Our guide to construction timesheets for subcontractors

Key Takeaways

• A construction timesheet records who worked, when they started and finished and which job, task and cost code the hours belong to. For subcontractors it feeds payroll and doubles as the evidence behind every labour claim, variation and future tender price.
• On fixed-price work, timesheet accuracy is a margin issue before it is an admin issue. Hours rounded up, recalled on a Friday or booked to the wrong cost code erode the margin you tendered and corrupt the rates you price your next job on.
• Fair Work requires employee records, including overtime start and finish times, to be kept for seven years. If those records are missing or unreliable, an employer can be left to prove in court that no underpayment occurred.

A construction timesheet is a record of the hours a worker spent on site, broken down by date, start and finish times, unpaid breaks and the job, task or cost code the time belongs to. For a subcontractor it is the document that turns labour into a payable, claimable and reportable number.

That single record does three jobs at once. It drives what your crew gets paid under an award or EBA, it tells you what a job is costing against what you priced it at, and it is the evidence you reach for when Fair Work does an audit. Get it right and all three run off one input. Get it wrong and you pay for it three times over.

What is a construction timesheet?

A construction timesheet is a time record built for site work rather than an office desk. As well as check-in and check-out times, it typically captures breaks, inclement weather and the cost code or codes the hours belong to.

Cost codes are what catch businesses out. A fieldworker might spend the whole day on one job but split it across different work, say three hours on ground level and five hours on level 3. A generic timesheet records eight work hours. A construction timesheet splits them, three hours against cost code A and five against cost code B, so you can see what each part of the job is costing.

Why do construction timesheets matter more for subcontractors?

Most subcontract work is priced as a lump-sum or a fixed-rate. Once the contract is signed the scope is locked and labour is the one variable big enough to move the result, so the timesheet is the closest thing you have to a live read on your margin.

Hold your hours to the rates you tendered and the margin you priced is the margin you keep. Miss them and there is no invoice for a crew that booked 400 hours against a task you priced at 300, and no line item in the P&L that names it. It surfaces as a job that came in tight for reasons nobody can quite explain, then it repeats, because the rates you carry into your next tender come from the same unreliable hours. Price too high off bad data and you lose the work. Price too low and you win it and lose the margin.

There is a compliance edge as well. The Fair Work Ombudsman recovered $358 million for more than 249,000 underpaid workers in 2024-25 and imposed a record $23.7 million in court penalties, with construction named among the high risk sectors targeted for the following year. Where allowances, travel, overtime and RDO accruals all hang off recorded hours, an unreliable timesheet is where that exposure begins.

What should a construction timesheet template capture?

A timesheet that records only start and finish is a payroll document. One that supports costing, compliance and claims carries more.

• Worker and date: Who worked, on which day and their classification, because the classification drives the rate.
• Start, finish and breaks: Actual times rather than a rounded daily total, with unpaid breaks recorded separately.
• Project details: The project the fieldworker is assigned to and where it is.
• Area and cost code: Where on site they worked, with hours split across cost codes the way you estimated them.
• Allowances and conditions: Travel, fares, height, weather conditions, confined space, leading hand and anything else your award or EBA triggers.
• Plant and equipment: What the worker operated, tying labour and plant hours to the same activity.
• Notes, delays and site conditions: The weather stand-down or the late access that explains why the hours ran over.
• Approval: A supervisor sign-off close to the day the work happened, not a batch approval the following week.

The last two are the ones construction businesses skip and later wish they had not. Hours with no context are just a number in a dispute. Hours with a recorded delay and a supervisor's approval against them are evidence.

What does the law require the construction industry to record?

Employers in Australia must keep employee records for seven years, in English, legible and readily accessible to a Fair Work Inspector. Those records cannot be altered except to correct a genuine error and they must not be false or misleading. On hours specifically, the record-keeping rules require overtime start and finish times along with the penalty rates applied, hours worked by casual and irregular part-time workers paid on a time-worked basis and a copy of any agreement to average hours.

The real risk sits in what happens when the records are not there. Employers who have not kept records, or cannot produce them for inspection, may have to prove to a court that they did not underpay a worker. That is a difficult position to argue from a shoebox of dockets.

Construction adds a layer on top. State portable long service leave schemes require employers to report the days each worker was engaged in construction work, and those returns are only as accurate as the timesheets behind them.

Where do manual construction timesheets break down?

The problem with paper dockets and traditional timesheets usually isn't one big mistake. It's small errors that build up week after week, and most of them come from fieldworkers filling in hours from memory at the end of the week.

Paper dockets have a habit of going missing, whether they get wet, get left in a ute or get handed in three days after payroll has closed. The ones that do make it back are often incomplete, with a missing finish time or a blank cost code, or they're handwritten so badly that the office has to decipher them or chase the fieldworker to ask what they meant.

When a crew fills in the week on Friday afternoon, they'll usually remember which job they were on but not how many hours went against which area or cost code, so they round to the nearest half hour and fill the gaps with their best guess. Allowances earned on Tuesday get reconstructed from memory, if they're remembered at all.

In some cases the error is deliberate, like a fieldworker who arrived late on Tuesday writing down their usual start time, knowing that by Friday the supervisor has no reliable way of checking.

Then the same timesheet data gets handled over and over. Someone chases the missing paper timesheets, someone deciphers the handwriting, someone keys it into a payroll system and someone reconciles it against the job cost report. Every one of those steps can introduce an error and none of them add anything to the record.

How do you get accurate timesheets out of your crew?

Accuracy is a design problem more than a discipline problem. Construction teams record hours accurately when recording them is faster than not recording them.

Capture at the moment, on the phone the worker already carries. A check in and check out that takes seconds beats a form that takes ten minutes on Friday, and time captured as it happens never has to be remembered.

• Pre-load the choices: When the jobs, cost codes and activities already sit in the app, a fieldworker picks rather than writes and the coding matches your estimate instead of approximating it.
• Automate the conditions: Allowances, overtime and penalty rates should follow from the recorded times and the worker's classification, not from whoever is filling in the sheet.
• Approve daily: A supervisor reviewing yesterday's hours on site remembers yesterday. A supervisor approving a full week on Friday is guessing, and so is everyone downstream.
• Close the loop with the crew: When fieldworkers can see their own approved hours and allowances, most payday queries disappear before they reach the office.

How Neo Intelligence handles construction timesheets

Neo Intelligence is a construction operations platform built for Australian subcontractors, and timesheets sit at the centre of it. Crews check in and out on their phones using GPS, a QR code or app entry, against the job and cost code they were scheduled to, so digital timesheets capture hours where the work happens instead of reconstructing them a week later. Supervisors approve timesheets individually and bulk on site, daily.

During onboarding, we program your EBA and company awards into our EBA interpretation engine. After a timesheet is approved, EBA and awards interpretation applies the correct rates, allowances and penalties automatically, and approved time flows through payroll integration without being keyed a second time. The same hours feed your job costing, so labour running hot against a cost code is visible while you can still do something about it.

The businesses using it describe the change in hours returned. GVK Group cut payroll processing time by 90%, and SG Formwork and C3 Construction both report an 80% reduction. Spiros Mamary, Director of The Steel Fixing Group, put it plainly: "What used to take us up to a day and a half is now done in a few hours."

Want to see what your own hours would look like running through the Neo timesheet app? Book a demo and we will walk you through it.

Digital Timesheet FAQs

Do you need timesheets for salaried supervisors and working directors?

Salaried office staff who are covered by an award or EBA still need their total working hours recorded, although not necessarily in the same detailed format fieldworkers use. Under annualised salary arrangements, the employer generally has to record both start and finish times, as well as unpaid breaks so the salary can be reconciled against what the award would have paid, typically every twelve months. A working director employed by their own business is still an employee for record-keeping purposes.

For salaried staff who aren't covered by any award or EBA, there's no requirement to record hours, but many construction businesses do it anyway for two commercial reasons:

• Job costing: Project managers and supervisors can see how many hours each project is using, so their time is counted as a real cost against the job rather than left out of what the work took to deliver.
• Overhead insight: The business can see how much time and money goes into running the business itself, separate from project work.

Is it legal to track a worker's location when they clock in?

Taking a GPS location when a fieldworker checks in and out is generally lawful in Australia. Tracking their location for the whole shift is much harder to justify and far more likely to meet resistance from crews and unions.

In New South Wales and the ACT, employers must give at least 14 days written notice before any tracking surveillance begins, and Victoria has committed to its own workplace surveillance reforms. Privacy obligations apply as well, covering how location data is stored and who can see it. 

The safe approach is to limit location capture to check-in and check-out, tell your crew in writing what's captured and why, and put that in a short policy they've actually read.

Do you need timesheets for the ABN subcontractors you engage?

Fair Work record-keeping obligations apply to employees, not to genuine independent contractors, so a subcontractor invoicing you on an ABN sits in a different category. You still want their hours. Contractor time affects your job costs, your programme and your claims the way employee hours do, and capturing it in the same system means your cost codes reflect the full labour picture. Be careful with the classification itself, because someone working under your direction, on your equipment, to your hours may be an employee in substance regardless of the ABN on the invoice.

Can you round timesheet hours to the nearest 15 minutes?

Rounding is not automatically unlawful, but it is only defensible when it is neutral. Rounding that consistently favours the employer, for instance pushing start times forward and finish times back, becomes a systematic underpayment once you multiply it across a crew and a year. If you round at all, round both directions on the same increment and keep the actual recorded times alongside the rounded figure. Capturing exact times electronically removes the question altogether.

What happens if a worker disputes their hours after they have been paid?

Your records are the starting point, which is why unapproved or reconstructed timesheets leave you in a weak position. A dispute usually resolves quickly when you can produce the recorded start and finish times, the supervisor approval against that day and any site notes explaining unusual hours. Where a genuine error turns up, correcting it and back-paying promptly keeps a simple mistake from escalating into a claim. Keep the amended record and the original, since records can only be changed to correct an error and the correction should be traceable.