JunkBossPro Blog — Crew App

The Time Clock in the Junk Crew App

Ask a junk removal owner how payroll gets done and you will often hear something like: “The guys text me their hours on Friday.” Or a paper sheet in the truck that gets filled in on Thursday for the whole week. Or the owner rebuilding the week from memory and the route sheets. None of those are great, and all of them lead to the same argument sooner or later about whether Tuesday was eight hours or nine.

Clock In on the Same Phone

Adding what the customer tacked on at the door is covered in When the Customer Adds More Junk on Site: From the Crew's Note to the Invoice. Tracking the crew's own time is simpler, and it lives in the same app.

The JunkBossPro crew app has a time clock built in. Drivers and helpers clock in and out on the same phone they use to run jobs. There is no separate time-tracking app to install, no punch card at the yard and no Friday text. Hours are recorded as they happen.

One PIN, One Person, One Set of Hours

The time clock is the best argument for giving every crew member their own PIN. When each person signs in with their own PIN, each person's punches are theirs. The helper who rode on Truck 2 on Monday and Truck 1 on Wednesday still has one clean record of the week.

If two people share one PIN, the time clock cannot tell them apart, and you are back to guessing. How sign-in works is covered in Company Login Plus a Personal PIN: How Junk Crews Sign In to the App.

When to Clock In and Out

Set the rule once and say it out loud, so every crew does it the same way. A common one for junk companies:

• Clock in at the yard when the workday starts: loading tools, checking the truck, reviewing the day's jobs.
• Clock out when the truck is back at the yard, unloaded or parked, and the crew is done for the day.
• Lunch handled however your policy says, the same way for everyone.

A dump run at the end of the day is part of the workday. So is sweeping out the truck. Write that into the rule so nobody has to wonder.

Pay rules, overtime and breaks are between you and your employees and whatever applies where you operate. The time clock just records when people said they started and stopped.

Two-Person Crews

Plenty of junk jobs need two people, which means two sets of hours per truck. With a time clock in the app, each person clocks in on their own phone with their own PIN. If your trucks run with a single shared phone, each person can still sign in and clock themselves in with their PIN at the start of the day. The details of running a crew of two are covered in the guide on two-person crews later in this series.

What the Office Gets

From the office, the time clock turns into a record of who worked when. Put that next to the jobs each truck completed and you start to see the shape of your days:

• How long a typical half-load job really takes your crews.
• How much of a day goes to driving and dump runs instead of loading.
• Which days run long because too many big jobs landed on one truck.

That is useful when you quote. If cleanouts keep running longer than you price them for, the time clock and the completed jobs will show it.

Clocking In Is Also a Habit Starter

There is a side benefit to putting the time clock in the crew app. The first thing every crew member does each morning is open the app. Once it is open, the day's jobs are right there. That one daily habit pulls the rest of the app along with it, which helps when you are getting a crew used to working from the phone.

Hours Recorded as They Happen

A time clock on the phone does not make payroll exciting. It makes it boring, which is the goal: no rebuilding the week, no arguments about Tuesday, no texts to chase on Friday. To see how the time clock fits with the rest of the crew's tools, visit the JunkBossPro junk removal app page.