Founding offer: lifetime access for a one-time $399 — 10 companies only →
FieldTimesheet pushes completed time entries into QuickBooks Online through the TimeActivity API — one click from the Time page, whenever you are ready. No spreadsheets, no CSV exports, no double-entry.
Every electrical contractor running QuickBooks Online has the same end-of-week ritual: collect paper timesheets or text messages from the crew, decipher handwriting, and manually key hours into QuickBooks. It takes the office manager 3-5 hours every Friday. And no matter how careful you are, mistakes slip through. A transposed number here, a forgotten job code there, a missed entry that nobody catches until the invoice goes out wrong. For a crew of 15 electricians working across multiple job sites, that is thousands of data points per month entered by hand. The American Payroll Association puts the error rate on manual time entry between 1% and 8%. Work the low end through with visible inputs: 15 electricians, 40 hours a week, 50 weeks, billed at $75 an hour is $2.25M of labor, and 1% of that is about $22,500 a year of hours keyed wrong in one direction or the other. Those are example numbers on an example crew, not a reading of your books — the point is that keying errors are not rounding noise.
The real damage goes beyond typos. When time data enters QuickBooks days or weeks after the work happens, your job cost reports are always stale. You cannot make real-time decisions about which jobs are profitable because the numbers in QuickBooks are always a week behind reality. You find out a job went over budget after the invoice is already sent, not while there is still time to course-correct. That gap between the work happening and the number showing up is the whole problem: every decision gets made on last week's data. An ENR study found that contractors who track job costs in real-time bid 12% more accurately than those who rely on end-of-project reconciliation.
Some contractors try to solve this with CSV exports or third-party integration tools. But those introduce their own problems: file formatting issues, duplicate entries, sync conflicts, and another piece of software to manage. You did not start an electrical contracting business to become an IT department. You need the trip from the field to QuickBooks to be one step, accurate, and something nobody on your team has to learn a new workflow to run.
Simple setup. Immediate results.
Click 'Connect to QuickBooks' in your FieldTimesheet settings. You will see the standard Intuit authorization screen. Log in with your QuickBooks credentials, grant permission, and you are done. Connecting authorizes FieldTimesheet to send time to QuickBooks; the sync runs one way, so nothing is pulled out of QuickBooks and you add your active jobs in FieldTimesheet yourself. For a typical active job list that is a few minutes of typing, once. No mapping spreadsheets, no field configuration, no IT support needed.
Electricians open FieldTimesheet on their phone, select the job they are working on, and tap Clock In. That is the entire workflow. When they finish, they tap Clock Out. The time entry is recorded with the worker name, job, start time, end time, and GPS location. Workers do not need to know anything about QuickBooks. They just clock in and out.
FieldTimesheet sends each completed time entry to QuickBooks Online through the official TimeActivity API. This is the same integration method that Intuit recommends for time tracking applications. Each entry arrives with the employee, the date, the hours, and the electrician's own clock-out note as the description, and shows up in your QuickBooks Time Activities report. The sync does not set a service item, a class, a billable flag, or a rate — you apply those in QuickBooks when you build the invoice. What it removes is the re-keying and the Friday guesswork about what an hours figure meant.
Your admin dashboard shows the sync status of every time entry: synced, pending, or failed. If a sync fails due to a network issue or QuickBooks error, FieldTimesheet flags it and lets you retry with one click. You always know exactly which entries have made it to QuickBooks and which need attention. No more guessing whether the books are up to date.
Built specifically for electrical contractors
Every hour your office manager spends re-keying timesheets into QuickBooks is an hour they are not spending on something productive. With FieldTimesheet, the week's entries move to QuickBooks in one click instead of being typed in line by line. For a 15-person crew, that is 3-5 hours per week of manual data entry replaced by a button, which adds up to over 200 hours per year.
An entry is ready to push the moment the worker clocks out, so you can send the day's hours the same day instead of waiting for Friday's paper. Push daily and your QuickBooks reports reflect what is actually happening in the field, not last week. Inside FieldTimesheet the job cost report updates as workers clock out, whether or not you have pushed to QuickBooks yet.
T&M invoices are only as accurate as the time data behind them. When entries sync directly from the field to QuickBooks with precise start and end times, your invoice reflects the work that was actually performed instead of a Friday estimate. No rounding to the nearest half hour, and no arguing from memory when a GC asks about a specific day. The data is clean, timestamped, and tied to the job.
Manual time entry introduces errors at every step: illegible handwriting, transposed numbers, missed entries, wrong job codes. FieldTimesheet removes most of them. Workers pick from the active job list you set up, so nobody is writing a job name from memory. Times are captured digitally to the minute, so there is no rounding or estimation. The result is billing data you can trust.
FieldTimesheet does not replace QuickBooks or change how you use it. You still run payroll, send invoices, and generate reports in QuickBooks exactly the way you do now. The only difference is that time data arrives as TimeActivity records instead of being entered by hand. Your accountant, bookkeeper, and office staff keep using QuickBooks the same way they always have.
The QuickBooks API requires OAuth tokens that expire periodically. FieldTimesheet handles all token refresh automatically in the background. If your QuickBooks connection ever drops, you get a clear notification with a one-click reconnect button. You do not need to understand OAuth, APIs, or any technical details. It just works.
Every synced time entry creates a clean audit trail: who clocked in, when, on which job, at what GPS location, and when it synced to QuickBooks. If a general contractor disputes a T&M invoice or an auditor questions payroll records, you have timestamped, location-verified data that matches your QuickBooks records exactly.
According to the American Payroll Association, companies using manual time tracking methods lose between 1% and 8% of gross payroll to errors and inaccuracies. Here is the low end as labeled arithmetic, inputs visible: 15 electricians, 40 hours a week, 50 weeks, billed at $75 an hour is $2.25M of labor, so 1% is roughly $22,500 a year — hours entered under the wrong job code, transposed numbers, or entries that never make it from the paper timesheet to QuickBooks at all. Change the headcount and the rate and you get your own number.
The problem compounds when time data enters QuickBooks days or weeks after work is performed. An ENR study found that contractors who track job costs in real-time bid 12% more accurately than those relying on end-of-project reconciliation. Stale data in QuickBooks means your job cost reports are always a week behind reality, and you find out a job went over budget after the invoice is sent — not while there is still time to course-correct.
Moving the hours as structured records instead of retyping them removes most of these failure points. Workers pick from the active job list rather than writing a job name from memory, times are captured digitally to the minute, and the day's entries can go to QuickBooks the day they happen. The result is billing data you can trust without the weekly data entry ritual.
Whenever you run the sync. It is an admin action, not a background job: an entry becomes eligible the moment the worker clocks out, and the dashboard shows a pending count, but nothing leaves FieldTimesheet until someone selects Sync to QuickBooks on the Time page. Push daily, weekly, or before you invoice — whatever fits your office. There is no batching delay and no schedule to configure.
FieldTimesheet works with all QuickBooks Online plans: Simple Start, Essentials, Plus, and Advanced. The integration uses the standard QuickBooks Online API, so any active QBO subscription will work. FieldTimesheet does not work with QuickBooks Desktop or QuickBooks Self-Employed, only QuickBooks Online.
Each time entry syncs as a TimeActivity record in QuickBooks Online. The payload is exactly this: the date, the worker as an employee name, the hours and minutes, and the electrician's clock-out note as the description. It does not send a service item, a class, a billable flag, a rate, or a customer — you apply those in QuickBooks when you build the invoice. Clock-in and clock-out times, GPS, and bill rates stay in FieldTimesheet, where the billing packet and the CSV export use them.
If a sync fails due to a network issue, QuickBooks downtime, or a data mismatch, FieldTimesheet marks the entry as 'sync failed' on your dashboard with a clear error message. Transient failures retry up to three times on their own; you can retry the rest with one click. The most common cause is a QuickBooks connection that expired or was revoked, which you fix by reconnecting in Settings. One failed entry never blocks the rest of the batch.
Yes, the same way as anyone else's. Every entry syncs as an employee time activity — FieldTimesheet does not record whether a worker is W-2 or 1099, so it cannot route subs to a QuickBooks vendor instead. If you need sub time on a vendor in QuickBooks, that is a change you make there. You can set a different hourly rate per worker either way.
FieldTimesheet is a focused alternative to QuickBooks Time, built specifically for electrical contractors. Unlike QuickBooks Time, which is a general-purpose tool for any industry, FieldTimesheet is designed around the way electrical contractors work: T&M billing, job costing, and crew management. It costs significantly less for mid-size crews and includes features like offline clock-in that are critical for construction sites.
No. FieldTimesheet tracks the sync status of every entry. Once an entry is synced to QuickBooks, it is marked as synced and will not be sent again. If you need to edit a time entry that has already synced, the original QuickBooks record is preserved and you can make corrections in QuickBooks directly to maintain a clean audit trail.
Synced hours get the invoice out the door. They do not explain it. Here is a sample billing packet — the backup that goes to the customer showing the dates, who was on site, what got done, the hours and the amount — marked up to show why each line keeps the invoice from coming back. Free to read, nothing to sign up for.