  

Your technicians have the ability within the Smart Service mobile app to clock in for the day, and also for a specific job itself.

To the untrained eye, the screenshot above may not look like much. Let’s break it down. The screen displays a job. Within that job, the technician has the ability to start time tracking (highlighted in the lime green box). This allows office staff to see how long technicians are working on each job. In the future, they can use this info to determine how long specific jobs should last. Not only does this assist with time tracking, it also allows you to better plot your technicians’ days. You can start giving better, more accurate estimates of when you will arrive to customers, which will increase customer satisfaction. 

In addition to recording your time, you can add labor time after you have officially “clocked out” of a job and charge it to the customer. This means your technicians do not have to manually calculate their time for labor charges. You can even set up Smart Service to round off labor times. If a technician only works for 15 minutes, you can set Smart Service up to round up to and charge for one hour. This feature will assist in keeping the amount of administrative work your technicians do to a minimum.

Once the job comes back from the field, office staff have the ability to add or edit time information. This works well for businesses who do not want technicians in charge of tracking time data at all.

To summarize, with the HVAC software Smart Service, your technicians can easily manage their time in the field. Smart Service gives them the tools to clock in and out of jobs, and for the entire day. When your tech finishes work, they have the ability to send the time info back to the office, where dispatchers can edit and approve the info before sending it over to QuickBooks for payroll. Smart Service assists both office employees and technicians, allowing for easy HVAC time tracking.