Clock labor to the job it belongs to.

Ask a shop owner how long a standard tune-up takes and you will get a confident answer. Ask how long it took on average last month, across every mechanic, and you will usually get a guess. The difference between those two numbers is where labor margin goes missing.

A flat-rate tune-up priced for an hour that actually takes an hour and forty minutes loses money every time. A hydraulic bleed that runs long because the caliper was contaminated is a price you should change. You cannot see either without time recorded against the job.

Time tracking in Service is built to be light enough that mechanics actually use it. The clock sits in the app, a mechanic starts it against the visit they are working on, and stops it when the bike comes off the stand. Only one clock can run per person, so nobody ends the day with two timers quietly adding up.

A mechanic clocks in against a visit, which ties the time to that visit's job. Time that is not on a job is clocked on its own, in one of four categories: work, drive for a van heading to a stop, shop for the non-billable jobs like building up rental bikes or cleaning the bench, and break. Stopping one clock and starting another is how a mechanic switches from the bike on the stand to the counter.

People forget. A mechanic who never clocked in on Saturday can add the shift by hand afterwards, so the week is complete before it goes for approval. Manual entries sit on the same timesheet as clocked ones.

At the end of the week a manager reviews each person's timesheet and approves it. Nobody can approve their own hours, which matters in a small shop where the owner is also on the bench. Overtime is worked out to California's rules: daily overtime after eight hours and double time after twelve, weekly overtime after forty, and the seventh consecutive day. The timesheet shows straight time, time and a half and double time separately.

Service will prepare payroll, not run it. It already works out the hours and the overtime split, and the monthly report shows hours per person with straight, time and a half and double time, using the same overtime rules as the timesheet so the two always agree. What it does not do yet is produce the export file. For now you read the approved hours off the timesheet or the report and enter them in your payroll provider.

It will never pay anyone, withhold tax or file anything. A prepared export for your payroll provider, and a payroll accrual posted to the erp.io Accounting ledger, are on the roadmap.

Hours also stay on the timesheet rather than the bill. If you charge labor by the hour, put the labor line on the quote or the job yourself. Posting clocked time to invoice lines is planned, and so is job costing, which will finally put labor and parts cost next to what you charged for each repair.

The field app is an installable web app, not an App Store app, and it does not track phones in the background. It knows where a phone is only when someone is using it. The plan adds a foreground location check-in when a van tech opens a job; that is not built today.

The field app can now queue work with no signal, which is new and not yet widely tested on real phones: checklist answers and completed visits wait on the phone and send in order when the signal returns. The shop computer at the counter and the phone at the stand see the same clock, the same timesheet and the same visits.