It’s Friday afternoon. Your project manager is hunched over a desk, squinting at a stack of handwritten timecards. One card is missing entirely. Another looks like it was filled out in a moving vehicle. A third lists 11 hours on a day when the crew clocked out early. By the time the errors are tracked down, corrected, and entered into payroll, an hour has turned into three—and that’s before anyone finds the card wedged under a seat in the company truck.

Sound familiar?

Manual timesheets have been a fixture on construction sites for generations. They feel familiar, low-maintenance, and easy to explain to crews. But familiarity isn’t the same as efficiency—and “easy to explain” doesn’t mean “easy to manage.” According to a 2018 ConstrucTech study, nearly 40 percent of contractors still rely on paper-based timekeeping systems. That’s a significant portion of the industry still running a critical business function on a method that creates friction at every step.

The costs aren’t always obvious. A missing timecard here. A rounding error there. A foreman who enters a flat 60 hours for every worker regardless of what actually happened on site. Each incident seems small on its own. Together, they add up to a financial leak that quietly drains thousands of dollars from your bottom line every year.

THE TRUE COST OF PAPER

Manual timesheets don’t just slow things down. They drain money at every stage of the process, often in ways that are hard to trace back to their source.

The headline number tells the story clearly: paper time tracking costs contractors an average of $4,285+ per worker annually, through a combination of time theft, padded hours, and payroll inaccuracies, according to SmartBarrel’s 2025 analysis. For a crew of 20 workers, that’s over $85,000 walking out the door every year.

Individual errors may seem trivial in isolation. A worker forgets to record a lunch break and claims a full 10-hour day. A foreman rounds everyone up to the nearest hour. An office administrator misreads a handwritten “7” as a “9.” None of these issues feel like “big deals.” But multiply them across multiple crews, several job sites, and 26 pay periods in a year, and the numbers compound fast.

Ernst & Young’s 2022 HR Processing Risk and Cost Survey found that each payroll error costs an average of $291 to remedy—combining both direct costs and the indirect labor involved in correcting it. 

Before examining where these errors originate, it helps to understand why they’re so persistent in construction environments specifically. Job sites are chaotic by nature. Crews get reassigned mid-shift. Supervisors are focused on safety and progress, not timecard audits. Paper is cheap and requires no training. The problems only become visible later—in payroll, in job-cost reports, and in the conversations that nobody wants to have.

ADMINISTRATIVE BURDEN

The administrative cost of manual timesheets isn’t just financial—it’s also a significant drain on the time of your most experienced people.

Think about what the weekly timesheet workflow actually looks like: Foremen collect cards, chase down missing ones, decipher handwriting, and flag discrepancies. Office staff then manually re-enter all of that data into payroll software, often catching errors mid-entry and having to loop back to the field for clarification. Payroll teams review the entries, flag inconsistencies, and request corrections before the cycle can close.

DELAYED SUBMISSIONS

Paper timesheets introduce delays at every point in the chain, and those delays have consequences that extend well beyond the back office.

Here’s how the typical failure sequence plays out: Workers fill out cards from memory at the end of the day—or the end of the week. Foremen collect the cards, but one is missing and another needs sign-off. The foreman is unavailable Friday afternoon, so the card sits until Monday. Office staff wait for corrections before they can process payroll. Payroll runs late—or with errors that have to be corrected next cycle

Each step introduces a potential bottleneck, and the downstream effects aren’t purely administrative. Workers who receive incorrect pay—or who wait an extra day for a paycheck they were expecting—lose trust quickly. 

TRANSCRIPTION ERRORS

Even when timecards arrive on time, the data they carry is often unreliable.

Studies show that 80 percent of paper timesheets contain at least one error—whether it’s incorrect hours, illegible handwriting, or miscalculated totals (Wagepoint, 2019, via TimeTrex). That’s not a marginal failure rate. It means the majority of manual timecards require some form of correction before payroll can run.

INACCURATE TIMESHEETS

Payroll errors are painful. Their effect on job costing, however, may be the more lasting damage.

Job costing is how you determine whether a project is actually profitable. It connects labor hours to specific phases, cost codes, and project budgets—giving you the data you need to price future bids accurately, spot overruns early, and make informed decisions mid-project. Remove accurate labor data from that equation, and the whole reporting structure becomes unreliable.

MANUAL VS. AUTOMATED TIME TRACKING

According to CCR Magazine, 60 percent of contractors have already moved away from paper toward digital systems—and the benefits are measurable: faster payroll processing, fewer disputes, and more reliable project data.

Critically, implementation doesn’t have to disrupt operations. Many construction-focused time-tracking tools are designed for field use, require minimal training, and can be rolled out one site at a time. The best ones remove friction rather than adding it.

WHAT TO LOOK FOR IN A CONSTRUCTION SOLUTION

Not every time tracking tool is built with construction environments in mind. Choosing the wrong one means trading one set of problems for another. Here are the features that matter most:

Mobile-first design: Workers should be able to clock in and out from the job site, without needing a desktop or a reliable office connection

Offline functionality: Job sites don’t always have strong connectivity—your system should work anyway

GPS and geofencing: Confirms workers are clocking in from the correct location, eliminating buddy punching

Payroll integration: Time data should flow directly into your payroll system without manual re-entry

Job-costing support: Hours should be assignable to specific projects, phases, or cost codes in real time

Simple interface: If it takes more than a few minutes to learn, crews won’t use it—and adoption is everything

The right solution makes accurate time tracking the path of least resistance, not an additional burden on already stretched field teams.

Switching from paper to digital time tracking isn’t a technology upgrade for its own sake. It’s a financial decision with a fast and measurable return—one that improves payroll accuracy, reduces administrative overhead, strengthens job costing, and gives your team better data to work with at every level.

for more information

TimeClick offers a straightforward, affordable time tracking solution built for businesses that want accurate records without the complexity. Try it free and see how much simpler payroll can be. For more, visit www.timeclick.com. 

After 16 years in the trenches of global manufacturing and another 18 years dedicated to aligning education with industry needs, I’ve realized that the labor shortage is actually a structural failure. Whether I’m talking to a production leader or a mid-sized contractor, the pain remains the same: You’re fighting for a workforce that doesn’t exist yet. You can’t find the workers you need. The ones you do find aren’t ready. And the ones who are ready don’t stay.

While GPS Education Partners has spent the last 25 years helping thousands of students find family-sustaining careers in the trades through work-based learning (WBL), we’ve learned something fundamental: The workforce crisis won’t be solved by fighting harder for the same shrinking pool of trained adults. It will be solved by building the pool itself.

THE PIPELINE IS BROKEN

Employers invest in job fairs, sponsor apprenticeships, offer solid wages, and still can’t staff their crews. What they’re missing is the “why.”

The problem isn’t that young people don’t want to work in construction. It’s that most of them have never been shown what a career in construction actually looks like, what a skilled trade career can provide, or how to bridge the gap between a high school classroom and a job site.

By the time a student shows up at a job fair or applies for an apprenticeship, they’ve already decided who they are in the world of work. Those decisions were made years earlier, often by default, because no one showed them the alternative. Employers are fishing at the end of the river. The real work has to happen upstream.

INTERNSHIPS AND APPRENTICESHIPS AREN’T ENOUGH

Apprenticeships and internships are valuable, but they’re not a pipeline strategy on their own. They’re the finish line, not the race.

The employers winning the talent competition right now aren’t the ones offering the highest signing bonuses. They’re the ones who showed up in ninth grade, who opened their job sites for a visit, who mentored a student in an exploration program, who gave a sophomore a reason to think “maybe this is for me.” 

One-off activities, a career day, a single plant tour, a scholarship announced at graduation, create moments instead of momentum. Momentum is what the construction trades pipeline needs.

THE PROBLEM IS STRUCTURAL, NOT GENERATIONAL

I hear it constantly: The young people being hired aren’t ready professionally. Work ethic, reliability, communication skills, and the basic understanding of what a job site demands, feel foreign to too many new hires.

That’s not a character flaw. It’s what happens when we build an education system almost entirely separated from the world of work. We tell students for twelve years that the goal is academic achievement and then act surprised when they have no foundation for operating in a professional work environment.

Work-based learning fixes this. Not by replacing academics, but by making them relevant. When a student works alongside a skilled tradesperson, sees technical knowledge applied on an actual project, and learns what it means to show up and be accountable, that’s education at its most powerful. In our book Make School Work, we define this through the 4 As: Authenticity, Aspiration, Ability, and Agency. When all four are present, work-based learning doesn’t just prepare students for a job, it transforms their relationship to work entirely—and with it, their sense of what’s possible.

THE PIPELINE STARTS EARLY

If you’re waiting until a student is a senior to reach them, you’ve already missed much of the window.

A real pipeline starts in middle school—when identities are forming, and one right exposure can change everything. In our experience, the moment that shifts a student’s trajectory happens around eighth or ninth grade—not senior year.

The students who complete apprenticeships, earn journeyman certifications, and stay in the trades for decades aren’t doing it because they stumbled into a job posting. They’re doing it because someone made a career real for them.

GPS Education Partners has built exactly that—structured pathways that start early, build progressively, and produce genuinely career-ready graduates. We’ve partnered with hundreds of businesses, schools, and colleges, impacting over 20,000 students across our home state of Wisconsin and the nation. The model works. The challenge now is scaling it, and that’s an effort that construction employers are positioned to help lead. 

WHAT YOU CAN DO RIGHT NOW

Engage earlier. Reach students before they’ve decided. Conduct site visits, job shadows, mentorship, and part-time work programs. This is the front end of your recruiting strategy. Yes, strategy!

Commit to the continuum. The most effective employer partners we work with don’t just show up at hiring time. They’re part of the full work-based learning journey—awareness, exploration, experience, and preparation. That sustained presence is what turns a curious ninth-grader into a committed apprentice.

Partner with work-based learning intermediaries. You don’t have to build this infrastructure alone. These organizations exist to provide the capacity needed to bridge employers and schools, managing complexity, navigating compliance, and building the relationships that sustain a real pipeline. Structured programs are also designed to integrate 17- and 18-year-olds safely and legally, so liability concerns don’t have to be a barrier. Often, these students become the perfect shadows and support to your most experienced foremen. 

The students who will fill your crews in five years are in a classroom right now. The question isn’t whether the talent exists. It’s whether you’re going to reach them in time.

This work is possible. The pipeline won’t build itself, but together, we can. The blueprint for a successful education-to-industry partnership is already drawn. What we need now are leaders willing to break ground. Join us in transforming how we prepare our youth. Let’s build a future where every graduate is truly career-ready.

about the author

Stephanie Reisner is the President and CEO of GPS Education Partners, a Wisconsin-based nonprofit celebrating 25 years of connecting students to meaningful careers through work-based learning. She is a co-author of Make School Work, a practical framework for designing and scaling high-quality work-based learning, available now on Amazon. For more, visit www.gpsed.org and www.makeschoolwork.org.

When asked, most construction company owners envision their perfect business, and you can bet that nearly all of them will have a different perspective. While many will declare that making a profit is their top priority, digging deeper, profit is not what owners really want. Profit is required to create what they really want. Profit is merely a tool for achieving something greater. What business owners truly desire is to build equity, generate lasting wealth, and enjoy the freedom of a business that operates efficiently without their constant oversight. Equity and wealth are the outcome of consistently making a profit, retaining it, and using it to seek other business opportunities, create passive ongoing income, own investments such as real estate rental properties, and grow net worth. Sadly, less than ten percent of contractors build enough wealth to retire comfortably at age 65.

UNDERSTANDING PROFIT AND ITS PURPOSE

Profit serves as the foundation for building equity and wealth. It’s the result of effective business practices and acts as the capital needed for expanding opportunities, creating passive income streams, investing in assets such as rental properties, and ultimately increasing net worth. 

Consider CEOs of Fortune 500 companies; their performance impacts not only their companies but also the shareholders and the economy at large. Every week, business news covers whether these companies generate profits, increase revenues, or see fluctuations in their stock prices. These executives focus intently on driving up their stock value, knowing that a higher stock price equates to increased company valuation. When your company makes a profit, the equity created can be reinvested back into your company, used to seek new business opportunities, or distributed back to the stockholders as dividends. When companies don’t make a real profit, or when all of the profits are distributed to owners, your company is not able to grow, expand, or seek new business ventures.  

THE DEFINITION OF WEALTH

Profit creates equity which allows for building wealth. Wealth is not solely defined by financial metrics; rather, it encompasses a holistic view that includes investments, financial security, family stability, time, freedom, peace of mind, and overall satisfaction. True wealth arises from a financially healthy business, one that consistently generates positive cash flow and growing profits. When your business flourishes financially, you gain the freedom to design a life that reflects your interests and aspirations.

Wealth is created from assets that make money without you doing much hands-on work. Wealth-building assets create regular positive cash-flow, go up in value over time, reduce debt, and are passive instead of needing constant attention and supervision. Wealth building is built through owning income-generating assets that require minimal ongoing management. 

Investment properties, for example, can provide a positive monthly cashflow with little hands-on involvement. Consider multi-family units or commercial real estate, which can generate net income without demanding your constant oversight by hiring a professional property manager to handle the day to day. Wealth building real estate assets can include joint venture projects with customers, your own building and yard, buying an old property to fix up, owning a residential duplex, or buying rental houses at great prices. Furthermore, investing in stocks of successful companies can expand your asset portfolio and bolster wealth. Financial success allows you to enjoy and design your life to do and get what you want. Wealth allows you to make choices how to spend your time and money. No wealth will keep you stressed out and constantly working to make ends meet. 

RETHINKING YOUR BUSINESS PURPOSE

Reflect on what drives your business decisions and the ultimate objectives you wish to achieve. Your purpose is to build a business that fits your vision, not just to construct buildings or fulfill contracts. The right purpose is to give the business owner what he or she wants. The core mission should revolve around generating profits, building equity, and recognizing wealth-generating opportunities while reaping the rewards of business ownership.

After two decades in commercial contracting, I finally recognized the disparity between my workload and the profits enjoyed by my clients, who were actively engaged in wealth-building endeavors. My firm generated significant revenue, but our profit margins were narrow, often between two to four percent. I endured lots of stress and took extreme risks building projects for customers who made millions of dollars owning and developing real estate. I started realizing that while our construction company did most of the work, our customers made most of the money. Why? Because I was in the profit business and my customers were in the wealth building business. This realization propelled me to pivot my business model toward recognizing and pursuing equity and wealth-generating opportunities plus being a contractor.

GET IN THE “OPPORTUNITY BUSINESS”

Finally, I made a decision to change our business model and get into the “Opportunity Business” seeking equity and wealth-building opportunities Transitioning into the “Opportunity Business” mentality, I began to seek real estate investment and development alongside our general contracting operations. We had expertise in construction and therefore it was time to leverage that knowledge to acquire a stake in the development process and associated profits. This meant allocating at least 25 percent of my efforts to pursuing wealth-building projects.

WEALTH-BUILDING MACHINE

Evaluate your business operations and consider how to transform your company into a wealth-building machine. While building the projects you handle well, dedicate a significant portion of your time to seeking and creating investment opportunities. Start small. My initial investment was humble: a $5,000 down payment on a distressed residential duplex. I dedicated time to renovations, which increased its appraised value. This allowed me to refinance, freeing up capital to invest in more properties. This strategy led me to acquire multiple assets over the years, compounding my wealth significantly. A thoughtful approach to real estate investment can lay the groundwork for lasting wealth. As you build your portfolio, your perspective shifts. You start prioritizing your own financial future rather than only laboring to expand someone else’s business.

The crucial step is to act! Don’t delay your journey toward building wealth. There’s never a perfect time to start this process. Aim to invest in at least one wealth-building asset each year. I am grateful for the early start I gained; thirty years later, my properties have appreciated substantially, equating to thousands in annual passive income that supports both me and my partners. Reimagining your construction business is not just about constructing buildings; it’s about constructing your financial future. Embrace the transformation from a profit-seeking enterprise to a wealth-building powerhouse. 

about the author

George Hedley CPBC is a certified professional construction business coach, consultant, and speaker. He shows contractors how to double their profits, grow, get organized, and get their company to work like a machine! He is the author of Get Your Construction Business To Always Make A Profit! available on Amazon.com. To talk, start a personalized BIZ-BUILDER program, or get his free e-newsletter, email gh@hardhatbizcoach.com. Visit his YouTube channel to watch his videos. To download online courses or get his contractor templates, visit www.constructionbusinesscoaching.com.