VeriClock (which begins at $15 per month) is a strong time tracking platform with a no-frills design. It gives you an impressive number of configuration settings over how and when employees log their time, and it’s reasonably priced. It doesn’t focus on collaboration or project management (PM) like competitors Zoho Projects, which is one of our Editors’ Choices in our PM software review roundup, or the well-designed clock-in buttons of TSheets, our Editors’ Choice in our time tracking software review roundup. However, even though it’s missing some minor features, VeriClock does an excellent job at time tracking, and should be on your evaluation list if you’re looking for something purpose-built and not overly feature-heavy.
Pricing and Plans
VeriClock costs $5 per user per month with a $10 monthly account fee (for a total of $15 per month). Per-user pricing and account fees don’t change regardless of how many users are working in the system, so multiply $5 by the number of users you have and then add $10, and that’s the price you’ll pay for the system. As such, VeriClock is among the most affordable time tracking solutions we tested. However, if you’re a single user looking to keep track of time for your own projects, then Time Doctor (Visit Site at Time Doctor) offers a free, introductory, desktop-only plan that offers no access to reporting.
TSheets ($8/Month at Tsheets) is another straight time tracking-focused tool that also starts with a free plan geared toward one user. It has a plan for up to 99 users that costs $5 per user per month with a $20 base fee per month. However, these tools don’t offer any of the basic invoicing or expense tracking elements you’ll find in competitor TimeSolv Pro.
Features and User Interface
The first thing you’ll notice when you log in to VeriClock is its minimal, somewhat drab, tab-heavy user interface (UI). This software isn’t going to win any design awards, which is one of the reasons it doesn’t quite match up with Editors’ Choice-winning TSheets.
The employee account is a lot more bare-bones compared with the administrative side. The UI is plain compared with Hubstaff ($7.00 Per Month at Hubstaff) and TSheets. There’s a lot of white space, particularly in the Clock In and Clock Out pages. However, what you’ll find hidden within the seemingly endless amount of white space, bold blacks, and boring blues of VeriClock is a treasure trove of functionality that will make tracking time easy.
One problem we noticed with adding time for a past shift is when I tried to save a time sheet for an employee, we got the error message that some custom fields have validation errors. We think this is a glitch with the Custom Fields section.
VeriClock does a good job focusing on automating manual repetitive processes. For example, when you first start using the tool, you’ll be able to batch upload employees. Once the employees are in the system, you’re then able to check into jobs as a group. Think about how important this functionality is for a mobile workforce that travels from site to site for assignments. A construction team, for example, will be able to upload its roster of 500 workers via a Microsoft Excel file, and then check each worker into a job with a single click of a button. Obviously, this becomes more complex when variables are added, such as hourly rates, but it’s by far the best batching we’ve seen on any tool we’ve reviewed.
VeriClock does an excellent job enabling users to clock in via the tool of their preference. Users can clock in to work via a traditional desktop browser or mobile browser via Android or iOS. They can also dial in to clock in by voice or send SMS messages to clock in, for an extra $3 per user per month. Because VeriClock has an open application programming interface (API), your development team can build VeriClock’s clock-in button into any other open third-party tool. Other apps in our roundup, such as TSheets, Hubstaff and TimeSolv, also offer this open API functionality.
Since our last review, VeriClock has added several features relating to mapping. You can now track the last-known position of all clocked-in employees, and the company has simplified its map view at wider zoom scales to make the UI cleaner. In addition, VeriClock has enhanced its alerting functionality to track if employees clocked in at the locations they’re supposed to be working.
VeriClock also offers geofencing, a feature you’ll also find in time-tracking software like TSheets and Hubstaff. As you leave a specified geographic radius, you can automatically clock out of a work shift. In addition, you can set VeriClock’s geofence to self-destruct when you clock out. You can have VeriClock send you a warning if you’re about to leave a geofence radius and won’t be able to clock in. Managers can get an alert if an employee went too far away. You can use a scale to set distance for the geofence. Geofencing is a handy feature that people can use to monitor whether they are in or out of a perimeter of a location like an office. In my tests, we set the scale so that people would be logged in or out if they are within about 1 mile of their office (about 5,289 feet).
Adding time in VeriClock is pretty standard. To start tracking, we selected Clock In in the top right under my name. Then we selected the job and then selected Clock In again. The UI is barebones and not a fancy stopwatch like in TSheets, but it gets the job done. TSheets makes a stopwatch available at all times should you decide to quickly track time from project to project. We’d like to see VeriClock add a stopwatch that shows you to the second. In the mobile app, you can see a stopwatch showing hours and minutes but not seconds.
To enter past time, you click Add Time, select your name, and select the name of the job into which you’re clocking. Then you select the days and hours worked. VeriClock makes it easy to edit shifts so that you can add or subtract the amount of time a shift takes place should you make a mistake.
Specifically for Admins
VeriClock has robust configuration options, particularly on the administrative side. You can create accounts for new employees, and set their passwords and daily budget hours. The software has intuitive settings like adding and editing time, viewing time, and viewing details for jobs and service items. The next step is to add jobs by clicking Add Job. We added a budget for the various projects. You can set All Time Budget, Monthly Budget, Weekly Budget, Daily Budget and Payroll Budget. You can also specify if the project is exempt from overtime. The options to select these budget items stand out among competitors such as TSheets and Hubstaff. Like with TSheets, you can set whether a job is a parent or a child job. An example is Government Office Painting (parent) and (Painting the XYZ City Supreme Court Building as child). But when we added this child task, the job didn’t show up in the list—just in a hidden drop-down menu. Also, adding the jobs in VeriClock involved a bit of math but we like the budget total features.
The Settings tab provides admins with a seemingly endless array of options and customizations (certainly more than any of the other pure play time tracking tools we reviewed). Within this tab, you’ll be able to manage alerts, set payroll standards, customize your main dashboard view, manage document storage, and build out your time cards for specific jobs. It would take too long to break down each customization, so we’ll use the rest of this section to highlight the most important and unique customization options.
You can set whether you want the Job Codes to be required under Settings. Under Settings > Extras, you can also select the amount of storage you want. I noticed that service codes weren’t showing up because they were disabled under settings. So I changed to Optional. It’s not clear what Service Codes are even though the company explained it to us. Under Basic, you can choose to integrate with QuickBooks like TSheets. VeriClock also integrates with Sage 50 Canada and Sage 50 US.
VeriClock includes a helpful setting under in which you can add rules for alerts. A No Show rule, for example sends a message out to designated employees by email or SMS if someone doesn’t show up at a specific time.
We added a rule for No Show so employees get notifications via email or text if people don’t show up for work.
We ran into a glitch when adding a Custom Setting and found that UI confusing. We looked to the field on the left-hand side under Custom Fields, but we couldn’t type anything there. We had to enter it at right under Fields Settings.
Admins can require users to attach photos to their clock-ins before and after the start of shifts. This is ideal for admins who want to measure production as much as they want to keep track of hours worked. For example, if you’re running a hotel and you’d like service staff to prove they serviced rooms, then you can require them to snap a photo before and after each room they service.
Additionally, and perhaps most importantly, VeriClock lets you add as many custom fields as you want. So, if you’re more concerned about how many miles truckers drove rather than how long it took them to make the drive, then you can add a field that requires them to enter total mileage as they clock out of their shift. All of these custom fields can be turned off for jobs to which it doesn’t relate. You’ll only find this level of control on more high-end tools, such as Clarizen ($45.00 at Captera) , TimeSolv Pro, and TSheets.
VeriClock’s Jobs tab lets you assign employees, block employees, and create monthly allotments for dollars or hours for each job. The dashboard lets admins know where they are with jobs in real time to understand labor costs and prevent overstaffing. You can even toggle the system to block employees from clocking into a job if your budget has been met.
The system offers five different alerts for admins to help ensure—in near real time—that tasks are being completed and that budgets are being respected. If someone is about to enter into overtime, then admins will receive an email or text message letting them know. You can monitor specific employees to see if and when they clock in or out via notification. The Time Guard alert guards against employees who forget to clock out at the end of the day, and the No Show alert lets managers see who didn’t show up and the task to which they were assigned. The Job Cost alerts warn you when you’re close to going over budget for a specific job.
Employee Monitoring
VeriClock also has some solid employee monitoring functionality. Like most of the tools I reviewed, you can restrict clock-ins from certain IP addresses, which is ideal for fixed location offices that don’t want people clocking in from home. You can also flag clock-ins to see where someone logged into the system. This is a much more civilized employee monitoring function than what you’ll find in tools such as Hubstaff and Time Doctor, both of which offer Big Brother-esque monitoring tools that let you see the webpages visited, apps used, and mouse activity for all active employees. Additionally, VeriClock tracks GPS for smartphone clock-ins, which is an industry-standard feature. With this function, you’ll see where employees were during shifts, an important function for people who run transportation companies, for example.
VeriClock also has three different permission levels: admin, manager, and employee. This is important to maintain data and privacy controls when it comes to employee monitoring. For instance, in the Settings tab, you can group employees together under a specific manager’s oversight so that manager can only see their own team’s data in the VeriClock dashboard. Another nifty feature is the ability to batch-upload employees through your accounting software. VeriClock integrates with Intuit QuickBooks , Sage, and others.
The tool’s employee monitoring features are primarily broken down into real-time data gathering, location verification, notes and photos, custom data fields, alerts, and reports. What VeriClock does best, however, is time and location tracking.
On the Activity page in the Time tab of the dashboard, you can see all employee clock-ins in real time. You can see where employees are, based on the helpful Icon legend (a laptop icon for a web clock-in and a globe icon for a smartphone clock-in). You can track employees’ location either by IP address or GPS. You can click into Location to see a map view of where employees are within a diameter of 21 meters. VeriClock also lets you block IP addresses from clocking in using the Clock Access Rules options in Settings. Here, you can whitelist or blacklist specific phone numbers and IP addresses, and add job-specific rules.
VeriClock services industries such as cleaning, construction, and landscaping so you can set specific access or whitelisting rules based on an employee’s job. On smartphones, there’s also a continuous tracking option to monitor an employee’s location at all times, though that’s more draining on battery and data. When turned on, VeriClock will show an orange breadcrumb trail on the map view to show an employee’s movements.
Additionally, employees can attach notes and pictures to their clock-ins and clock-outs for supplementary monitoring data. For example, a worker could upload a gas receipt or a picture from their job site to verify that they’re at the appointed location. To view pictures or activity notes, you can run a search in the Employees tab with a date range. There are also a number of alerts, including one called TimerGuard, which sends an employee a notification if they forget to clock out after their shift is over or, if on a mobile device, if their GPS location indicates that they left a job site.
Reports
In terms of reports, the tool offers pretty basic but customizable report creation through custom filters and templates. In the Reports tab, there are options to run reports for Payroll, Job Cost, Employee Hours, and Employee Cost Summary. You can also click into the Templates tab to create your own. The Template Filters in the Reports section is complex with settings like “Use global rounding settings” and “Use global scheduled deduction settings.”
On this page, we created a test report on which we could drag and drop the various fields I wanted, such as employee and job information, IP and GPS addresses, and job budgeting and payroll items. These latter items can be grouped by employee, job filter, or service items. You can then generate and export the report in Microsoft Excel, CSV, or PDF file format, and then schedule it as a recurring report or just save the report.
Under “Displayed Fields” and “Group By,” you click the box for the fields you want. At the right of each item there’s a hamburger menu icon, but this serves no purpose. It seems to be a design flaw. If the settings aren’t set, then it will say “Column Unavailable.”
One benefit of VeriClock is you can include the IP address in the reporting. This feature is helpful to see if an employees really clocked in where they said they did. The last field in the Report configuration page is “Filters.” We think this option should be higher up on the Reports Configuration page because that’s where you get a pop-up to specify the employees that will be included in the report. Then you can Generate the report and Schedule This Report.
Once the report is generated, you have the option to export in CSV, PDF, XLS, and XLSV formats. You can also print and save. It’s not the most exciting view of a report compared with what you’ll get in TSheets or in enterprise-focused programs such as Zoho Projects, but it’s sufficient and easy to follow.
It’s not an official report, but under Time, you can view a grid of the time readings for employees for a certain time period. You can export to PDF and Microsoft Excel. There is a folder icon next to the admin- istrative account indicating that there is a report available, but this would be a report within a report, so that’s confusing. Still, we like the design of the icons.
Finally, VeriClock has custom fields to track additional types of monitoring data. We discussed custom fields in the Admin section of this review earlier but they’re equally important for employee monitoring. From the Custom Fields tab in Settings, an admin or manager can set up a custom text, number, or date field for employees to fill out when they clock in and out to track more detailed work.
In the Number field, for instance, you could set an optional or required field asking employees for an odometer reading at the beginning and end of a shift, if their job requires driving. You can also create a multiple choice field, for instance, to help workers tick off a safety checklist or task list if they’re working on a construction site. In totality, as with Hubstaff and Time Doctor, VeriClock is a pure play time tracking tool with some monitoring features built in.
Mobile App Testing
When you log in to the mobile app, you see the clock-in screen right away, which is convenient. The four-line hamburger menu in the upper left corner leads to a menu with all white text on a black background. The design is a bit boring, but easy to read the menu options at the same time. On the clock-in menu at top right, you’ll see a GPS icon on the mobile app. When you click that you ‘ll see a beautiful looking map with vivid green colors. The map (below) shows Current Shift Locations.
The menu under the hamburger icon at top left is well-organized. When you select Groups from this menu, you get a list of your employees with an option to clock them in or out. This is a handy feature for administrators to help employees who might be working and forgot to clock in or they are working but don’t have access to their phone.
We found the mobile app simple to use and on a par with that of Hubstaff and Editors’ Choice winner TSheets. Actually, the ability to clock your reports in and out was one feature that seemed superior to TSheets and Hubstaff.
To view both an admin account and an employee account or add multiple accounts in the mobile app, you click the hamburger button and then Manage Accounts and Add Account. This is a helpful way to log in to multiple accounts. The Events page in the mobile app is straightforward.
You can see a weekly report of work shifts for that week. You can click on each shift for more info. When you click on the event you can view more information for that shift, edit hours, change the name of the job worked that week, and add notes.
Although we liked the mobile interface of VeriClock, TSheets was a bit more robust. You can view the full schedule for the week of your team members while it appears that VeriClock can only show what’s happening that week for one employee at a time. TSheets has a decent display of time sheets for the week. You can scroll up and down to go through the list. Hubstaff has the best-looking mobile dashboard among TSheets and VeriClock. It has space for pictures next to each member and little percentage of time-worked marks next to each task. VeriClock’s mobile app is kind of drab compared with the others but it’s easy to use.
There are three major problems with VeriClock: First, the UI needs improvement. Thankfully, software doesn’t need to be pretty; it needs to be feature-rich, a quality that most certainly can be attributed to VeriClock. Second, users can only upload 1 gigabyte (GB) to the system without extra cost (you can get additional 10GB increments of storage for $20 per month). Think about how quickly 1 GB of storage capacity will be eaten up if you require all of your users to snap photos when they check into a job. This is a bit inconvenient, especially when compared with tools such as TimeSolv Pro, which is a document management tool as well as a time tracking tool. For reference: TimeSolv Pro offers its users an unlimited amount of document storage. Third, you can’t schedule future time. This issue is a headscratcher and one we imagine VeriClock will remedy soon.
If none of the previous issues is bothersome for you, then you should certainly take VeriClock up on its 30-day free trial. It’s an easy-to-use, well-planned, feature-rich time tracking solution that can make life easier for admins and users alike.
