Time Doctor

In short

Time Doctor is a time-tracking and productivity-reporting tool built around desk-based activity: automatic time logging, optional screenshots, app and website usage tracking, and payroll-ready hours exports. It suits the back-office and dispatch side of a trades business more than the trucks, since its core signals (screenshots, screen time, app usage) come from someone sitting at a computer. Pricing runs per user per month across several tiers, detailed in the pricing table on this page.

Key features for office and dispatch teams

Who it's for

Time Doctor fits the office, dispatch and back-office staff of a plumbing, HVAC, electrical, roofing or landscaping business, the people scheduling jobs, answering phones and handling admin from a desk, who need accurate hours and activity data flowing into payroll. It works well anywhere a manager wants visibility into how computer-based work time is actually spent across a distributed or hybrid team.

Who should skip it

A business looking to track technicians in a truck, rather than staff at a desk, should look elsewhere. Time Doctor has no scheduling, dispatch, quoting or invoicing built for trades work, so it does nothing to run the field side of the business; a tool like Jobber, Housecall Pro or ServiceM8 covers that instead. It is also worth skipping, or applying carefully, wherever screenshot and activity monitoring would feel invasive to a workforce that isn't sitting at a screen all day, since that mismatch is one of the more common complaints about deploying it broadly.

How it handles screenshots and activity monitoring

Screenshots and screen recording are described as configurable by team and controlled with privacy guardrails, meaning an administrator, not the individual employee, decides whether a given user is monitored. Settings can be changed company-wide from company settings or per individual user from the manage-users screen, including toggling screenshots on or off and adjusting capture frequency within a set range. Administrators can also restrict or allow a manager's visibility into a specific employee's screenshots, and can enable or disable a user's ability to delete their own captures.

This is exactly where the honest limit sits: screenshot and app-usage tracking are built for desk-based computer work, so pointing that kind of monitoring at field crews who are driving, climbing and wiring rather than typing tends to feel like surveillance rather than useful reporting. The feature set reads as strongest for office and dispatch roles, weakest as a fit for techs on site.

How it handles payroll and reporting

Time Doctor ties tracked hours to tasks and work processes so payroll and billing can run without manual reconciliation, and its reporting layer includes activity summaries, web and app usage breakdowns, and payroll-ready exports starting at its mid tier. Its homepage documents native integrations for HR and payroll systems alongside broader workforce-visibility reporting aimed at operations, executive, HR and IT leaders managing distributed or hybrid teams.

Integrations

Time Doctor's mid-tier plan and above document more than sixty integrations, spanning payroll and HR systems along with general productivity and project tools, so hours and activity data can flow into whatever back-office stack a trades business already runs. Add-on modules extend this further, including software-cost insight reporting and dedicated HRIS and payroll integrations for businesses that need a deeper connection than the standard export.

What to check on pricing

Time Doctor is sold across four tiers, from a basic tracking plan up to a fully customizable enterprise tier with private cloud deployment, and it offers a trial period on its highest standard tier before a business commits. Annual billing is described as cheaper than paying monthly. Because feature gates change which tier includes screenshots, payroll exports or AI analytics, check the pricing table on this page and /tools/time-doctor/pricing for the current tier breakdown before assuming a feature is included.

Alternatives

Time Doctor covers office and dispatch hours tracking, not field scheduling or dispatch itself. Pair it with a trades-specific platform for the parts of the business it does not touch.

• Jobber or Housecall Pro if what you need is scheduling, quoting and invoicing for techs in the field, with Time Doctor layered on top only for office and dispatch hours.
• Connecteam if you want a GPS time clock and shift scheduling built for a deskless field crew instead of screenshot-based desk monitoring.
• Tradify for a lighter, trades-focused job-management app to pair with office-side time tracking.

How we reviewed it

We checked Time Doctor's homepage directly for its core activity-tracking and payroll positioning and target customer roles, its pricing page for tier structure, integration counts, trial terms and billing options, its features page for screenshot, activity and role-based configuration details, and its help center article on screenshot settings for exactly how monitoring can be turned on or off and who controls it. We did not confirm exact per-seat prices or add-on fees, since this page avoids dollar figures; those appear in the pricing table on this page.