Painter time tracking, without the timer.
How a painter's day actually looks
Most time-tracking apps assume a steady, predictable day. A painter's day is the opposite. You're prepping surfaces and applying finishes, switching between addresses like Residential homes, Commercial offices, Retail storefronts, and doing tasks like Sanding and prepping surfaces, Taping and masking edges, Priming new drywall. Timers get forgotten. Manually entering jobsites in advance does not match how calls actually come in.
Friction painters tell us about
- Losing track of mileage during mid-day supply runs to the paint store
- Difficulty proving exact on-site duration for split-day jobs like prep vs. finish coats
- Unrecorded travel time between scattered residential clients in a single afternoon
How TradesTimer handles it
- Automatic stop detection for every house and site visit
- Seamless mileage logging for every trip to the supply house or client
- Rounded billable hours calculated from every detected jobsite
Tracking hours as a painter: notes from the tools
I painted for years — commercial jobs, condo repaints, and high-end residential where the client walks the walls with a work light at the end. Painting hours are slippery: you're at one address cutting in until the second coat can go on, then across town spraying doors, then back at the paint store because the colour got tweaked after the first wall went up.
I tracked those days in spiral notebooks, the same way most painters I worked with did. It works — until a Friday night when you can't remember whether Tuesday's second stop was two hours or three. Round down to be safe and you gave away money. Round up and you're arguing with a GC over a timesheet neither of you can prove.
That's the specific problem this app kills. Your phone already knows you were at the first house from 7:40 to 11:10 and at the shop from 12:00 to 4:30. You just name the stops and read off the hours.
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.