Time tracking for painters
Track visits throughout your day
Your work can include Sanding and prepping surfaces, Taping and masking edges, Priming new drywall. You might visit Residential homes, Commercial offices, Retail storefronts in one day. Use your timeline to review each recorded visit before billing.
Common time-tracking challenges
- Losing track of mileage during mid-day supply runs to the paint store
- Difficulty proving exact on-site duration for split-day jobs like prep vs. finish coats
- Unrecorded travel time between scattered residential clients in a single afternoon
How TradesTimer handles it
- Automatic stop detection for every house and site visit
- Seamless mileage logging for every trip to the supply house or client
- Rounded billable hours calculated from every detected jobsite
The founder’s experience with painter work
I painted for years — commercial jobs, condo repaints, and high-end residential where the client walks the walls with a work light at the end. Painting hours are slippery: you're at one address cutting in until the second coat can go on, then across town spraying doors, then back at the paint store because the colour got tweaked after the first wall went up.
I tracked those days in spiral notebooks, the same way most painters I worked with did. It works — until a Friday night when you can't remember whether Tuesday's second stop was two hours or three. Round down to be safe and you gave away money. Round up and you're arguing with a GC over a timesheet neither of you can prove.
That's the specific problem this app kills. Your phone already knows you were at the first house from 7:40 to 11:10 and at the shop from 12:00 to 4:30. You just name the stops and read off the hours.
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.