$0
Trades: your software already tracks this
GPS timesheets and job-card clock-ons are built in — and they show you which jobs quietly lose money.
Problems / track-staff-hours
How to track staff hours without Friday guesswork
If hours get written down on Friday from memory, payroll is a guess. The tracking is already in most job software — and in a law firm, untracked hours are lost income.
5 industries share this problem · prices checked 27 July 2026 · no affiliate links
What to know
$4.50
Shops and restaurants: Deputy is cheap
Rosters built from real trading hours, off the group chat, from $4.50 per person per month.
Law firms
Untracked hours are unbilled income
The software can track calls and emails in the background and find the billable time nobody wrote down — a person checks it before it's billed.
How to implement this today
- 1
Trades: turn on the time tracking already in your job software — GPS timesheets or job-card clock-on.
- 2
Shops and restaurants: move the roster into Deputy (from $4.50/user) and build it from real trading hours.
- 3
Law firms: turn on passive time capture and spend five minutes each morning reviewing what it caught.
- 4
After a month, compare hours charged with hours worked per job type — that's where the money leaks.
The fixes, industry by industry
6 of 8 fixes are already in software you might pay for.
Pick your industry to see what applies to you — or browse the lot. Prices as checked in each source guide on 27 July 2026.
Already in software you might pay for · 6
Electrical5 hrs/mo
Fill timesheets from GPS, not from memory
Clock-on, check-in and travel time recorded automatically from the phone, exported to payroll — instead of reconstructing four techs' weeks from texts and guesswork.
ServiceM8 auto time tracking$0 — included
Auto Repair5 hrs/mo
Track each tech's time from the job card
Time on job tracked from clock-on to clock-off per vehicle — so labour charged matches labour spent, and you learn which job types quietly lose money.
Workshop software time clocking$0 — included
Law Firmsper fee earner, weekly
Find the billable time you forgot to record
Passive capture plus a five-minute morning review turns yesterday's forgotten calls and email reviews into billed work. Across a firm, the recovered units are the cheapest revenue in practice — already earned, previously evaporating.
Smokeball AutoTime + Time Finder$0 — plan-gated
Law Firmsmonthly, all matters
Bill finished work before it goes stale
Work in progress older than sixty days gets harder to bill every week it ages — the client's memory of the value fades faster than yours. A monthly WIP-aging review with a billing decision per matter keeps the lockup honest.
Your platform's WIP reports$0 — included
Law Firmsrecovered billable units
Let the software track your time in the background
Activity across emails, documents, calls and matter work tracked in the background and converted nightly into time entries for review — the six-minute units that die in reconstruction, recovered by settings. Enabled per user under Staff & Users, and off until someone does it.
Smokeball (Prosper+, add-on on Grow)$0 — plan-gatedSetup guide ↗
Law Firms≈2–4 units/fee earner/wk
Find tracked work that never got billed
A review pane surfacing tracked activity that never became a fee entry — the leak detector for anything AutoTime's nightly run didn't convert, run before invoicing.
Smokeball$0 — plan-gatedSetup guide ↗
Bought or built separately · 2
Restaurants5 hrs/mo
Use a roster app instead of the group chat
Shifts, swaps and availability in a rostering tool instead of a message thread — hospitality's most reinvented wheel, solved for a few dollars a user.
Deputyfrom $4.50/user/mo
Retail & Ecommerce4 hrs/mo
Roster staff from your real sales hours
Staffing set against the hours that actually trade rather than habit — a small change that shows up in wage percentage every week.
Deputyfrom $4.50/user/mo
When not to solve this with software
No source guide names a tool to avoid here. The boundary the data draws is procedural: capture can be passive everywhere, but wherever the record becomes a bill — law's time entries above all — a person reviews before it goes out.
The source guides
Every fix above comes from a Comora AI guide, researched and price-checked by hand (27 July 2026). The full playbook for each industry — the thirty-day order of work, the complete stack, the official setup links — lives on its guide:
No vendor pays for placement and Comora takes no affiliate fee, referral cut, or commission from anything named on this page.
For your business specifically
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