How to choose a timesheet app for your NZ team: a buyer's checklist

Start with what the law needs

Whatever app you choose, the record is still yours. Section 130 of the Employment Relations Act 2000 requires a wages and time record showing, for each employee, the number of hours worked each day in a pay period and the pay for those hours. Section 81 of the Holidays Act 2003 requires a holiday and leave record, which holds the daily hours too and can sit inside the same record. Both must be kept in writing, or in a form that can easily be turned into writing. Our article on wage and time records sets out everything else they hold.

Two time limits matter when you choose. Holiday and leave entries are kept for at least six years after they are made, and an employee can ask, at any time, for their wages and time record from the preceding six years, which you must provide immediately. So ask any provider:

• Does it record start, finish and breaks for each day, not only a weekly total?
• How long does it keep records, and can you export all of them, at any time, in a file you can open without the app?
• If you stop paying, what happens to six years of hours?
• How quickly can you produce one person's record when they ask?

Look ahead, too. The Employment Leave Act 2026 replaces the Holidays Act on 6 August 2028, and Employment New Zealand says employers cannot start following it early. From that date, annual leave builds up at no less than 0.0769 of an hour, and sick leave at no less than 0.0385 of an hour, for each standard hour, and the leave record must show the hours worked each day in each pay period. The hours you record will drive leave, so a tool you buy now should hold accurate daily hours for years.

Consent, privacy and tracking

A timesheet app collects personal information, so the Privacy Act 2020 applies to how you use it. Its information privacy principles ask:

• Principle 1: is each thing collected necessary for a lawful purpose connected with your business?
• Principle 3: do people know what is collected, why, who will see it, and that they can ask to see and correct it?
• Principle 4: is it collected fairly, without intruding unreasonably on their personal affairs?
• Principle 5: is it protected by reasonable security, including when a provider holds it for you?
• Principle 6: can you give someone their own information when they ask?
• Principle 10: will it be used only for the purpose it was collected for? Hours collected for pay are not automatically available for something else.

The Privacy Commissioner puts the test plainly: an employer cannot collect information just because it can, and must be able to justify why it needs it. Section 11 of the Act treats information a provider holds for you as held by you, wherever in the world it is stored, so the responsibility stays with you. Ask where the data is held, who at the provider can see it, and who on your side can see what. Can a manager see pay rates beside hours? Can they read a note about a medical appointment? The less a view shows, the less it can leak.

Then look hard at tracking. The Commissioner accepts GPS in work vehicles, for example to monitor the time a driver works, with clear policies, drivers who know about it, and time outside work handled very differently. Ask whether an app records location only at clock-in and clock-out or all shift, and whether you can turn it off. Fingerprint and face clock-ins fall under the Biometric Processing Privacy Code 2025, which now applies to all biometric processing, old or new. Under rule 1, the purpose must not be achievable as effectively by an alternative with less privacy risk, and under rule 3 people must be told whether an alternative is available. For recording hours, there usually is one.

Employment New Zealand's advice for any monitoring is a written policy explaining why and when, consultation with staff and any union, and making sure everyone knows about it. Our articles on clock-in apps, GPS and fingerprints and on seeing team hours without micromanaging go further.

Corrections and change history

Timesheets get corrected: a forgotten break, a wrong date, a timer left running. How an app handles that decides whether you can trust its record in a pay dispute. Under section 132 of the Employment Relations Act, if a missing or unproduced record hurts an employee's claim for wages, the Employment Relations Authority may accept their account of the hours unless you prove it wrong. Ask:

• Who can change an entry: the worker, a manager, or both?
• When a manager changes one, does the worker see it?
• Is the earlier version kept, with when it changed and who changed it?
• Can you tell, from the export, which entries changed after hours were submitted?

An app that overwrites the old figure leaves you a tidy sheet and no answer when someone asks what happened to their Tuesday.

Getting hours to payroll

The point of a timesheet is a correct pay run. Before you buy, get a sample export and try importing it into your payroll software. Check the columns it holds (person, date, start, finish, break, hours, project), whether hours come as decimals or as hours and minutes, how a shift that crosses midnight appears, and whether breaks are taken off once and only once. If you end up converting by hand, Calculate.co.nz has an hours to decimal calculator, but a tool that needs it every week is costing you time.

Check rounding settings too. An app that rounds start and finish times in your favour builds unpaid work into every pay run, as our article on whether an employer can round hours explains. Employment New Zealand adds that even with payroll software doing the sums, you still need to check it accurately records any changes to hours and pay.

Rostering, approvals and leave: decide what you need

Many tools do one thing well and the rest less so. Before comparing, decide which of these you need from this one tool, and which already live somewhere else:

A roster is the plan, and the timesheet is what happened; you need both if shifts change often. If your payroll software already handles leave, a timesheet tool that also does it adds a second place for balances to disagree. Paying for five jobs when you use two is an easy way to overspend.

Price per seat and what a trial should show

Most timesheet tools charge per person a month. Compare like with like: is GST included or added, is there a minimum number of seats, do managers need a seat, is there a discount for paying yearly or for a larger team, and what happens to the bill and the records when someone leaves?

If there is a trial, use it on a real week, not a demo. Run four tests:

1. Log a real week with three people, including a split shift, a long day and a missed break.
2. Correct an entry, and see who can tell, and what the record keeps.
3. Export to payroll, and import it into your payroll software for real.
4. Have someone leave, and check what you keep, what they keep, and for how long.

Here is our own product against this list, fairly. Team timesheets from jobtracker.co.nz is built on consent: each person logs hours in their own Your Timesheets and chooses whether to share them with you, and can stop at any time. You see hours by person, project and task, team projects with budgets, who has not logged anything this week, a CSV and a team PDF, and the dated history of changes, with anything changed after a week was marked sent flagged. You never see their pay or rates. If someone stops sharing or leaves, you keep a read-only copy of the hours they shared, without their notes. It does not roster, has no approval step, does not run payroll or calculate pay, and does not manage leave, and because sharing is each person's choice, it sits beside your wages and time record rather than replacing it. It costs $6.99 a seat a month or $59.88 a year, GST included, for at least three seats, managers included, with 10% off from 50 seats, and there is no trial.

Hours your people choose to share