How Paper Timesheets Turn Payroll Into a Daily Crisis (and What You Can Do About It)
Emman Velos
Last update on:
August 27, 2025 2:58 PM
Published on:
TL;DR
Paper timesheets eat your time, bleed money from your payroll, and turn every pay period into a stress test. With Timeero’s GPS time tracking, you can track employee hours and mileage accurately, prevent early clock-ins, and put payroll back where it belongs: off your worry list.
It’s Monday morning and it’s time to run payroll. You sit down with your coffee, open your laptop, and expect the numbers to be straightforward. After all, paying your team shouldn’t feel like solving a mystery.
But almost immediately, something’s off. The spreadsheets line up with your employees’ paper timesheets. So you dig deeper.
That’s when the real mess shows up.
Half of your employees’ timesheets are torn, crumpled, or missing altogether.
The timecards you can read are smudged with coffee stains or written in handwriting that you can’t even read.
Incoming text messages show an employee “Worked 8-5” but there aren’t any additional details written.
Now you’ve left boss mode and are in full detective mode, cross-checking notes, pestering supervisors for missing info, and second-guessing whether you’ll get payroll right this week.
Shouldn’t there be a better way to run payroll than sifting through paper scraps and text messages every week? Well, the good news is – there is.
Save time, reduce errors, and streamline payroll with Timeero.
Businesses that still use paper timesheets find them convenient for their ease of use. Everyone knows how to fill in a box with start and stop times (for the most part). Manual timesheets don’t require logins or training. For new hires, a clipboard feels less intimidating than an app they’ve never seen.
But comfort comes with hidden costs. When hours are tracked on scraps of paper, documented through text messages, or transferred through multiple systems, there’s no automatic verification, no clean reports, and no backup if someone fudges the numbers.
This is why payroll often becomes a recurring scramble. It’s not that people are lazy or dishonest. It’s that paper isn’t designed for accountability in a world where crews are spread across job sites, schedules change by the hour, and clients expect detailed records.
Paper feels easy in the moment. But come payday, it becomes clear: what’s easy for your team isn’t always the best for payroll.
Should you really use paper timesheets?
What appears to be a simple time tracking method actually creates layers of hidden costs.
Paper doesn’t just slow payroll down — it robs your business of time, money, and employee trust week after week.
From wasted admin hours to inflated mileage reports, the price of sticking with paper is a lot higher than most owners realize.
1. Wasted time
Payroll prep should be straightforward, but when you use paper timesheets, it becomes a scavenger hunt.
Managers and owners often spend hours each week:
Chasing down missing or incomplete timesheets
Calling employees to confirm shifts they worked each week
Cross-checking handwritten notes, texts, and spreadsheets against one another
One operations manager in construction described her Mondays as “a six-hour shift just to process everyone else’s shifts.” If this were to happen all year long, this manager ends up wasting 250+ hours of time that could have been spent on other administrative tasks.
“Timeero is extremely user-friendly! My staff has had zero issues with the implementation process and it's saved us so much time! Our accountant was spending 5-6 hours on this weekly and now we can run payroll in just a few minutes.”
— Kelli H., Consumer Services
2. Mileage mistakes
Mileage reporting without actual location data is based on guess work. Employees jot down numbers at the end of the week, round up totals, and may even estimate mileage. In most cases, nobody’s trying to game the system — it’s just human nature to take the most convenient approach.
Then there’s accountability. If a client questions whether your sales rep actually visited their office, you have no way to prove it. You either eat the cost or risk souring the relationship.
3. Time theft
With paper timesheets comes an increased risk of time theft. Maybe an employee clocks in 15 minutes early to chat with coworkers or a buddy clocks in for someone running late.
It may not be a big deal if one or two employees are clocking in early, but if everyone on your team is committing time theft, you risk losing thousands of dollars each year.
Here’s a scenario.
If two employees clock-in 15 minutes early three times a week, you must pay for 1.5 hours of work that was never performed. At a rate of $20/hr that’s nearly $2,340 per year.
That figure is just for 2 employees. Imagine what the total would be for larger crews!
4. No accountability
Paper timesheets can’t tell you where someone was when they clocked in. All you have to rely on is their word and a handwritten time card.
Without a time tracking system that encourages accountability and provides visibility, crew members might clock in before they arrive at the job site or even lie about completing a client visit.
A system that lacks the ability to enforce accountability and visibility means:
Clients may question your invoices
You’re unable to confirm how long your team spent on a project
Supervisors have no idea where team members are working
It’s hard to resolve employee/client disputes without location history
5. Messy records
Paper is fragile and gets lost easily. Even if you collect everything perfectly and manage to keep your records intact, at the end of the day you’re still stuck keying in data manually.
Without streamlined recordkeeping:
Reports take forever to generate
Data entry errors start to happen
Historical records are unreliable when you need them most (audits, compliance checks, tax season)
Storing and organizing paper files takes up more physical space each year
Sharing records with accountants, auditors, or clients turns into a scanning-and-emailing chore
Think about what would happen if the IRS or a labor auditor requests detailed records from the past year. Can you confidently hand over your paper time and mileage logs without worrying about what’s missing?
For many businesses, the answer is no. When labor costs make up such a large share of your expenses, an unorganized recordkeeping system is too much of a risk.
How Timeero replaces paper timesheets
Instead of piecing together scraps of paper and text messages, Timeero gives you a clean, accurate record of every shift, mile, and site visit — all in one place.
Clock in from anywhere
Timeero simplifies time tracking and eliminates any guesswork seen with paper timesheets.
From the Timeero mobile app, employees select “start” on the app’s home screen to begin tracking time and mileage. With a mobile time tracking solution like Timeero, crews can clock-in from the job site and no longer need to stop by the office to sign a timecard.
Timeero’s mobile time clock
One-tap clock in/out: Employees can start or end a shift from their mobile device. No extra paperwork or back and forth calls.
Task switching: Workers can switch between different tasks during their shift for increased visibility and better job costing.
Offline clock-ins: Continue tracking employee time even when internet connection is lost. Data syncs automatically to the cloud once the device reconnects.
Case study: How can Timeero help me track time across multiple job sites?
A roofing company in Louisiana dispatches crews to multiple clients each day. The manager struggles with being able to trust the accuracy of employees’ time entries and is looking for a system that prevents employees from altering their timecards. Before Timeero, workers were scribbling down their work hours (7am–3:30pm) on a paper timesheet that the manager would later key into the system.
With Timeero, employees can now clock in from the house or business location they’re assigned to.
The result: A record that’s both simple for employees and reliable for payroll. No stacks of paper, no texts to chase down, and no question about whether the hours match reality.
GPS location tracking
Paper timesheets can tell you when someone worked, but they can’t tell you where.
Did the employee clock in from the job site, or did they clock in on the road?
Did they stay for the full shift, or did they leave early and round up their hours?
With Timeero, GPS coordinates are attached to every time entry, giving managers access to both time and location data.
When viewing timesheets, click on “View on map” to view the attached location.
GPS-tagged clock in/out: Each shift record includes the location of the punch, so there’s no question about where work started or ended.
Breadcrumb trail: View a path of employee movement during the shift, useful for confirming stops, visits, or travel between sites.
Geofencing with auto clock in/out: Create job site boundaries that allow employees to log time only when they’re inside the designated area. You can also set automatic reminders to clock in upon entry and clock out upon exit.
Live map view: See where your team is in real time from the dashboard, reducing the need for check-in calls or manual updates.
Each timesheet contains location information that’s readily accessible straight from the timesheet.
GPS tracking turns timesheets from a matter of trust into a record you can verify. Instead of piecing together paper slips and hoping they’re accurate, you have precise, location-backed records of the work that was actually done.
Accurate mileage logs
A delivery driver spends the day weaving through the city — warehouse to client A, then to client B, then back across town for an afternoon drop-off. By the time he gets home, he realizes he never wrote down the odometer readings. Instead of submitting his actual mileage, he relies on memory: “I think I drove around 160 miles.”
On his timesheet, he rounds up to a clean figure that managers are left to accept.
Paper mileage logs are often fragmented, based on memory, and nearly impossible to verify. Even when drivers try to be accurate, one missing number creates uncertainty that has an impact on payroll and reimbursements.
Timeero eliminates inaccurate mileage records by automatically recording every trip to create a mileage log that’s complete, verifiable, and IRS-compliant.
Miles are automatically logged and attached to the employee’s timesheet.
Every trip is tied to a GPS-verified starting and ending location with exact timestamps, making the record far more reliable than a handwritten note. These reports can be exported or synced directly with payroll and accounting systems, so mileage data flows seamlessly into payroll without extra handling.
Easy payroll reports
Timeero simplifies your company’s payroll process with comprehensive reports and overtime rules features. Managers can generate custom reports that display employees’ work hours, overtime, mileage, and job details in one place. Those reports can then be exported directly into payroll systems like QuickBooks, Gusto, or ADP.
Timeero applies wage and overtime rules automatically, so businesses don’t have to spend time manually determining who worked over 40 hours each week or verify whether state-specific overtime thresholds were met.
With compliance checks built-in, Timeero solves one of the most common pain points associated with paper timesheets: miscalculations that lead to incorrect paychecks or potential wage disputes.
Generate IRS-compliant reports within Timeero.
Simple to use
Timeero’s mobile timeclock replaces paper timesheets by automating employee time and mileage tracking. Instead of filling out physical timecards at the end of the week, Timeero creates timesheets as soon as an employee clocks in from their mobile device.
Timeero app’s timesheet view on a mobile phone.
If time clock entries need to be corrected, managers can review and re-submit entries within the web portal.
For mobile teams, having the ability to track employee time and mileage in areas without internet connection is important. Timeero’s offline tracking capabilities ensure that no hour or mile go missing. The app stores all location data locally on your employees’ mobile devices until internet connection is restored.
When it’s time to run payroll, you won’t need to chase down timesheets or try to fill in missing numbers. Timeero keeps tracking without any extra effort on your part.
The next time you run payroll, imagine sitting down with your coffee at your desk and having everything you need already there:
Every clock-in is GPS verified
Every mile is tracked automatically
Job site visit details are already recorded
Payroll ends up taking 30 minutes now instead of half a day. No more loose ends and second-guessing. Just clean, accurate records that you and your team can trust.
Emman is a passionate writer with more than 6 years of digital marketing experience under his belt. As a licensed chemical engineer with a passion for writing, he marries the technical with the creative to create engaging copy that converts. He is also a certified #girldad who spends most of his day playing with his three girls when he's not busy writing.
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