A technician’s day in Forz, step by step
- Clock in at the first site. The technician taps Clock In in Forz Mobile or on the Timecard in the web app. Forz saves the GPS position, the technician’s name, and their hourly rate on a new timelog.
- Time finds its project. A background job checks for customer sites within the configured radius (0.3 miles by default). If a site within that radius has an active project, the timelog is assigned to the closest active project.
- Job timers run on each job. During the day, technicians start and stop the timer on each work order they work. Those entries feed the On jobs figure in Timesheets.
- Clock out. Forz records the end time and GPS position, closes any active activity log, applies the Lunch deduction if the shift passed your threshold, and calculates pay.
- The office reviews the day. Timesheets opens on today, with badges for how many technicians are still clocked in and how many job timers are running.
- Approve the week. In the Week view, a manager approves each technician’s Monday to Sunday period once the open records are closed.
What the office sees in Timesheets
Timesheets has two scopes. Day shows one collapsed line per technician and is where you repair a record. Week shows a grid with one row per technician and seven day columns, and it is where you approve a pay period. The Needs attention tab collects everyone whose week holds at least one amber label.
Each line shows three figures. Worked is time on the clock after the lunch deduction. On jobs is the total of closed job timer entries. Not on a job is the difference. That last figure describes the records, not the technician: it fills up with travel between jobs, the lunch deduction, clock rounding, and timers nobody started.
| Label | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Still clocked in | The shift has no end time (amber on a past day) |
| Timer running | A job timer has no end time |
| Automatically clocked out | Forz closed the shift on its automatic clock-out schedule, so check the end time |
| Overlapping entries | Two job timers cover the same minutes, so On jobs is double-counting |
| Logged outside the shift | A job timer falls outside every shift that day |
| No job time | The technician worked a shift and started no job timer |
When a technician forgets to clock out, close the shift from Timesheets instead of editing the record. You type the end time yourself (nothing is pre-filled), and the change history records who closed it. Closing a shift does not close a running job timer. The modal links to Close timer so you can enter that end time separately.
Approval locks the numbers. Before a week is approved, editing a shift re-applies whatever lunch rule is in your settings today. After approval, the lunch deduction and pay figures stay as they were approved, and edits to the times are refused until someone clicks Reopen. A record added after sign-off shows an “added since” badge on the row.
How it plays out in the field
A full-day HVAC install
An HVAC technician arrives at a commercial site at 7:00 AM and clocks in. Forz assigns the timelog to the project on that customer’s site. At 3:30 PM the technician clocks out. With a 30-minute lunch deduction set for shifts over 6 hours, the timelog shows 8 billable hours at the technician’s rate.
A plumber who forgot to clock out
A plumbing technician finished a job at 4:00 PM and never clocked out. The next morning, the Still clocked in label is amber on yesterday’s sheet. The dispatcher clicks Close shift and types 4:00 PM, and the shift’s change history records who closed it.
Training hours logged by the office
An admin needs to record 4 hours of off-site safety training. They create a manual time entry for the technician with the training date and times and assign it to a Training project. Forz calculates the deduction and pay from the same rules as a clocked shift.
Limits worth knowing
- Pay periods are weekly, Monday to Sunday. Biweekly and semi-monthly periods are not supported yet.
- An overnight shift belongs to the day it started and is labeled Spans midnight.
- Clock time can’t be reconciled to individual jobs. A shift’s project comes from where the technician clocked in, so read these figures per technician per day, not per job.
- Timesheets shows no money. Hourly rates and pay amounts stay on each timelog record.
- The Manage time permission does not include location tracking. The right to correct someone’s hours is separate from seeing where they drove.
Works with the rest of Forz
Timelogs assigned to a project roll into that project’s Timelogs tab and the Labor cost on its Finance tab, covered on the project management page. Jobs come from scheduling and dispatch, and technicians see their assigned work and the clock in the same mobile app. Time tracking is included in every plan (see pricing). To walk through it with your own crew, book a demo.
Setting it up? The Time Tracking guide and the Timesheets guide walk through each screen.