Chronotek does the hard part of distributed time well. Crews clock in by phone or app, geofencing confirms they are on site, and the hours come out clean. The trouble starts after the export, when those hours have to become payroll with your overtime and union rules, then reconcile against the timesheet the client signed. This page is for the operator who wants the clock and the rest of the Friday close handled too.
What Chronotek does well
Chronotek is built for exactly the cleaning problem of crews spread across many buildings on odd hours. Telephone and mobile clock-in with geofencing answers the question every owner asks first, which is whether the person was actually on site. The timesheets come out clean and ready to hand to payroll. For a company whose only gap is capturing accurate hours, that is the tool.
It sits in the wider market on the time tracking and payroll guide next to ClockShark, Workyard, and QuickBooks Time. The question is not whether it captures hours well. It is what has to happen to those hours after the export.
Where a time clock stops short
A clean timesheet is where the close begins. The hours still have to run through overtime and union rules, then get checked against what the client signed for, and most operators do that reconciliation by hand every Friday. The hours sit in the time app while payroll and the account record live somewhere else, and the owner is the bridge between them.
A time clock will not see margin per account either. It knows a cleaner worked six hours, not whether that building is making money at the rate you bid it. That answer lives across the time app, the payroll system, and a spreadsheet, and it usually shows up a quarter too late.
Where a custom build fits instead
Colby builds the pipeline from the clock you already use through to reconciled payroll and job-level margin, wired into the systems you run. You keep Chronotek or whatever clock works and add the part that turns its hours into a finished close. You can see the full version on the payroll reconciliation use case.
The GPS hours your clock already captures carried through to payroll, with your overtime and union rules applied, reconciled against the client-signed timesheet before anyone runs a check.
The same hours tied to the account and the contract, so you see profit per building instead of one payroll number, and a quietly unprofitable account surfaces before the quarter closes.
Approved hours move into the payroll and accounting systems you already run, so the Friday reconciliation between the time app, the spreadsheet, and the client timesheet stops being a person's afternoon.
How to choose
If your only gap is proving attendance and handing payroll a clean timesheet, Chronotek covers it and a custom build would be overkill. Buy the clock and move on.
The case for building shows up when the weekly tax is the reconciliation between hours, pay rules, and the signed timesheet, or when you cannot see which accounts make money until the quarter closes. Colby starts with a three-week discovery that maps how hours move through your company to a paycheck, then hands you a readout of build options to pick from. You own what gets built, and Colby hosts and maintains it. The quickest read on where you stand is to score your operation or start a quote.
Tell us what you are evaluating. We will reply within one business day and walk you through what the custom path would look like for your operation, including whether a discovery is worth it before you commit to a platform.
Reply within 1 business day · NDA-friendly · No build prices before discovery