# Timecard

> The daily record of who worked, where, for how long, and on what cost code — the atom from which payroll, job cost, and productivity all derive.

- Source: https://briq.ai/acu/object/timecard
- Department: Workforce, Equipment & Supply Chain (https://briq.ai/acu/department/workforce)
- Catalog code: WRK 101 · Level: Foundation · Track: Operations · 10 min read
- Also known as: Time sheet, Time entry, Field time, Labor ticket

## Definition

A timecard is the record of an employee's hours worked over a pay period, coded to the job, cost code, and often the specific activity or work classification, and split between regular, overtime, and premium time. It is the source document from which gross pay is computed and from which labor cost is posted to the job. A timecard is not the same thing as a paycheck or a payroll register: those are downstream artifacts, and a timecard that is wrong quietly corrupts both the amount a worker is paid and the labor cost charged to the project. In construction the timecard carries more coding than in most industries because the same crew may touch several jobs and many cost codes in a single day, and each split has to land in the right place.

## Why it matters

Labor is the cost line a contractor actually controls day to day, and the timecard is where that control either happens or fails. Material and subcontract costs are largely committed at buyout, but self-performed labor is spent hour by hour in the field, and the only way to know whether a crew is beating or losing the estimate is to compare coded hours against budgeted hours by cost code. A timecard that lumps a whole day into one code destroys that comparison before it can be made.

Timecards are a compliance instrument, not just an accounting one. On public work they feed certified payroll and must reconcile to the classification and hours reported under Davis-Bacon or state prevailing-wage rules; on union work they drive fringe contributions by hours worked in each classification. Overtime calculation under the Fair Labor Standards Act, meal-and-rest-break rules in some states, and multi-state withholding all begin with what the timecard says. Errors here are not rounding differences; they are wage claims and audit exposure.

The timecard is the raw material of every productivity and earned-value measure a contractor produces. Labor productivity reports, unit rates, and earned-value calculations all reduce to hours divided by installed quantity, and if the hours are miscoded the whole analysis is fiction that looks precise. A project can appear to be losing money on concrete when the real problem is that formwork hours were coded to the concrete cost code.

Timecards are evidence in disputes. On a change or a delay claim, the contemporaneous record of who was on site, in what trade, for how many hours, is often the difference between a substantiated cost and a rejected one. A time-and-material ticket, a backcharge, and a labor inefficiency claim all lean on timecard data, and a reviewer will trust a coded, signed, daily record far more than a reconstruction built after the fact.

## Lifecycle

1. **Capture** — Hours are recorded as the day happens or at day's end — by the worker, a foreman, or a timekeeper — on paper, a kiosk, or a mobile device. The further capture drifts from the moment worked, the less reliable the cost coding becomes, because people reconstruct where they were rather than remember it.
2. **Coding** — Each block of time is assigned a job, a cost code, and a labor classification, and split between regular and premium. This is where most error enters: a foreman running three cost codes in a day guesses at the split, or codes everything to whichever code is top of mind.
3. **Foreman or crew review** — The crew lead confirms who was present and the hours are plausible. On many jobs this is also where the daily report and the timecard should agree on headcount but frequently do not, because they are filled out by different people at different times.
4. **Approval** — A superintendent or project manager approves the coded hours before they leave the field. Approval that is a rubber stamp rather than a review is the point where miscoding becomes permanent, because payroll trusts an approved card.
5. **Payroll processing** — Hours are rated, overtime and premiums applied, taxes and deductions computed, and gross-to-net produced. Prevailing-wage and union-fringe logic runs here, and any classification error on the card now becomes a pay and compliance error.
6. **Cost posting** — The same hours, now burdened with labor cost including taxes and insurance, post to the job cost ledger by cost code. This is where the field's coding decisions finally hit the job cost report the project manager reads.
7. **Reconciliation** — Payroll hours are reconciled against job cost hours and against the daily reports. Gaps — hours paid but not costed to a job, or headcount that does not match the daily log — are chased here or, more often, ignored until an audit.
8. **Retention and audit** — Timecards are retained for the periods required by wage-and-hour and prevailing-wage rules — commonly several years — and produced on demand in audits, wage claims, and litigation. A missing or altered card is a serious problem in any of those.

## Anatomy

- **Employee identifier** — The worker's ID or number. Must tie unambiguously to one person in the payroll master; duplicate or ambiguous IDs cause pay to the wrong account.
- **Work date** — The specific calendar day worked, not the pay-period end date. Day-level dates are required for overtime, break, and daily-record reconstruction.
- **Job / project number** — The job the hours belong to. A worker moved between jobs mid-day must be split, or one job absorbs cost it did not incur.
- **Cost code** — The activity within the job, usually a CSI MasterFormat or company-specific code. The single field that determines whether productivity analysis is meaningful or garbage.
- **Labor classification / craft** — Carpenter, laborer, operator, apprentice level, and so on. Drives prevailing-wage rate and union fringe, and must match the work actually performed.
- **Regular hours** — Straight-time hours worked. The base against which overtime thresholds are applied.
- **Overtime and premium hours** — Time over the daily or weekly threshold, plus double-time, shift, and holiday premiums. Miscategorized premium time is a common wage-claim trigger.
- **Start / stop and break times** — Punch or recorded times where captured. Required in states with meal-and-rest-break law and useful for reconstructing disputed days.
- **Equipment or activity notes** — Which equipment was operated or what specific task was done. Supports operator pay differentials and links labor to equipment utilization.
- **Approvals and signatures** — Foreman and supervisor sign-off, with timestamps. The evidentiary backbone; an unsigned card is weak evidence in any dispute.
- **Per diem / subsistence / travel** — Non-hour pay elements captured on the card. Often mishandled as taxable versus non-taxable and a frequent audit finding.
- **Change-order or T&M flag** — Whether the hours belong to base contract, a change, or time-and-material work. Missing this flag means recoverable T&M hours get buried in base cost and never billed.

## Failure modes

- **Everything coded to one bucket** — A foreman running four cost codes in a day codes the whole shift to one, usually the largest. Payroll is right and the job cost is wrong, so a cost code shows a wild overrun while another shows suspiciously few hours, and productivity analysis is quietly worthless.
- **Reconstructed at week's end** — Timecards are filled out Friday for the whole week from memory. Hours net out roughly right but the day-level and code-level detail is invented, which breaks overtime accuracy in daily-overtime states and destroys any hope of matching to daily reports.
- **Classification mismatch on prevailing-wage work** — A worker is paid and coded as a laborer but performed carpenter work, or an apprentice exceeds the allowed ratio to journeymen. On public work this is an underpayment finding, back-wage liability, and potential debarment, discovered in an audit long after the money is spent.
- **T&M hours lost in base cost** — Extra work directed in the field is worked but never flagged as time-and-material, so the hours post to the base job cost and are never captured on a T&M ticket. The contractor performs the work and simply does not bill for it.
- **Ghost and buddy punching** — Hours are recorded for workers who were not present, or one worker punches for several. It inflates labor cost, distorts headcount on the daily report, and on public work is fraud with criminal exposure.
- **Approval without review** — Supervisors approve stacks of cards to meet the payroll deadline without checking coding or hours. Approval is supposed to be the control that catches error; when it is a formality, every upstream mistake flows straight to pay and cost.
- **Timecard and daily report disagree** — The daily report says twelve workers on site; payroll pays fourteen to that job. The two records are never reconciled, so nobody knows which is right, and both become unreliable evidence in a claim.

## Metrics

- **Timecard timeliness** — Share of cards captured same-day versus reconstructed later. The leading indicator of coding accuracy, because reconstructed time is guessed time.
- **Coding accuracy / correction rate** — Rate of cards corrected after submission, and the dollar value of reclasses. High correction volume signals field coding is unreliable.
- **Payroll error rate** — Off-cycle checks, voids, and corrections per pay period. Each one is rework and a hit to worker trust.
- **Regular-to-overtime ratio** — Overtime as a share of total hours by crew and cost code. Rising ratios flag understaffing, schedule pressure, or productivity loss before the cost report does.
- **Labor cost per unit installed** — Coded hours divided by installed quantity, compared to the estimate. Only meaningful if coding is clean, which is why coding discipline underwrites the whole metric.
- **Timecard-to-daily-report variance** — Difference between headcount paid to a job and headcount logged in the daily report. Persistent gaps mean one record is fiction.
- **Certified-payroll exception count** — Classification, ratio, and rate exceptions surfaced before certified payroll is filed. Catching these pre-filing is far cheaper than an audit finding.

## The AI shift

- **Conversational** — Instead of exporting hours to a spreadsheet, a project manager asks which crews ran overtime this week, which cost codes are consuming hours faster than budgeted, and where paid headcount does not match the daily reports — and gets specific workers, days, and codes with the entries cited. The timecard data becomes something you interrogate rather than pivot.
- **Generative** — Given a foreman's rough notes, the crew list, and the day's activities, a model drafts a fully coded timecard with hours split across cost codes and classifications, flagging the splits it is least sure about for confirmation. The foreman edits a plausible draft rather than filling a blank grid, which pulls capture closer to the moment worked.
- **Orchestrated** — The timecard stops living alone. Coded hours are reconciled against the daily report headcount, checked for classification and apprentice-ratio compliance before payroll runs, matched to open T&M tickets so extra work is not buried in base cost, and posted to job cost against the right budget line — with mismatches surfaced as a short exception list rather than discovered in an audit.
- **Autonomous** — Routine time processing runs on a schedule: cards ingested, obvious coding errors and duplicates flagged, overtime and premium logic applied, prevailing-wage and fringe classifications validated, and clean cards advanced to payroll while anything anomalous is held for review. Humans approve pay, resolve exceptions, and sign off on compliance; the system never pays a card it flagged and never changes a classification without a person.

## Prompts

### Conversational — Reviewing labor before the weekly job cost meeting.

```text
Review this week's approved timecards for job 4120. Tell me: total hours by cost code versus the budgeted hours to date for each code; every cost code where actual hours are pacing more than 15 percent ahead of budget; the overtime ratio by crew; and any day where the headcount paid to this job does not match the daily report for that day. Give me the specific cost codes, crews, and dates, not just totals, and rank the overruns by dollar impact.
```

**Expected output:** A per-cost-code comparison of actual versus budgeted hours ranked by dollar impact, with overtime and headcount-mismatch exceptions named at the crew and date level — not a raw hours dump.

**Follow-ups:**

- For the two worst cost codes, show me the daily hour trend so I can see if it is one bad day or a steady bleed.
- Which of the overtime hours look avoidable versus schedule-driven?
- Draft three questions I should ask the superintendent about the headcount mismatches.

### Generative — Turning a foreman's end-of-day notes into a coded timecard.

```text
Draft coded timecards for my crew from these notes. Crew: four carpenters and two laborers, 6:30 to 15:00 with a 30-minute unpaid lunch. Morning: formed and stripped the level-2 stair landing (cost code 03-300). Afternoon: two carpenters framed interior partitions on the east wing (06-100) while the rest continued formwork. One laborer spent about two hours on directed cleanup of the flooded electrical room, which the super told us is extra work. Split each worker's hours across the right cost codes and classifications, flag the cleanup as time-and-material, apply the unpaid lunch, and mark any split you are estimating so I can confirm it.
```

**Expected output:** A per-worker card with hours allocated across cost codes and classifications, lunch applied, the T&M portion flagged separately, and the uncertain splits marked for confirmation — a draft to edit, not a form to fill.

**Follow-ups:**

- Redo it assuming the two framing carpenters started after lunch, not before.
- Generate the matching T&M ticket line for the electrical-room cleanup.
- Which of these splits will affect our prevailing-wage report and how?

### Orchestrated — Pre-flight check before running payroll on public work.

```text
Before payroll runs for the week ending Friday, validate every timecard on our prevailing-wage jobs. Check each worker's coded classification against the work described in the daily reports and the applicable wage determination, verify apprentice-to-journeyman ratios are within the allowed limits by classification and by day, confirm overtime is computed on the correct daily and weekly thresholds for each job's jurisdiction, and reconcile total paid headcount per job per day against the daily report headcount. Return one exception list with each item tied to the specific card, worker, and rule it violates, and mark items that will produce a certified-payroll finding versus items that are merely inconsistent.
```

**Expected output:** A single validated exception list separating true compliance findings from inconsistencies, each tied to a card, worker, and rule, with the back-wage dollar impact where reclassification is required.

**Follow-ups:**

- Draft the corrections for the classification mismatches and tell me who needs to approve each.
- Which apprentice-ratio exceptions require us to reclassify hours to journeyman rate, and what is the back-wage cost?
- Summarize the residual compliance risk if we file as-is.

### Autonomous — Standing policy for how time processing should run each pay period.

```text
Run our time-processing loop every pay period under these rules. On ingest: dedupe entries, flag any card reconstructed after the fact, and validate that every block of time carries a job, cost code, and classification. Before payroll: apply overtime and premium logic by each job's jurisdiction, validate prevailing-wage classifications and apprentice ratios, reconcile paid headcount against daily reports, and match directed-extra hours to open T&M tickets. Advance only clean cards to payroll; hold anything with a compliance flag, an unreconciled headcount gap, or an estimated split in an exception queue for me. Never pay a card you have flagged, never change a worker's classification or rate without my approval, and never post hours to a cost code that does not exist in the job's budget — surface those instead.
```

**Expected output:** A processed pay period with a clean-versus-held split, a short exception queue with reasons, and a full audit trail — where pay, classification, and unbudgeted-code decisions always pass through a human.

**Follow-ups:**

- Show me everything you advanced and everything you held this period, with the reason for each hold.
- Which holds recur week after week, and what upstream fix would eliminate them?
- Which of my overrides last month turned out to be wrong?

## Maturity ladder

- **Level 0 — Level 0 — Paper and payroll only** — Hours are captured on paper and keyed for payroll. Job cost coding is minimal or added later from memory, so labor cost by activity is essentially unknown until the job is over.
- **Level 1 — Level 1 — Coded and posted** — Timecards carry job and cost code, and hours post to job cost. Coding is manual and trusted, overtime is computed by rule, but accuracy depends entirely on foreman discipline.
- **Level 2 — Level 2 — Reconciled** — Timecards are reconciled against daily reports and validated against prevailing-wage and union rules before payroll. Exceptions are worked systematically rather than discovered in audit.
- **Level 3 — Level 3 — Assisted** — Cards are drafted from field notes, coding errors and classification issues are flagged on submission, and headcount and T&M reconciliation is generated for human review.
- **Level 4 — Level 4 — Operated** — The routine loop runs unattended — dedupe, validation, reconciliation, and advancement of clean cards — while humans own pay approval, classification changes, and every flagged exception.

## FAQ

### Why does cost coding matter if payroll comes out right anyway?

Because payroll and job cost are two different questions. Payroll asks what to pay each worker; job cost asks how much a given activity cost. A card can be perfectly correct for pay while being useless for cost if all the hours land in one code. Since self-performed labor is the cost a contractor actually manages day to day, coding is what turns time into the productivity signal that lets you correct a losing activity while there is still time to correct it.

### Should the foreman or the worker fill out the timecard?

It varies by trade and jurisdiction, and both models have failure modes. Worker self-entry improves accuracy of hours and start-stop times but weakens cost coding, since workers rarely know the code structure. Foreman entry improves coding but invites reconstruction and buddy-punching. The strongest arrangement is same-day capture with the person closest to the work confirming hours and the foreman confirming coding, so neither is guessing.

### How long do we have to keep timecards?

It depends on the applicable rules, but plan on multiple years. Federal wage-and-hour rules require payroll records for several years, prevailing-wage and certified-payroll requirements often run longer, and any card tied to a claim or dispute should be held until the matter is fully closed. Because you cannot know in advance which cards will be needed, most contractors retain all of them for the longest applicable period rather than sorting.

## Related objects

- [Certified Payroll (WH-347)](https://briq.ai/acu/object/certified-payroll)
- [Prevailing Wage Determination](https://briq.ai/acu/object/prevailing-wage-determination)
- [Union Payroll & Fringe Benefits](https://briq.ai/acu/object/union-payroll-fringe)
- [Daily Report (Daily Log)](https://briq.ai/acu/object/daily-report)
- [Labor Productivity Report](https://briq.ai/acu/object/labor-productivity-report)
- [Time & Material (T&M) Ticket](https://briq.ai/acu/object/time-and-material-ticket)