Fence installer time tracking, without the timer.
How a fence installer's day actually looks
Most time-tracking apps assume a steady, predictable day. A fence installer's day is the opposite. You're digging post holes and setting fence panels, switching between addresses like Residential backyards, Commercial perimeter sites, Construction site boundaries, and doing tasks like Setting posts in concrete, Stretching tension wires, Installing gate latches and hardware. Timers get forgotten. Manually entering jobsites in advance does not match how calls actually come in.
Friction fence installers tell us about
- Losing track of travel time between scattered residential properties
- Difficulty separating actual labor time from material unloading and site prep
- Missing small repair service calls when jumping between large-scale installs
- The headache of manually calculating mileage across multiple job sites for tax season
How TradesTimer handles it
- Auto-detects every new jobsite arrival without manual input
- Automatically logs every mile driven between posts and gates
- Captures the full duration of the day, including travel between yards
- Provides a ready-to-export mileage log for tax time
Tracking hours as a fence installer: notes from the tools
I built cedar fencing for a living — panel runs and stick-built custom, post holes, concrete, gates. Fencing days are split by nature: quote one yard in the morning, set posts at another before lunch, come back to hang panels at a third once the concrete from Tuesday has set up.
Every one of those stops is billable to a different homeowner, and every drive between them is deductible mileage. I tracked it all on paper, and the ones that got away were always the little stops — the 40-minute gate adjustment on the way home that never made an invoice.
TradesTimer logs every stop and every drive automatically, so the 40-minute stops stop leaking. At the end of the week you name the yards and the hours are just there.
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.