for Construction Companies
Hubstaff helps you to manage and streamline your construction business. This article will cover everything you need to know about how our software can help you with project management and give you a few useful tools to use to increase your team’s productivity.
Below is a step-by-step guide on how to get the most out of your Hubstaff organization:
Table of Contents
- Setting up your organization
- Invite your team to join your Hubstaff organization
- Download the mobile app
- Installing and signing into the client
- Setting up projects
- Assigning to-dos
- Adding clients
- Scheduling your team
- Managing your payroll
- Setting up time off and holiday policies
- Location tracking basics
- Setting up job sites and geofencing
- Time Tracking
- Generating reports
- Invoicing clients
Setting up your organization
Organizations are a critical aspect of Hubstaff. Think of each Hubstaff organization as one company. It is the structure that houses all your employees, clients, projects, tasks, payroll, and more.
Click on any topic below to learn more about organizations:
- Setting up an Organization
- Edit your Organization Details
- Archiving an Organization (Cancel Subscription)
- Restoring an Archived Organization
- Leaving an Organization
If you are a team member looking to join an existing Hubstaff organization, please reach out to your organization owner to send you an invite.
Each organization requires its own subscription plan.
Invite your team to join your Hubstaff organization
To get started, you’ll need to invite your staff as members of your Hubstaff organization. To invite your team, navigate to the People > Members page, then click on the Invite Member button. Click here to view our complete guide to inviting your team.
After successfully inviting your team, the next step would be to download the time tracking app/s.
Installing and Signing into the Client
After downloading the client, users will be prompted to install it. Click on an operating system below for a guide on how to install the Hubstaff app:
Desktop
Mobile
Browser
Setting up Projects
Projects are a way to organize your team’s tracked time. You can organize your team’s time and activities into projects, which can then be invoiced or billed to specific clients. The best way to set up projects is by customer names — this ensures all the time tracked on a specific project can be billed to a specific customer/client later. Click on a topic to get started on setting up your Hubstaff projects:
- Setting up projects – complete this initial setup guide to customizing your projects based on how you need them to work for your company.
- Setting project pay rates – add pay rates per team member, based on the project they’re working on.
- Add project-level budgets – ensures that each project is completed within the allotted time or cost.
Assigning to-dos
Tasks are called To-dos in Hubstaff. To add a to-do, navigate to the To-dos menu on the sidebar, select a project then click on Add a to-do.
A dialog box will appear where you can choose which team member to assign the task to. Once the to-do is assigned, it will appear on the Hubstaff client so the team member can track time to them.
Adding clients
The Clients feature lets you add specific customers so that you can then invoice after the completion of a project, or on a recurring basis. Furthermore, here’s our complete step-by-step guide to setting up your Hubstaff account for clients/customers.
In the examples below, it shows that we have a client who has scheduled a job, and the time spent working on their house will be logged to the 1725 Slough Avenue project when our team tracks time, which you can then add to an invoice. You can also add budgets for each client to avoid overflow costs.
Customer Name/Address:
Project associated with the client:
Scheduling your team
Here’s what you can do with our scheduling feature:
- Schedule work shifts for your team
- View schedules by the entire team or by individual
- Create one-time or recurring shifts for team members
- Send reminders to team members if they are late
- Notices to the organization owners/managers for missed shifts, late shifts, and abandoned shifts
Click here for our complete guide to Hubstaff’s schedules.
Managing your payroll
Next, we’ll need to set up your payroll. This starts with setting up your team’s pay and bill rates. Pay rates are the rates you pay your staff, and bill rates are the amount you bill your clients/customers based on the time tracked on projects associated with those clients. Click here for our complete guide to setting up pay/bill rates.
Once the rates and pay periods are established, you can then connect your payer account to member payroll accounts by following this guide. Hubstaff supports payments via PayPal, Transferwise, Gusto, Bitwage, and Payoneer.
In case you don’t plan to make payments within the Hubstaff platform, you may also export your team’s hours/rates by following this guide.
Setting up time off and holidays
The Time off section allows you to create a policy for each team member around paid or unpaid time off, vacations, and/or sick days, as well as holidays to give your team time off to kick back and relax. You can pay them for that time, too.
If you’d like to know more about how to set these up for your team, click here.
Location tracking basics
The Hubstaff mobile app uses GPS data to track your staff’s locations. Location tracking allows you to view the current locations of your staff, their routes, and display time stamps on each GPS point showing where users were at specific times on the route.
The first step in location tracking is enabling the Track locations setting on the Maps settings page. Here you can define whether locations are recorded while tracking time, within scheduled shifts, or always.
Next, we need to ensure that the team’s phones are fully ready to record locations by enabling both Location tracking and Background app refresh features.
Setting up Job Sites and Geofencing
What is a Job site?
Job sites are geographic areas with boundaries specified by a radius. This is also known as geofencing. Job sites are predefined areas where employees perform their work.
Creating Job sites
Step 1
To create a job site or geofence, click on the Job Sites menu on the sidebar, then click the Add a job site button.
Step 2
Next, enter the Job site name, address, and the geofence radius. Click Next to continue.
Step 3
You can then choose which users or teams can record time to this job site, then on the Automatic timer actions section, you can define whether:
- On Arrival/Departure – defines what happens when a user arrives at a job site.
- Start/Stop Timer- With the automatic settings set to start/stop the timer, (with mobile location services set to always) the timer will automatically start when your staff arrives at the job site and stops when they leave.
- Send Reminder– With settings set to Send Reminder, this will send an in-app notification to your staff once they enter or leave the job site. This setting would be ideal if they are leaving job sites, and on occasion, you’d like the timer to continue to run (if they are going to a different location) or stop the timer (if they are done with work for the day)
- Don’t Start/Stop Timer- This requires a complete manual start/stop of the mobile application. Users will need to hit play on the timer for time and location tracking to start. If they hit play before entering/leaving the job site, the time they enter/leave will show on the Job Site Visit Report
- Track time to project – record time to a specific project when a user is within the job site area.
Hit Save to continue.
If you are looking to calculate total drive time, you will need to calculate this on your own by noting the departure time at one job site and the arrival time at the next job site.
Time Tracking
At this point, your team is now ready to track their time. Once they’ve tracked time, the app will then upload the time and activity data to the web dashboard every ~10 minutes.
Time tracking using the apps
You can track time manually by pressing the start/stop buttons on your Hubstaff application.
Desktop
Mobile
Browser (Chrome)
Manual time addition
You can also opt to add in time manually for your team or let them manually add time for themselves. To do this, Enable the Modify Time setting, then follow this guide on how to add time manually.
Generating Reports
Hubstaff provides a number of reports that display an in-depth look into what your team is working on, as well as how they are spending their time, and how efficient they are being.
We separate data into different reports that are easy to use, filter, and then adjust to provide the exact information you are looking for. Furthermore, you can also display the total amount of time each/all users works, how much time each/all users spend on a project, the total time a specific user spent at a job site, and more.
Additionally, click here to learn more about what reports are available in Hubstaff.
Invoicing Clients
Hubstaff lets you easily generate invoices for your clients and then send them directly, as well as record payments for your invoices. Billing your clients or your employers takes literally seconds when using our invoicing feature. You can automatically or manually generate line items based on time tracked, add clients, tax information, as well as discounts on your invoices. For a complete guide on how to create invoices, please click on the links below:
You’re all set! Next time, you’ll be able to add more people, projects, tasks, clients, generate reports, job sites, and more. In case you need help with anything, please feel free to reach out to our support team via support@hubstaff.com.