Welder time tracking, without the timer.
How a welder's day actually looks
Most time-tracking apps assume a steady, predictable day. A welder's day is the opposite. You're tacking, bead laying, and structural fabrication, switching between addresses like fabrication shops, construction sites, pipeline segments, and doing tasks like running beads on structural steel, tack welding frames, repairing heavy machinery. Timers get forgotten. Manually entering jobsites in advance does not match how calls actually come in.
Friction welders tell us about
- Difficulty proving travel distance for remote field repair visits
- Uncertainty in separating shop fabrication time from mobile service call travel
- Losing track of small, quick-stop repairs that occur between larger jobs
How TradesTimer handles it
- Automatic stop detection captures every repair site visit without manual input
- Automatic mileage log tracks every trip between sites for seamless tax season
- Provides rounded billable hours to simplify invoicing for varied-duration jobs
How welders actually track hours (and where it breaks)
Real threads from real tradespeople — each quote links to the original discussion.
The shop I’m at currently I slyly take note of the job, the consumables I use and how many hours I’m on it. … I’ve already found that with a couple of jobs I have been able to come in under the competition while also making a profit with most jobs I’ve taken on so far.
Hours-per-job data is quoting power. This welder beats competitors' prices without losing margin because he knows what jobs actually take — automatic per-stop tracking builds that same database without the sly notebook.
I am a welder and i weld 50+ hours a week. I normally keep my phone in my toolbox but lose track of time easily
A phone in the toolbox can't run a timer app — gloves, sparks, hood down. But it's still at the jobsite, which means background location tracking keeps recording the stop while your hands stay busy.
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.