Capture in the field, code to the job at the moment of capture, approve daily. Automation removes the re-keying and the Friday reconstruction — it does not remove the approval, and it must not lose the detail employment standards law requires.
Key takeaways
The Friday ritual — paper sheets from four trucks, a foreman reconstructing Tuesday from memory, the bookkeeper deciding which job the extra three hours belonged to — produces payroll that is late, job costs that are wrong, and employment records that would not withstand a question. Automating it is worthwhile, but only if the automation produces what the law actually asks for, which is more specific than most contractors realise.
In Ontario, the Ministry's Employment Standards Act record-keeping guide requires an employer to record and retain, for each employee, the name, address and starting date of employment — kept three years after the employee stops working for the employer — and the dates and times the employee worked, plus the hours worked in each day and each week, kept three years after the day or week of work. Records must be readily available for inspection. The guide notes a narrower rule for employees paid a fixed salary each pay period where the amount does not change: there, only hours in excess of the regular work week, and hours in excess of eight per day (or the regular work day if longer), need be recorded.
In British Columbia the requirement is set out directly in section 28 of the Employment Standards Act. For each employee an employer must keep the name, date of birth, occupation, telephone number and residential address; the date employment began; the wage rate and its basis; the hours worked on each day, regardless of whether the employee is paid hourly or on another basis; benefits paid; gross and net wages for each pay period; each deduction and the reason for it; statutory holidays taken and amounts paid; annual vacation taken, amounts paid and days and amounts owing; and time bank activity. Subsection 28(2) requires payroll records to be in English, kept at the employer's principal place of business in British Columbia, and retained for four years after they were created.
Two design conclusions follow immediately. A system that stores a weekly total does not satisfy either province. And "regardless of whether the employee is paid hourly" in the BC wording rules out the common shortcut of skipping timekeeping for salaried site staff.
The record is not paperwork for its own sake — several entitlements are calculated from it. Ontario's overtime guide and its hours of work guide set out how those limits and premiums operate, and public holiday entitlements depend on what was worked around the holiday. Our sister firm summarises the overtime position in this note on Ontario overtime rules and the retention question in how long an employer must keep employment records.
If the underlying record is a weekly figure, every one of those calculations becomes an argument rather than an arithmetic exercise, and the employer is the party without evidence.
The mature part of this is ordinary software, not AI. Procore's Timecard tool documents entering weekly timecard data for employees in the company directory, specifying billable hours on projects, copying hours from a previous week for faster entry, exporting timecard data to CSV or PDF, and viewing reports filtered by date, employee, project and billable status. Its project timesheets documentation covers creating and approving timesheets on both web and mobile, including field worker entry. That is the backbone: capture near the work, approve close to the day.
AI adds four things on top, all of them upstream or downstream of the record itself.
Capture without typing. A foreman speaking "Dave and Priya, second floor, eight hours each, unit 12 rough-in" into a phone and having it land as structured entries against a job and cost code removes the main reason paper survives — typing on a phone in work gloves.
Anomaly flags. Hours booked to a job that closed last week, a fourteen-hour day nobody mentioned, a crew of five where the site log shows three, a week with no break recorded. These are prompts for a supervisor to look, not conclusions.
Reconciliation against the site record. If you already produce a daily log, comparing who the log says was on site with who claimed hours is a cheap, high-value check that nobody does manually.
Drafting the summary. Turning approved hours into the weekly note for the project manager, or into the description lines on a time-and-materials invoice, is drafting work — exactly what language models are for.
Construction runs on a mix of employees and subcontractors, and timesheet automation quietly raises the question of which is which — because a person whose hours you schedule, supervise and record daily looks different from an independent business. That characterisation is a legal question with tax, employment standards and workers' compensation consequences. Our sister firm addresses the immediate practical version in whether you still have to deduct when paying an independent contractor, and the downside in the consequences of misclassifying workers and CRA penalties for misclassification.
Configure the system so a person assigns the category and a change is logged. Never let a default or a suggestion make that call.
Hours feed earnings, and earnings feed premium reporting. In Ontario the WSIB's guidance on how to report your payroll and pay your premiums sets reporting frequency by insurable earnings — monthly at $1,000,000 or more, quarterly from $20,000 to $999,999.99, and annually below $20,000 — and states that if actual insurable earnings become higher than the estimated amount you should contact the WSIB within 10 calendar days to update the information, as failure to do so can result in penalties.
Construction has its own coverage rules; the WSIB's page on expanded compulsory coverage in the construction industry is the starting point, and clearance certificates — described on the WSIB's clearances page, which notes a clearance is valid for all your contracts and valid for up to 90 days — are part of the routine when you engage others.
A twelve-person framing crew, illustrative
Before. Paper sheets, collected Friday, keyed Monday. Job coding assigned by whoever keyed it. Two jobs running at once, so roughly a quarter of the hours were allocated by guesswork.
Capture. Each worker records start, breaks and end on a phone, selecting the job at the start of the shift. Where a crew moves mid-day, the move is a second entry, not a mental note.
Approval. The foreman approves the previous day each morning over coffee — five minutes, while memory is intact. Missing entries are flagged rather than filled in.
Checks. The system flags hours on a closed job, a day over twelve hours, and any worker with no break recorded. The foreman resolves each flag; the system resolves none.
Outputs. Payroll gets clean hours, job costing gets daily labour, and the employment record holds dates and times worked at daily granularity — which is what both provinces' rules above ask for.
Technically yes, and it raises employee privacy questions you should settle openly rather than discover later. Location data about identifiable workers is personal information; the Privacy Commissioner's summary of PIPEDA requirements sets out the expectations around identifying purposes, consent and limiting collection. Tell people what is collected and why, and collect the minimum that answers the question.
In British Columbia, section 28 requires hours worked on each day regardless of the pay basis. In Ontario the guide provides a narrower rule for employees on an unchanging fixed salary, requiring hours in excess of the regular work week and in excess of eight per day (or the regular work day, if longer). Recording everything is simpler than maintaining two regimes.
Ontario: three years after the day or week of work. British Columbia: four years after the payroll record was created. If the same hours also support a tax deduction, note that paragraph 230(4)(b) of the Income Tax Act runs six years from the end of the last taxation year concerned.
No. Approval is an assertion that these hours were worked on this job. Let the system pre-fill, flag and remind — and leave the assertion with a person who was there.
A 30-minute call is enough to tell you whether AI pays for itself here.
