Mechanic time tracking: the shift and the job

An attendance clock says a technician was at the shop and can't say which job those hours went to. A clock on the job says how long the brakes took and nothing about the time between jobs. A one-man shop on AutoShopOwner wanted a clock "to check my proficiency and productivity on jobs vs total time spent", and that sentence needs both.

Wrenchy keeps them on one control. The shift clock covers in, out and breaks. The job clock runs on a line of the repair order. The shift clock is a setting for each shop, because a flat-rate shop may only want the job clock.

A technician starts, switches and stops the clock from the line on the order. Switching jobs stops one clock and starts the other, so nobody is on two jobs at once, and a switch made by mistake can be undone. Diagnosis and a road test are clocks of their own, and the road test records the odometer when the vehicle leaves and when it returns.

A clock somebody forgot doesn't run quietly through the weekend. One left running with nothing happening on its order goes on Needs attention, to the technician first and the manager after, with Stop and Ask beside it. It never stops on its own.

If one technician started clocks on two devices during an outage, the server ends the earlier clock when the later one began and shows that on the order's activity. No minute is dropped and nobody is asked to sort it out.

Shift in is one tap in the technician's app, on a phone or a shared iPad, with the web as the fallback. Where a shop requires the shift, the first Start of the morning opens it in the same tap rather than refusing. A break stops the running job clock and offers that job back when the break ends.

Ending the shift stops the running job clock and any open break in one step, and the screen says what it will stop before the tap.

Every start and stop is saved on the device first and syncs when the connection returns, so the clock keeps going through an outage. A technician sees their own day, with lines done, hours billed, hours clocked and the shift, and nobody else's.

A flagged hour is what the line billed. A clocked hour is what it took. Marking a line done keeps both on the line, technician efficiency reads those two, and productivity reads the billed hours against the shift, so both ratios come from recorded time.

A flat-rate technician on The Garage Journal gave the floor's usual advice: "When waiting for parts, clock out". That time leaves the job clock and stays on the shift, which is where an owner finds the hours the shop is paying for and not billing.

The Department of Labor's recordkeeping sheet lists "Hours worked each day" and "Total hours worked each workweek", and says "Employers may use any timekeeping method they choose". On flat-rate pay, flagged hours alone don't answer that. Under 29 CFR 778.111 a pieceworker's regular rate adds "any sums paid for waiting time or other hours worked" to the week's piece earnings and divides by the hours worked.

California is the hard case. In Gonzalez v. Downtown LA Motors (2013), technicians "accrued no flag hours during time spent waiting for cars to repair", and the court held they "were entitled to separate hourly compensation for time spent waiting for repair work". In Mora v. C.E. Enterprises (2025) the same appellate district upheld a dealership's plan that, in Ogletree Deakins's summary, paid "at least double the minimum wage for all hours recorded on a biometric time clock", with a flag bonus on top. Labor Code section 226.2 separately has the wage statement show the "total hours of compensable rest and recovery periods". Those are different pay plans with one need in common: hours recorded apart from the flag.

So a pay period lists shift, break, job-clock and flagged hours for each technician and workweek, computed from the entries and never typed. The bookkeeper or the owner locks the period, the owner approves it, and it exports as a CSV in the shape ADP RUN or Gusto imports, or as a plain file with every column. A correction is an adjustment with its reason, shown beside the computed figure.

A manager can edit a clock entry with a required reason, and the audit log keeps the before and the after. A technician can't edit their own entries; they ask. State break and overtime rules are settings, applied when a period is computed and never silently, and a clock entry holds hours, never pay.