Time tracking for electricians
Track visits throughout your day
Your work can include running circuits and pulling wire, troubleshooting dead outlets and intermittent faults, sizing and installing panel upgrades. You might visit residential service calls, new-build rough-in, panel upgrades in occupied homes in one day. Use your timeline to review each recorded visit before billing.
Common time-tracking challenges
- Service calls are 45 minutes at one address, then 2 hours at the next — easy to lose half-hour increments in memory
- Diagnostic work on stubborn faults balloons past the quote and you need defensible time to justify the extra line
- Rough-in days jump between unit A, B, and C of the same subdivision and the addresses blur together by Friday
- Permit inspectors arrive unannounced and wreck whatever rhythm you had going
How TradesTimer handles it
- Every stop at every address is captured to the minute without you reaching for the phone
- Ballooned diagnostic time shows up as a long, confirmed stop you can point to in the invoice
- Subdivision unit visits land on the timeline as separate stops with their own duration
- Record visits without remembering to start or resume a timer
The founder’s experience with electrician work
I wasn't the guy pulling wire — I was the back office. I ran orders, parts, invoices, and time tracking for an electrical contractor with about ten electricians on the road. Which means I've personally chased every way hours go missing: a guy forgets to clock in and we reconstruct his morning from memory; he clocks into the wrong job and the wrong customer nearly gets billed; the office (me) hadn't set up the PO or job number yet, so his hours had nowhere to land.
When I caught it same-day, we fixed it. When it surfaced at invoice time weeks later, we ate the hours — and with ten guys, 'sometimes we forgot and lost big bucks' is not a figure of speech. Here's the part that matters if you're solo: that shop had a full-time person doing this. Most electricians running their own book have nobody in that chair.
TradesTimer is designed so nobody has to sit in that chair. The day records itself from location — every service call is a stop with a start and end time — and you attach names at invoice time, after the fact, when you actually know what the job was called. No job codes to pick at 7 a.m., no PO that has to exist before your hours can.
Time-tracking experiences from electricians
Each quote links to its original public discussion.
We have crews working on multiple job sites, often with staggered start/end times, and it's getting harder to stay on top of hours, breaks, and overtime especially when it comes to accurate payroll and job costing.
Staggered, multi-site days are exactly where clock-in apps break down — the fix is capturing the day automatically instead of asking anyone to remember.
Typical hourly rates
Electricians in North America typically bill between $85–175/hr . Typical North American residential service range; journeyman vs master, and region, swing the number materially. Review recorded visits to check for missing billable time before preparing an invoice.
Rate range as of 2026-04-15.
Free time tracking
Record stops and trips, review your hours, and export reports without a subscription.
- Automatic stop and trip recording
- Unlimited stops, drives, and days
- Review and edit stops and trips
- Rounded billable hours, exported as text or CSV
- Travel log with estimated distances
- 7-day summary view
- History stored on your phone
Control your location history
TradesTimer stores your history on your phone. Address lookups send coordinates to an address provider. You choose where to share your hours and travel exports.
See the privacy policy for details about address lookups, exports, and other data use.