It's Monday morning and your office manager is doing what she does every Monday morning.

Chasing timesheets.

Three engineers haven't submitted last week's hours, one has sent a photo of a barely legible notebook page, and another has put in his hours but hasn't broken them down by job. One engineer actually submitted everything correctly, but the totals don't add up.

By the time payroll is ready to run, half the work day has gone.

This is the reality of running a plumbing business using paper timesheets. It costs you time, accuracy, and money.

At four engineers it's manageable. At twelve, it's weekly chaos.

And the thing is, most business owners masively underestimate what it's actually costing them.

Putting a Number on the Paper Problem

According to PayEscape, the calculation error rate in organisations relying on paper time tracking can reach 8% of total payroll. For a plumbing business with a monthly payroll of £40,000, that's potentially £3,200 in errors every month from the inaccuracy of manual data collection and entry.

Beyond payroll errors, there are also hidden labour costs.

Your office manager's time spent chasing, deciphering, and entering timesheet data isn't free. And when a subcontractor or employee challenges their pay and neither side has a reliable, timestamped record to refer to, disputes can become expensive and difficult to resolve.

Paper timesheets create ambiguity.

TimeKeeper removes it.

What a Digital Timesheet Workflow Looks Like

TimeKeeper replaces every step of the paper process with a streamlined digital workflow.

Engineers can easily clock in and out from their smartphones, managers approve timesheets digitally, and verified hours flow into BrightPay for payroll. It's designed for plumbing businesses where teams are spread across multiple jobs and sites each day, which means it works for the way your business actually operates, and not an idealised version of it.

• Mobile clock-in with GPS verification: Engineers open the TimeKeeper app and tap to clock in. The system records their GPS coordinates and checks them against the geofenced job site, confirming they're on location at the point of clock-in.
• Job time tracking: Engineers can log time against specific jobs or tasks as they work. By the end of the day, you have an accurate breakdown of how long each job took.
• Multi-level approval workflow: Managers receive digital timesheet submissions directly in TimeKeeper and can review, query, or approve them from their phone.
• Automatic regular and overtime calculation: TimeKeeper calculates regular and overtime hours based on your configured pay rules, removing manual calculations.
• BrightPay integration: Approved hours sync with BrightPay, eliminating the re-keying step. Your payroll administrator starts from verified, structured data rather than a stack of paper, and payroll that previously took a day can be completed in a fraction of the time.

Operational Benefits Beyond Payroll

TimeKeeper also transforms how you manage your team day to day.

The live Who's In dashboard gives you a real-time view of who is on site across all your active jobs, which can be super useful when a client calls asking for an update, or when you need to know who's available to take an emergency call.

The rota planner lets you schedule engineers across jobs with visibility over their hours, leave, and availability. And the instant reporting tools mean you can pull a summary of any team member's hours, any job's labour cost, or any week's attendance in seconds.

Getting Started Is Simpler Than You Think

One of the most common hesitations about moving away from paper timesheets is the perceived complexity of it.

How do you get twelve engineers to use a new system? How long does it take to set up? What happens during the transition?

TimeKeeper is designed to make the answer to all three questions simple. The mobile app takes seconds to use and requires no technical knowledge. Setup is typically completed within the hour. Most plumbing businesses are live and capturing their first digital timesheets on the same day they sign up.

The transition from paper timesheets is easy. With TimeKeeper, engineers are just required to tap their phone when they arrive on a job.

Ready to get started?
Start your 14-day free trial and get accurate payroll from day one.