Best Time Tracking Apps For Cleaning Companies In 2026

A cleaner works three buildings in one night. By Sunday, the owner is piecing the hours together from a group text and a half-filled timesheet.

Most owners start with texts or paper because they cost nothing. The trouble shows up later: a missed punch, a disputed hour, or a payroll week that takes an evening to untangle.

Janitorial time tracking gives managers a shared record of each cleaner’s hours and, when GPS or geofencing is included, helps verify where a punch happened. It also protects you. Under federal rules, travel from one job site to another during the workday counts as paid time, and the Department of Labor requires accurate records of the hours each person works every day and every workweek. Texts and paper timesheets make both hard to prove.

This guide compares five apps built for crews that move between sites. We looked at GPS clock-in, how easy each app is on a cleaner’s own phone, what it costs at 10 and 20 cleaners, and where each one falls short. If you manage a small crew, the picks below should help you narrow the list fast.

The best janitorial time tracking app confirms where each cleaner clocks in, works on their own phone, and sends approved hours to payroll. Our picks:

We’re Homebase, and we make a free-to-start app for small businesses with hourly teams. It covers scheduling, time clocks, payroll, hiring, and team messaging in one place, so hours tracked on a phone flow straight into payroll. More than 150,000 small businesses run their teams on it.

That gives us a stake in this topic, so we’ll be upfront: Homebase isn’t in the ranked list below. Every app there was judged on its own merits, and we never accept payment or backlinks for a mention. We’ve described Homebase here in the same format as the others.

Homebase is best for: cleaning crews that want time tracking, scheduling, and payroll in one app.

Rating: G2 4.4 · Capterra 4.6 (1,158 reviews)

Key features:

Pricing: Free for one location with up to 10 team members. Paid plans start at $30 per location per month, or $24 billed annually. Payroll is an add-on to any plan at $49 a month plus $6 per paid employee. See Homebase pricing.

What users like: “With Homebase we were able to get rid of the physical time clock, and my team started clocking in on their phone. Once people finally bought in to using the app on their phone, they realized they could see all the history of their work and how much they should expect to be paid.” Jared Higginbotham, owner of Teal Door (source).

What users criticize: Capterra reviewers on page 3, page 6, and page 16 describe app logouts, geolocation that doesn’t work, or clock-ins that fail to register on some days. One says, “GPS doesn’t always recognize arrival time.”

To see the time clock for yourself, try the Homebase time clock free.

We looked at apps that let cleaning crews clock in from their phones and give owners location-verified hours. Each one was scored on the same criteria:

We read each company’s own pricing and feature pages, then compared them with patterns in Capterra and G2 reviews. When several reviews described the same problem, such as frequent logouts, we report the pattern instead of one complaint. Ratings are overall scores from all customers, not only janitorial businesses. Prices, ratings, and review counts were checked on each company’s own pages, and plans change often, so confirm before you buy.

We also read Reddit discussions from cleaning-business owners to decide what to test: hours by property, missed punches, location checks, and payroll cleanup. The threads are in r/cleaningbusiness, r/CarpetCleaning, r/Workplace_Management, r/smallbusiness (and another), and r/Contractor. We treated those comments as individual experiences, not proof of how any app performs, and we verified features and prices against each company’s own pages.

Our top three picks cover the three most common buying situations: a small crew on a fixed budget, hourly client billing by building, and a full operations suite. Hubstaff and OnTheClock follow. We also looked at Clockify. Its free plan supports up to five users, but GPS tracking requires Pro or Enterprise, so crews that need location-verified hours would have to upgrade.

Read our full methodology.

Here’s how our top three picks line up on the points owners ask about most.

Prices are monthly unless noted and change often, so confirm each one on the company’s own pricing page. ezClocker takes 20% off for annual billing.

Publisher note: this section isn’t part of the ranking.

If you’re also considering Homebase, here’s where we fit, using the same rows as the table above.

Pricing is per location, not per cleaner, so the cost stays flat as a single-site crew grows. If you bill clients by the hour and need job costing for each building, ClockShark is built for that.

ezClocker is a plain mobile time clock with GPS stamps, and its flat monthly price makes it easy to budget. A crew of 15 costs the same as a crew of three. The tradeoff is depth: job assignments, overtime reports, and payroll integrations sit on the $30 plan, and you’ll need other tools for hiring and payroll itself.

Best for: small cleaning crews that want flat-rate GPS time tracking.

Rating: Capterra 4.8 (43 reviews) 

What it is: a mobile and web time clock for small field crews that handles clock-in, GPS stamps, basic scheduling, and CSV payroll export.

Key features:

Pricing: Flat rate by team size. Basic is $15 a month for up to 15 employees, Standard is $30 for up to 30, and Premium is $60 for up to 60. Annual billing brings those to $12.50, $25, and $50 a month. There’s a 30-day trial with no credit card.

What users like: Kody W., a 2019 Capterra reviewer, called the app “extremely easy for our crew to download and use.”

What users criticize: Beth L., another 2019 reviewer, found it “a very basic time clock with no extra features” and moved to a paid app elsewhere.

Our take: Fifteen cleaners cost the same $15 a month as two, the opposite of how most apps here charge, so the bill is easy to predict. Check one thing before you budget: $15 gets you GPS verification at clock-in. ezClocker’s blog post introducing its geofence feature says restricting clock-ins to a set radius takes the Standard or Premium plan, so confirm with ezClocker which plan covers it before you buy. During your trial, run one full day with cleaners moving between properties and see how a missed punch gets corrected.

ClockShark is a GPS time clock built for field crews, and its strength is job costing: hours attach to a specific building and roll into reports. That helps if you bill clients by the hour. It costs more as your crew grows, and a three-year contract term is worth a direct question before you sign.

Best for: larger cleaning operations that bill clients by the hour.

Rating: G2 4.7 (340+ reviews) · Capterra 4.7 (1,911 reviews)

What it is: a GPS time clock for construction and field service crews, where hours attach to a client site and roll up into costing reports.

Key features:

Pricing: Standard is $42 a month plus $9.50 per user, and Pro is $63 plus $11.50 per user. There’s a 14-day trial and no free plan. ClockShark’s pricing page states that a three-year contract term applies to all plans.

What users like: Michelle B., a 2022 Capterra reviewer, said, “The GPS function for clocking in is perfect.”

What users criticize: Drew F., a project manager who still rates it 5.0 overall, wrote in January 2025 that “the geofence cannot be enabled by default when adding a new job.”

Our take: If you bill by the hour and need to know what labor cost you at each building, ClockShark does that better than anything else here. Price in the three-year term, which is unusual for a small business. Cleaning companies also add sites often, so ask how much setup each new site needs, given Drew F.’s note about geofence defaults. Twenty cleaners on Standard run $232 a month. In a trial, check how a cleaner picks the right job and whether an off-site punch is blocked or only flagged.

Janitorial Manager is an operations suite for commercial cleaning contractors, with time tracking as one module beside inspections, work orders, and inventory. It’s thorough and it’s priced like it. One reviewer says it keeps buildings covered, and another warns about a steep learning curve. It doesn’t advertise a free trial.

Best for: established contractors who need inspections, work orders, and inventory alongside time tracking.

Rating: Capterra 4.6 

What it is: an operations suite for commercial cleaning contractors, with time tracking as one module beside work orders, quality inspections, inventory, bidding, and a client portal.

Key features:

Pricing: Plans start at $1,000 a month, and the final price depends on your buildings, cleanable square footage, and team size. There’s no advertised free tier or trial, so a demo is how you start.

What users like: Stacey B., a franchise owner, said on Capterra in December 2025 that it helps them “make sure our buildings are covered.”

What users criticize: Michael R., an owner, wrote that month, “Learning curve is significant,” while staying positive overall.

Our take: At $1,000 a month, Janitorial Manager costs far more than any other app here at a typical small-crew size. That isn’t a knock. It’s a different kind of purchase, and it fits contractors running enough buildings that inspections and workloading justify the spend. If you only need GPS-verified clock-ins, you’d pay more than 30 times ezClocker’s $30 plan. Ask for the demo, but bring your actual buildings and crew list, and ask them to walk you through a full payroll week, including how supervisors fix a missed punch and review hours by property.

Hubstaff pairs time tracking with productivity monitoring, and its GPS and geofencing tools make it useful for crews spread over wide territory. The advertised $4.99 per seat is not what a cleaning crew pays, though, and screenshots and activity scores mean little to someone mopping a lobby.

Best for: cleaning businesses that want detailed location history, not just hours.

Rating: G2 4.4 (2,300+ reviews) · Capterra 4.5 (1,600+ reviews)

What it is: a time tracking and monitoring app built for remote teams, with GPS and geofencing available as a paid add-on.

Key features:

Pricing: There’s a free 14-day trial with no credit card, and no practical free plan. Paid plans start at $4.99 per seat per month billed annually, with a two-seat minimum. GPS and geofencing come through the Locations add-on at $3.33 per seat, which requires the Team plan at $10 per seat.

What users like: A Capterra reviewer whose team works mostly on site called “Geo-Location tracking” the most desirable feature.

What users criticize: Crispin W., a director running a mixed remote and field team, said on Capterra in June 2026 that “default settings created some pushback from the team” until they adjusted screenshot frequency. He doesn’t run a cleaning company, so read it as a signal about the monitoring features.

Our take: The real entry point for verified clock-ins is $13.33 per seat per month on annual billing: about $133 for 10 cleaners and $267 for 20. Screenshots and activity scores make sense at a laptop. For a cleaner working a lobby at 11pm, they measure little and can read as surveillance. Hubstaff earns its place with wide geography and detailed location history instead of a single punch-in coordinate. If you use it, tell your crew what’s tracked, when, and who can see it.

OnTheClock charges $4 per employee a month plus a $5 base fee, and GPS and geofencing come with every plan, so there are no feature tiers to sort through. A crew of 10 pays $45. Per-employee pricing is predictable at small sizes and adds up as you hire.

Best for: small to mid-size crews that want GPS and geofencing without moving up a plan.

Rating: Capterra 4.7 (811 reviews) · G2 4.5

What it is: a time clock and scheduling app for small teams with mobile, web, and kiosk clock-in.

Key features:

Pricing: $4 per employee per month plus a $5 base fee, after a free 30-day trial with no credit card. That’s $45 a month for 10 cleaners and $85 for 20. Payroll is an add-on at $6 per employee plus a $40 base fee, with a required one-time $250 payroll migration fee.

What users like: One Capterra reviewer said new employees “don’t need much training at all.”

What users criticize: Stephanie M., an owner, wrote, “Sometimes there are glitches that don’t allow me to clock in/out.”

Our take: At 30 cleaners, OnTheClock runs $125 a month, while ezClocker’s Standard plan is $30 for the same headcount. The difference buys every feature on every plan. Offline behavior varies by app, so test clock-in at a job site and in the weakest-signal spot you have, like a basement or stairwell, before you commit.

Cleaning companies track employee hours with a mobile time clock, a spreadsheet, or paper records. For crews moving between properties, look for an app that records each job’s start and end and lets managers review hours by location. GPS or geofencing can add location checks when the app and plan support them.

Yes, in most cases. Under federal rules, time spent traveling from one job site to another during the workday counts as hours worked. Ordinary travel from home to the first site does not. Keep crews clocked in between buildings, and check your state’s rules, which can differ.

It can be, when you spend an evening each pay period piecing hours together from texts and spreadsheets. Compare the monthly cost with the hours you spend fixing records, then test an app with your actual crew and one full payroll week before you commit.

Choose an app that lets managers flag incomplete punches, correct entries, and review the changes before payroll. During a trial, forget a clock-out on purpose and check whether the correction can be documented and shared with the cleaner. A clear edit history also helps if an hour is ever disputed.

It can, depending on the app and plan. GPS records where a punch happened, geofencing can block or flag punches outside a set boundary, and some apps also track location between punches. Check which of these your app includes, and still review and approve hours, since location data doesn’t replace accurate time records.

Yes, but free time clock apps are limited. Clockify’s free plan covers up to five users, and GPS tracking requires its Pro or Enterprise plan. ezClocker and ClockShark offer trials instead of free plans. For a crew of eight or more, a 14- to 30-day trial is a more realistic test.

Look for individual employee sign-ins, location checks, and exception reports, and confirm which of those your app and plan include. Photo verification is available in some apps. When a punch looks wrong, talk with the cleaner before drawing conclusions, and keep a documented correction process so records stay accurate and fair.

The best app is one your crew will use on day one and your payroll week can trust on day seven. Start with your crew size and budget, then use the trial to test what matters: a clock-in from your weakest-signal building and one forgotten clock-out.

Publisher note: if you’re also weighing Homebase, we make a free-to-start time clock for hourly teams. It’s free for one location with up to 10 team members, so you can see how clock-ins, scheduling, and payroll work together for your crew before you pay for anything. Sign up for Homebase free.