Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, employers must keep accurate records of the hours worked by non-exempt employees. For exempt salaried staff, precise hour tracking rarely affects pay. For everyone else, the amount owed depends on time worked, and the calculation is only as good as the record behind it.
That covers a large share of the American workforce. In 2024, the Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 80.3 million workers aged 16+ paid at hourly rates, representing 55.6%of all wage and salary workers.
Hourly employees are concentrated in retail, hospitality, healthcare, logistics, manufacturing and construction, where pay depends most directly on an accurate record of when each shift started and finished. For employers in these sectors, time tracking for hourly employees is a payroll and compliance issue before it is a software choice.
Workforce software that runs smoothly for office staff often needs one more piece in place before it serves a shift-based workforce as well, and the reason lies in the working environment rather than the software set up.
Every Desk Is Already a Capture Point
Every workforce system needs a moment when a record is created, when a specific person is identified and a specific time is captured. In an office, the environment provides that moment at no extra cost.
Office employees have a company login because they need one to do their jobs. They spend most of the day at an authenticated device on a reliable network. When the platform asks them to confirm a timesheet or request time off, everything required is already in place, for reasons that have nothing to do with timekeeping.
This is why employee self-service works so well for professional staff. Administrative effort moves from a central team to the individual, and the individual is equipped to handle it. For salaried office staff, a cloud workforce platform is a complete solution because the office has already solved the part of the problem the software was never designed to address.
What Deskless Workers Lack
Change the setting, and each of those options needs to be provided deliberately.
Identity comes first. Many frontline or deskless employees have no company account, or have one they use so rarely that password resets become a standing support cost. Where logins are issued, they are sometimes shared across a team, which undermines the individual record a timesheet exists to provide.
Devices come next. A production line worker or a nurse on a hospital ward has no company laptop and no desk to leave one on. Many shift-based sites also restrict personal phones on the floor for safety or hygiene reasons, and where phones are allowed, employers still have to decide whether it is reasonable to ask employees to use their own devices for work. Wi-Fi in warehouses and steel-framed buildings is rarely as dependable as it is in an office.
But it is timing that matters most, and it’s an aspect that gets little thought. Even in an office with a structured day, the exact minute someone logs on rarely affects what they are paid, so a timesheet confirmed later loses nothing. For hourly employees, start and finish times are the basis of pay, and they have to be recorded as they happen. That moment falls as employees arrive or leave, often within the same few minutes as everyone else on the schedule, and before most of them have reached a workstation.
Workforce platforms handle scheduling and pay rules well. Capturing time at the start and end of a shift is a separate task, and on a shift-based site, something indisputable has to be in place to do it.
The Cost of Recording Hours After the Fact
It’s not to say that without a dedicated capture point, records don’t get made – they do. But the problem is how.
Maybe a supervisor enters the hours for their team worked, or maybe it’s the employees themselves completing a timesheet at the end of each week. While both methods show a number of worked hours, neither are defensible records made at the time, by the person who worked the hours.
And that distinction can turn an overlooked operational process into a legal risk. Under the FLSA, the duty to keep accurate records of hours worked sits with the employer. Where those records are inaccurate or incomplete, an employee who can show unpaid work took place and give a reasonable estimate of their hours may shift the burden onto the employer to prove otherwise. Where entries have been edited, the audit trail showing who changed a record and why can matter as much as the timecard itself. A supervisor’s recollection entered on a Friday leaves the employer poorly placed on both counts.
But that’s a worst-case scenario – there’s a real day-to-day cost that appears in HR administration. Payroll teams spend the days before each payroll cycle chasing missing punches and correcting obvious errors, and managers spend time re-keying data that could have arrived automatically.
What Time Tracking for Hourly Employees Needs to Do
A timeclock belongs to the site, not the individual. An employee who carries nothing can still be identified at a fixed point they pass on the way in.
The terminal must identify a specific person using whatever the employer has issued, be that a card or a PIN, and match that to the right employee record in the workforce platform. In an office, the login makes that link. On a shift-based site, it has to be made deliberately. Where an employer considers biometric verification such as facial or fingerprint recognition, the choice is a privacy and compliance question as much as a technical one, and several states attach specific notice and consent obligations to it.
It must work in the few seconds available at shift change, for everyone arriving at once. The GT8, for example, can process a facial recognition punch in under a second.
And it must pass what it captures into the employer’s workforce platform without anyone re-keying it.
How GT Clocks Solves The Deskless Problem
This is the problem GT Clocks has worked on for more than 35 years.
GT Clocks timeclocks, including the GT8 and GT10, sit at the point of capture in shift-based workplaces and integrate with the leading workforce platforms employers already use. Where a fixed terminal is impractical, such as a temporary or seasonal site, the GT Tablet app extends the same capture point to a company-owned device. GTConnect supports the estate with remote visibility for diagnostics and support.
Biometric verification is available where an employer chooses to enable it.
Getting the Point of Capture Right
Employers evaluating workforce technology tend to start with the platform, because that is where the functionality and license costs are most visible. But a useful consideration is what needs to be in place at the moment a record is created, in the conditions where the work is done.
An employer that gets the point of capture right can rely on whichever platform it chooses, and change platforms later without losing the integrity of its records.
You can see more about our timeclocks and the problems they solve on our timeclocks page.
This article is for general information only and does not constitute legal advice. Employers should seek qualified legal counsel on their specific recordkeeping obligations.