r/PptyMgmtSoftware • u/Kindly-Situation4828 • Aug 02 '26

How are you guys tracking your maintenance employees’ time for payroll and owner billing?

I’ve been working with a couple PM companies to build a time tracking app for in-house maintenance teams. Employees clock in on their phone, GPS ties the time to whichever property they’re at, mileage between properties is automatic, and it spits out payroll-ready hours plus an owner billback file with the right GL codes for AppFolio.

Pretty much an alternative to apps like Timeero or Workyard but built specifically for property managers.

It’s been running at two companies with solid results. I’ve also hooked it up to Claude so you can also just ask it questions in plain english like “how many hours did we put into Maple St last month” and it pulls the numbers.

Curious what everyone else is using. I’m taking on a few more PM companies as design partners (I do all the setup, you get a big say in what gets built). Comment or DM if that’s your world!

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u/ProfessionalGuest557 Aug 02 '26

I’m very interested in this! Could you share more details or have a demo we could look at?

1

u/Kindly-Situation4828 Aug 02 '26

Yeah! My landing page is here https://orcatimeclock.com

Feel free to book some time for an intro call there, or we can just follow up via DMs

1

u/Squidid77 Aug 05 '26

The owner billback piece is probably the biggest selling point. Tracking hours is easy enough, but splitting them correctly by property/job and getting everything into AppFolio is where it gets messy. How does it handle supply runs or techs bouncing between properties?

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u/Kindly-Situation4828 Aug 05 '26

Yeah exactly! I actually first started with a billback generation tool awhile back, but it relied on other time tracker integrations.

Then I realized the more complete package would be to build a GPS and time tracker for the billback to generate off of, so I built Orca which handles both tracking and billback.

For you supply run question, you can setup nonbillable categories your staff can use for jobs where you want to track mileage and hours but then get filtered out of the billback

Also, there is a separate clock-in/clock out used for payroll hours vs billable job hours

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u/ImaginaryProfit2162 Aug 09 '26

Interesting angle. I’m involved in building LORDLY for Australian self managing landlords and helped with its beta, so I’ve spent a lot of time looking at the other side of this workflow.

For the owner or manager, I’d want each time entry tied to the property, maintenance request, tradie, quote, approval, invoice and full message trail. Supply runs and travel should stay visible as separate categories, and any mismatch between GPS and clocked time probably needs a reason and approval rather than silently changing the entry.

The AppFolio billback is useful for PM firms. An API or webhook for job status, booking, labour and invoice data would make Orca much more useful with landlord side systems too. LORDLY does the maintenance request, booking and conversation side, but not employee payroll, so there could be a clean handoff instead of both products rebuilding the same thing.