busybusy Reviews

I love the reports this software generates! We have multiple projects going on simultaneously in multiple locations with multiple employees. This software tracks the projects each employee is on, how much time each employee spends at each project and the type of work each employee is performing while at the project site. You can generate reports for such activities as labor activity by date, cost code, equipment, employee or the project itself. The software also tracks the timecard entries for any pay-period or date range, you can print the timecards, employees can verify and sign off on their time.

Due to the lack of sensitivity of the GPS tracking, occasionally you will need to broaden the circle of your project so that your employees will receive a notice to "clock in" and "clock out," this gives your employees a little slack to clock in when they may not physically be back at the project.

It wasn't until we tried to switch away from busybusy when we implemented a new job costing software, that I realized how streamlined and efficient Busybusy is. We switched back immediately! The sync to quickbooks, ease of use, and flexibility to changes are what I like most.

The only con I see is not being able to assign different pay rates per project (like prevailing wage projects).

The reporting is great, lacks a little but is still better than others out there. It's quicker than some others when having to adjust time as well.

1. Must refresh almost constantly because the software doesn't update like it should.
2. When changing time it must be done from reporting if doing more than one employee. When doing so, if I'm working on someone on the bottom of the list of employees, instead of remembering where I left off, it goes back to the top every time.
3. App doesn't work most of the time - if you're in a dead area, recording does no good as there's no wifi to connect the device and record the information.
4. Employees unable to change their time, even when the option is selected for them to do so.
5. When initial login happens, it NEVER remembers the password and an entire fiasco happens because of it. Not good when you have a lot of employees all doing this at the same time. It certainly takes a lot of time away from the person setting it all up.
6. No feature to make the signing of time sheets a requirement, only an option, and no one signs the time sheets because they're not required to.
7. GPS only takes a snapshot of the location where they initially clocked in. It doesn't record locations throughout the day. When accountability is a factor, it's key to get real-time, readable GPS.
8. More expensive than many others that promise less functionality. BusyBusy promises more functionality, therefore making it one of the top charging companies, but doesn't deliver anything near what you expect.

We cancelled our subscription and went back to paper. That's how bad it was.

It works well with how our company was already scheduling our jobs. Makes time tracking, much smoother, easier. Also love the job costing!

There really isn't anything. The customer service is top notch. They love ideas for improvements and even reach out to speak with you in more detail regarding them and how you feel it would be an improvement.

The most beneficial being able to do payroll on payday as soon as your employees clock out. I can have payroll done before they even arrive to the office for their paycheck. I can then run a job/time report in QB and bill our customers for the hours, down to the minute, with descriptions of what the employee has done. At the end of the quarter I run a similar report monthly and quarterly which helps me to calculate taxes. There are so many ways to use the imported information. It has saved us so much time and our customers love the detail!

I WISH I could figure out how to get the "Description" information (in "Job Details") to transfer over to QB. It would give our customers just that much more information on exactly what our employees are doing.

Moving from paper time cards to a fully online digital time tracking solution that each of my guys can access from the phones they already have is huge. This saves time, validates hours worked, and allows me to do accurate Job Costing

Very happy with what busybusy is offering at the moment. They have updates and extra features that come out periodically and I've been pleased with how they are keeping things up to date to help me operate my business in an ever changing economic environment.

Easy to clock in and out. I like that you can create reports and upload photos directly to the reports. I like the ability of supervisors to assist the workers in clocking in/out and switching between jobs throughout the day just in case they forget. I like that the mobile progress reporting platform allows you to make line breaks without making entirely new notes.

It can sometimes take a long time to load notes and daily progress reports on the mobile platform resulting in wasted time, and sometimes my phone will even time out and lock itself while waiting for the reports to load. I'd like to see faster load times, but perhaps if you could add an option to keep the phone awake like some other apps do I could at least stop having to tap the screen every 15 seconds or so to keep it from locking.

We especially like the time keeping function of this software. The ease of use and mobile integration work very well together. We are able to train and have people up and running on it immediately. We love that you can clock in and out on breaks and the using the geo system has allowed us to use time management more effectively.

The time off requests are still a little cumbersome to work through. There needs to be some notification when requests are made and the reports seem to be limited.

BusyBusy is very easy to use and affordable. It has continued to improve over the years.

The cons are no longer cons. When we originally starting using BusyBusy the week start date didn't match our payroll period, this has been changed and is no longer a con. The only con now is, I wish there was a way to export the payroll that could just be imported to our payroll software. We have too many rules and exceptions so this is not a true con of BusyBusy.

Ability to correct employee's time and see live reports of employee status.

Each employee has a different phone so some behave differently, it can glitch and need to be deleted then reinstalled on the phone.

I like the field budgeting options that can use both time tracked (hours) or labor burden (dollars) to track the progress of each project

There isn't much to not like about it overall, but some of the menu's could be a little more user friendly, but honestly, I think all of the apps we've used could use some improvement on that.

BusyBusy was easy to deploy and is straightforward and easy to use. One thing some of our employees did find confusing was the multiple versions of BusyBusy available on the Google Play Store. All in all, it does a good job tracking time and syncing with our payroll backend (Quickbooks Enterprise). The ability to specify budget hours and dollars helps our managers and executives gain a clearer picture of overall job health from a labor standpoint, strictly in terms of expenditures. Perhaps in the future, the ability to implement deadlines and rudimentary project scheduling along with labor budgeting would provide a clearer picture of overall job health from both a labor and scheduling perspective -- something that every manager sorely needs.

Additionally, we love the reminders and geofencing capability (though it has its kinks), and location stamping all clocking activity is a verifiable way for accounting to determine the location of employees when they clock in/out (i.e., they're where they're supposed to be, not at the local dive bar).

There are some features that I have suggested to the development team there, and there are some cumbersome aspects regarding the use of the App.
1) Switching tasks frequently is cumbersome. Our management in particular likes to track time on a very granular level, against a large amount of subprojects. Replacing the map on the "Switch Task" screen with an icon-based favorites list (8 items) and recent history (4 items) to allow for 2-tap task switching would save time for everyone and decrease the possibility of an incorrectlyh selected task from the existing drop downs.
2) The reporting functions are very rudimentary. In my experience, they are either too general or too granular. Its hard to determine how many hours were worked against specific subprojects, who worked them, and on what days. However, every company has different reporting needs, and thusly the ability to export all time entires for a specific project (or subproject) as a CSV would prove extremely useful for meeting custom reporting needs (currently I export time card reports and filter via Pivot Table in Excel).
3) Reorganizing ongoing projects would also be handy. We have a scenario where multiple foremen have setup multiple subprojects for the same punchlist items and have instructed their crews to clock against their created subprojects, respectively. This creates some headache when trying to aggregate all the data to determine how many hours were spent against a specific item.

I love this app because of the clock-in accuracy and the ability to easily move from project site to project site. It is very easy to use, I literally taught myself how to use this app and discovered other features that I felt were benefiting for myself as well as for my employer. I love that it can keep records of costs for each project, which makes book keeping much easier when it comes to labor costs. I also like that I can review my hours for the week prior before I sign and submit to our payroll department. This way I can bring up any discrepancies that I may have.
It's also easy to add new employee's and archive the ones that have either left or been terminated. It's easy to fix any discrepancy, if any, that regards hours or project location.

The only thing that I least like about this software is that on rare occasions I've had my GPS notification pop us stating that I have stepped away from the office, and if I would like to clock out, even though I haven't left the office. Other than that this program has been awesome.

It was very easy for our employees to learn how to use the app on their phones. When they forget to clock in or out, it is possible for me to go in and edit their hours. I also like the reports that are available. It makes it easy when it comes to payday to see a report of each employee and double-check the hours they worked.

Some of the tasks take a few too many clicks to get through or are a little confusing. For example, finding an employees time card from a previous day takes 4 or 5 different menus. I've gotten used to it after using it for so long, but I remember it was confusing at first.

I also struggle with the little clock that pops up to choose an employees clock-in or clock-out time. I'd rather just type in the time than move the hour/minute hands on a clock.

I also wish there was a way to get notified when an employees scheduled time off is coming up. We let our employees schedule time off as far out as possible, but when the time comes, we've forgotten about it. We actually don't use this feature of the Busybusy software, but would if it was more helpful to us.

Easy to use, great for several type of employees, I like how they can sign their time card on their phones, as most employees are not always at work on Sundays when the pay period ends. Easy to set up new employees, and keep an eye on who is clocked in. We got everyone trained on how to use this very quickly.

It would be great if the Desk Top option had the weekly view alike the phone version does.

It would help if at the end of the work week an employee could sign their time card and not have to wait until the end of the pay period. With seasonal part-time employees they may only work once and then have to wait 10 days to sign their time card, this wastes a lot of our supervisors time chasing down people to sign their time cards.

I wish there was a setting where I could say print all time cards and not have to log into each one and print them all at the end of the pay period.

I wish there was a way to use the "non gps" version. We don't want to track our employees by GPS, and some feel it is a privacy thing but the notice keeps popping up for them on their phones. Maybe there is something I don't know on this.

What I like most about BusyBusy is the access. You can log in at anytime so, their are less chances of an forgetting to log in time. Busybusy has great management features that make recording keeping a breeze. BusyBusy knows what the customer needs and will upgrade and adjust when necessary. BusyBusy support gets back to you pronto so you are never kept hanging. All questions are answered and all problems are resolved....that I like.

What I like least is that if you are not a supervisor and you need to add another employee you are unable to do so. What I have to look forward to is that BusyBusy will resolve this issue in the very near future.

We love the busy busy uses the internet to keep track of employee's timecards, we love that we don't ever have to guess or figure out what hours are written down with terrible penmanship. We love that we can access it on the mobile phone or from the PC and use all of the fuctions from anywhere. No more adding up hours manually it does the work for you! We also love that we can tie it to a geo location, and that it reminds people to sign their timecards for payroll. What don't I love about it, would be easier to type.

I don't subscribe to all the functions so I can't say what I don't like since I haven't tried it all. There isn't really anything I don't like. I do wish it was a little cheaper to sync with Quickbooks because I would totally do it then!

It can be used anywhere. We have construction crews in the field and it's great that they can use it wherever they are and we can have real-time data without having to wait for the end of the week for paper timecards. It takes a lot of the burden off of our foremen and frees them up for more important work. Plus, their customer service is outstanding!

Limited reporting features. Their canned reports often provide either two little data, or too much data that their canned reports often provide either two little data, or too much data that nut then needs to be manipulated in Excel.

The ability to talk into my phone and have it text the words I am saying into notes The ability to search for job names and addresses within the app. And just the ease of the dashboard

Is that your GPS has to always be on they need to have it on while using app
Sometimes it slow maybe that's my phone app I don't know why you can't copy and paste out of busybusy but you can paste into busybusy but can't copy and paste out of BusyBusy

I like how intuitive the program is. I like that, as the administrator, I can set the rules in the settings. I love the QuickBooks integration. It imports directly into the "Enter Time" part of QuickBooks. I like the customer support. They are quick to respond.

There are aspects of the software that I would never have noticed except via customer support like being able to sort by last name instead of first name, and payroll mapping. If I don't have everything correct, it won't import that employee hours.

Time and location stamp of employees, and how it integrates with quick books. Other great feature is that we have several jobs at the same Time and i am able to run reports on each job to see where we are using too many man hours.

There is not much that I can think of as cons, I have had several hiccups where an employee thought they have clocked out but the app has kept them clocked in so I have to fix time for employees quiet often, I don't see it has a big problem.

I like the easy user interface of platform as it is simple to use on both computers and mobile phone. As an admin it gives me access to edit employees time cards if they made an mistake. The GPS feature is really great to find out where employees actually are when they log into busy busy. This way owner can check if employees are really onsite or not.

Only thing that bothers me is that software do not have 15 minutes time rounding feature. Everytime I got the timecards like 8:04 min and then have to adjust to 8 hours.

I like that you can make changes if an employee made a bad punch in or out.
Also, being able to make those adjustments on a cell phone if you're not at a computer,
very convenient.

I don't like that the lunch time button says "break" not "Meal break", if there was ever an issue with legal, it would need to say lunch Break or Meal break... is this something that can be reprogrammed for Coastal Greenscapes??

Second: On a daily basis a few employees clock back in from their lunch, but the time continues on their lunch and multiple refreshes do not help to set them back on the timed screen. This makes us think that there is a software issue with some of the phones? most of our employees use ANDROID? is android the issue? please advise. This has caused conflict in the past...

So easy to use , everything is titled with what you need to know and self explanatory to clock in and out easy to make adjustments when you forget to clock in and out or if you didn't take your brake

The bad things about the busy busy app were to start it's a great app I have nothing bad to say other then getting kicked off or out of the app but that may be the cell phone provider I use if I had to say one bad thing it would be to maybe make it were it's a little more user friendly to make adjustments to your time in the app other then the you could say you have A very happy user

I think it's a great service, especially for those of us that work out of state or are otherwise away from our home office and can not clock in and out the old fashion way! Being able to electronically sign your time card is another valuable feature. Also, I love that I can work from home and still be able to clock in and out.

I have not found anything about this program that I don't like. As for the question about cost above, that I can't say, because I do not pay for the service, but from an employee stand point, who uses it on a daily basis I think it's great!