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Workforce and time

Stop chasing timesheets.
Start building profits.

QR clock-in at the gate, with a photograph and a time written by the server rather than read from the phone. The end of Friday afternoons chasing illegible timesheets, and Mondays reconciling them against three WhatsApp groups. Three seconds on any smartphone, no app to install.

3 sec per scan time from the server no app to install photo and location on the punch hosted in London
The chase

Paper timesheets. Friday afternoons.
Hours bleeding away.

Most UK SMEs we meet have an office manager who dreads Fridays and a director who suspects the gang clocks twelve hours when they worked nine. Both are right. Here is what that costs by the time you have ironed it all out on Sunday night.

Friday, 4:47pm
Office manager rings round site managers chasing illegible paper timesheets.
≈ 4 hrs / week
Every payroll
Workers rounding up by 15 minutes a day. Ten lads. A new van, gone.
≈ £12,000 / yr
Monday morning
"Can you clock me in mate, I'm running late." Buddy punching, in your hand.
≈ £10,000 / yr
Travel dispute
"Stuck in traffic for two hours." No way to verify. You pay it. Every week.
Goodwill leak
HMRC letter
CIS audit lands. You cannot prove who worked where, when. Penalty risk.
Penalty exposure
Sunday, 11:14pm
Excel formulas for overtime. 1.5× Saturdays. 2× bank holidays. Errors guaranteed.
≈ 2 hrs / week
The drain Conservatively, £37,600 a year 10-person firm · theft + chase + errors
How it actually works

Three steps. Thirty minutes
from box to first clock-in.

No app to download, no training to schedule, no procurement meeting. You print a QR poster for each gate, the lads scan with the camera they already use for WhatsApp, and the hours flow straight into payroll on Friday.

Print the
QR poster

5 min

Add your sites in five minutes. The platform generates a numbered QR poster for each gate, in your branding. Print on A4, laminate, screw it to the site board. That is the install.

  • Site, sub-site or floor codes
  • Weather-proof when laminated
  • Colour or black on white
  • Same QR for every worker
You spend5 min

The lads
scan and go

3 sec

They open the camera, point at the QR, the page opens. The phone takes a verification photo, the location is recorded with it, and the office gets a WhatsApp at the same time.

  • iOS and Android, no app store
  • Location recorded with the punch
  • Photo on first scan of the day
  • Time written by the server
Per scan≈ 3 sec

Hours land
on the job

Friday

Hours calculate themselves, overtime rates apply themselves, and every day line carries the project it was worked on. Site managers approve on the phone before Friday lunchtime.

  • Auto overtime, three rates
  • Travel time tracked separately
  • Costed against the job daily
  • Approval flow with audit trail
Friday admin2 hrs, not 12
Inside the module

Nine features, one module,
built for the gate, not a demo room.

The bits we got obsessive about, because the lads will pull this out of their pocket on a wet Tuesday or they will not, and the rest of the platform stops mattering.

QR
clock-in

Gate

Phone camera, no app. The page opens, the photo verifies, they are clocked in. Three seconds at the gate.

  • iOS and Android, no install
  • One QR per gate
  • Re-scan clocks out
  • The page is the form
Inside · Scan, ConfirmLive

Photo and
location

Proof

A camera photograph at punch in, the location recorded with it, and a time written by the server. Buddy punching becomes harder than turning up.

  • Photo on the scan
  • Location stored on the record
  • Server time, not phone time
  • Cannot be back-dated
Inside · Fence, Photo IDLive

Auto
overtime

Rates

Weekdays at base rate, evenings and Saturdays at time and a half, Sundays and bank holidays at double. Set once, applied every week.

  • Three standard rates
  • Custom per worker
  • Custom per project
  • Bank holidays built in
Inside · Rate rulesLive

Travel
time

Vans

Tracked separately from work hours, with a ceiling per day and suspicious claims flagged automatically.

  • Separate from worked hours
  • Daily ceiling
  • Flagged claims for review
  • Own rate if you want one
Inside · Travel ledgerLive

WhatsApp
ping

Comms

Every clock-in posts to your office WhatsApp. Know who is on site right now without a phone call.

  • WhatsApp Business bridge
  • Per-site channel
  • No-show alerts
  • Worker gets confirmation
Inside · WA bridgeLive

Live
payroll

Money

Per worker, per project, per week. Overtime building up live. Filter by job to see which one is bleeding money before Friday.

  • Live totals
  • Per-project split
  • Cost forecast
  • Who is on site now
Inside · Totals, ForecastLive

Approval
flow

Sign-off

Draft, submitted, approved, rejected. Site managers sign off on phone before payroll. Workers cannot edit after submission.

  • Four states, one queue
  • Reject with reason
  • Locked after submission
  • Audit trail unfakeable
Inside · Queue, LogLive

Rates that
hold history

Costing

Every person carries a dated cost rate. The rate in force on the day worked is stamped onto the line as it saves, so a rise in April cannot rewrite last quarter's job costs.

  • Effective-dated per person
  • Snapshotted onto the line
  • Historic costs stay put
  • Custom rate per project
Inside · Rate historyLive

Three sites,
three rows

Jobs

Hours are attributed at day-line level, so somebody who worked three sites in a week produces three costed rows rather than one lump nobody can split later.

  • Attributed per day
  • Lands on the job cost
  • Holiday and leave overlaid
  • Nothing re-keyed anywhere
Inside · Day linesLive
Construction workers at the site gate at the start of a shift
3 secPer scan at the gate
13 hrsAdmin back, every week
Fri 3pmPayroll signed off
The maths, end to end

One firm. Two timelines.
One pays for itself by March.

A 10-person residential refurb firm in South London, before and after switching off the paper. The numbers are conservative. HMRC penalty exposure and missed-tender risk are not in this column.

Without Unibuild£37,600 / yr lost
×Time theft, 15 min a day£12,000
×Buddy punching, ≈ 2% of payroll£10,000
×Admin chase-down, 15 hrs a week£15,600
×HMRC proof of hoursNone
×Payroll signed off bySunday 23:14
×Friday office manager12-hr day
With Unibuild≈ £35,000 / yr saved
GPS does not round. Exact hours.£0 leak
Photo + GPS prevents fraud0 cases
Auto-flow saves 13 hrs a week2 hrs left
GPS, photo, timestamp per hourHMRC ready
Payroll signed off byFriday 15:00
Friday office managerhome for tea
Net of subscription Year one, ≈ £35,000 back in the firm Same-day quote · never per-seat
Shapes of UK construction

Six firms. Six shapes.
Same module.

The module ships the same to every kind of UK firm. The setup is two evenings of configuration. Below is what the week looks like for the firms we have onboarded so far.

Housebuilders
and developers

Plots

One QR per plot. GPS fence at 100 metres flags off-plot scans. Hours export per plot for client billing, trade by trade.

Patternmulti-plot, one site

M&E
contractors

Callout

Maintenance contracts mean unpredictable hours. Custom rate codes for normal, emergency and out-of-hours. The client gets the GPS log.

Patterncallout · fixed price

Groundworks
and civils

Rural

Remote sites, no signal. Offline mode caches the scan and syncs when signal returns. Photo verification, standing next to the digger.

Patternrural · low-signal

Shop fitting
and refurb

Nights

Night shifts and weekend work. Timestamps prove exact hours, the night-shift premium applies itself after midnight, and the client gets proof on demand.

Patternnights · weekends

Facilities
management

Estate

A hundred buildings, five hundred operatives. Real-time dashboard per site, with an automated alert when a site has no scan by 08:15.

Patterndistributed · large

General
contractors

Mixed

Multi-site, mixed trades, different rates, one approval chain. Five workers or five hundred, same setup, same effort.

Patternmulti-site · mixed
The boring parts, in order

Payroll-grade plumbing.
Boring on purpose.

Timesheets end up in front of an auditor, a client's surveyor or a solicitor. We made sensible choices in the boring places so the record holds up when somebody official asks.

An audit trail that holds

Every action on a timesheet is logged with who did it, when, and whether it came from the app or the portal. The hour, the location and the photo are stamped against the shift.

who · when · from where

UK data residency

AWS eu-west-2, London. Data does not leave the UK. No third-party trackers, no analytics brokers.

aws · eu-west-2

Encryption

AES-256 at rest, TLS 1.3 in transit. Keys rotated quarterly. Backups encrypted, off-site, retained 35 days.

AES-256 · TLS 1.3

Uptime & releases

99.97% trailing twelve months. Live status page. Releases ship Tuesday and Thursday before 10am, never on Fridays.

99.97% · 12 mo
Asked in every demo

What every director asks
in the first ten minutes.

The full list lives at /faqs. These eight are the ones we hear in every demo.

Do the lads need to download an app?+
No. They open the camera, point it at the QR poster, the page opens. Works on any iPhone or Android made in the last decade. No app store, no password, no excuses. The page itself is the form.
What if there is no phone signal on site?+
Then the scan will not go through, and we would rather say so than promise otherwise. There is no offline queue. Where that bites, firms put the scan point where there is signal, at the cabin or the gate, or the office enters those hours on the operative's behalf with a manual flag and the same audit trail.
Can the lads cheat the system?+
It is harder than turning up. The GPS must match the site within 100 metres, the photo is required, the IP is logged, and the office gets the WhatsApp at the same instant the worker sees the confirm screen. Across the firms we have onboarded so far, the recorded fraud rate is 0%.
What about the worker who does not own a smartphone?+
Two options. Either the office admin enters their hours on their behalf, with the same audit trail and a manual flag, or you keep a forty quid Android tablet in the site cabin and everyone scans on that. In practice, more than 99% of UK construction workers carry a smartphone in 2026.
How long does setup take?+
Thirty minutes for the small firm, an afternoon for the larger one. Add sites, print QR posters, add workers, laminate, screw to the site board. Most customers are running their first live clock-in within the hour. The whole module goes live alongside the rest of Unibuild within two weeks.
Does it export to Sage or BrightPay?+
Not today, and we would rather answer that plainly than dance around it. Unibuild does not produce a payroll file in any format. What it does hold is every hour attributed to a project, an overtime multiplier and a dated cost rate per person, which is the whole of what an export needs. If payroll is the reason you are looking, say so on the first call and we will price it before you commit to anything.
Is the data secure? Where does it live?+
AWS eu-west-2, London. Data does not leave the UK. AES-256 at rest, TLS 1.3 in transit. ICO registered, GDPR by default, Cyber Essentials Plus. The audit trail on every clock-in is signed, timestamped and unfakeable.
Can we cancel? Do we keep our data?+
Cancel by email, any time, monthly rolling. We export the lot in CSV and PDF the same week: every clock-in, every photo, every approval, every payroll run. Your accountant gets the bundle and walks away clean.
Before you ask

Three things this module does not do.

All three get claimed routinely by software in this market. You would find out in week two, and by then you would not believe the rest of the page either.

01
No payroll export
Hours, overtime multipliers and a dated cost rate per person are all held correctly. What there is not is a payroll file, in any format. It is the most common first piece of tailoring we do, and it is well understood because the data is already in the right shape.
02
No CIS handling
No UTR, no verification number, no deduction, no monthly return. CIS sits with your accounts package today. The hours and subcontract records are held in the shape CIS needs, so it is defined work rather than research, but it is not in the box.
03
No offline queue
The app needs a connection. A punch does not cache on the handset and sync later, and we would rather tell you than have a gang find out in a basement. Where signal is poor, put the scan point where the signal is, or the office records those hours with a manual flag.

We would rather you read that here than find it in a demonstration. Everything else on this page is running in a live business today.

No card, no lock-in

If your gang will not use it,
we should not be paid.

30-day free trial

Full module, real sites, real lads. No credit card.

Setup in 30 minutes

We help on a screen-share. You print, laminate, go.

Free migration

From paper, Excel, BrightHR, Connecteam, Clockify.

Cancel by email

One sentence to [email protected]. Done.

UK data, UK support

UK office, working hours, real phone number.

Unlimited users

The gang, the office, the subbies. Same price.

Next step

Three seconds at the gate.
Friday off by 3pm.

The point Hours captured at the gate, not chased on Friday Straight into payroll