Electrician time tracking, without the timer.
How a electrician's day actually looks
Most time-tracking apps assume a steady, predictable day. A electrician's day is the opposite. You're pulling wire and troubleshooting panels, switching between addresses like residential service calls, new-build rough-in, panel upgrades in occupied homes, and doing tasks like running circuits and pulling wire, troubleshooting dead outlets and intermittent faults, sizing and installing panel upgrades. Timers get forgotten. Manually entering jobsites in advance does not match how calls actually come in.
Friction electricians tell us about
- Service calls are 45 minutes at one address, then 2 hours at the next — easy to lose half-hour increments in memory
- Diagnostic work on stubborn faults balloons past the quote and you need defensible time to justify the extra line
- Rough-in days jump between unit A, B, and C of the same subdivision and the addresses blur together by Friday
- Permit inspectors arrive unannounced and wreck whatever rhythm you had going
How TradesTimer handles it
- Every stop at every address is captured to the minute without you reaching for the phone
- Ballooned diagnostic time shows up as a long, confirmed stop you can point to in the invoice
- Subdivision unit visits land on the timeline as separate stops with their own duration
- Interruptions don't cost you billable time because you never had to start the timer in the first place
Tracking hours as a electrician: notes from the tools
I wasn't the guy pulling wire — I was the back office. I ran orders, parts, invoices, and time tracking for an electrical contractor with about ten electricians on the road. Which means I've personally chased every way hours go missing: a guy forgets to clock in and we reconstruct his morning from memory; he clocks into the wrong job and the wrong customer nearly gets billed; the office (me) hadn't set up the PO or job number yet, so his hours had nowhere to land.
When I caught it same-day, we fixed it. When it surfaced at invoice time weeks later, we ate the hours — and with ten guys, 'sometimes we forgot and lost big bucks' is not a figure of speech. Here's the part that matters if you're solo: that shop had a full-time person doing this. Most electricians running their own book have nobody in that chair.
TradesTimer is designed so nobody has to sit in that chair. The day records itself from location — every service call is a stop with a start and end time — and you attach names at invoice time, after the fact, when you actually know what the job was called. No job codes to pick at 7 a.m., no PO that has to exist before your hours can.
How electricians actually track hours (and where it breaks)
Real threads from real tradespeople — each quote links to the original discussion.
We have crews working on multiple job sites, often with staggered start/end times, and it's getting harder to stay on top of hours, breaks, and overtime especially when it comes to accurate payroll and job costing.
Staggered, multi-site days are exactly where clock-in apps break down — the fix is capturing the day automatically instead of asking anyone to remember.
Typical hourly rates
Electricians in North America typically bill between $85–175/hr . Typical North American residential service range; journeyman vs master, and region, swing the number materially. At those rates, even 30 minutes of lost billable time a week is real money — and the free version of TradesTimer is built around recovering exactly that time, with no subscription required.
Rate range as of 2026-04-15.
Free. The whole app.
The whole time-tracking app is free — no trial, no feature gate, no ads, no per-user fees. (Encrypted cloud backup is on the roadmap.)
- Automatic day reconstruction from background GPS
- Unlimited stops, drives, and days
- Review and edit any block
- Rounded billable-hours summary, shareable as plain text
- Automatic mileage log, exportable for taxes
- 7-day summary view
- All location data stays on your device
Your location history stays on your phone.
There is no TradesTimer server storing your location trails. No account. No sign-up. Your GPS history lives on the device that recorded it — for as long as you want it. The only time anything leaves your phone is when you choose to share your billable-hours summary yourself.
The app does not talk to any third-party service with your location. Nothing about where you've been is uploaded anywhere. See the privacy policy for the full detail.