Best Time Tracking & GPS Fleet Software for Australian Tradies (2026)

If you have employees and you're paying them under a Modern Award, Tanda is the platform you should be on. Full stop. Built in Brisbane, Tanda has spent over a decade developing what is widely regarded as the most accurate Award interpretation engine available to Australian businesses — and for trade employers, this matters enormously.

Here's why Award interpretation is such a big deal: take the Building and Construction General On-site Award 2020. It includes ordinary time rates, time-and-a-half for the first two hours of overtime (150%), double time after that (200%), Saturday rates (150%), Sunday rates (200%), and a raft of allowances for dirty work, confined spaces, and working at heights. The Electrical, Electronic and Communications Contracting Award has similar complexity. Calculating all of this manually — every fortnight, for every employee — is where mistakes happen. Tanda automates the entire process. You approve a timesheet; it spits out the correct pay figures, broken down by rate, ready to push to payroll.

Beyond compliance, Tanda gives you real-time labour cost visibility. You can see, right now, what your current roster is costing per hour and per shift — and compare it against your quoted job budget. For builders and contractors running tight margins, this is genuinely transformative information. The mobile app lets employees clock in and out via phone (with GPS verification) or via a shared tablet kiosk on site. You get instant alerts if someone doesn't show for a shift.

Tanda integrates natively with Xero, MYOB, and KeyPay (Employment Hero Payroll). Approved timesheets flow through with Award-interpreted rates already applied. No double-entry, no manual rate calculations, no excuses for payroll errors. Starting from $3 per active user per month, it's also one of the more affordable options at scale — the per-user pricing means you only pay for people who actually clocked hours in a given period.

Deputy is Tanda's closest competitor — and for many businesses, it's the better fit. Also Australian-built (Sydney), Deputy combines time tracking with roster management, shift scheduling, team communication, and Award interpretation in a polished, genuinely easy-to-use platform. It was one of Australia's first SaaS time and attendance platforms and has matured into a serious product with strong enterprise customers alongside thousands of small trade businesses.

Deputy's Award interpretation is strong, though industry insiders generally consider Tanda's engine marginally more accurate for complex construction Awards. For most trade businesses — particularly those on the General Retail Industry Award, Fast Food Award, or even the Building and Construction Award — Deputy's interpretation is more than sufficient. The rostering features are arguably better than Tanda's: drag-and-drop shift building, AI-powered scheduling suggestions, and automated conflict detection make building a weekly roster fast.

The mobile app is excellent — clean, fast, and reliable. Employees can clock in with face recognition or PIN, and GPS confirms their location at clock-in. Managers get a live dashboard of who's on site and who's running late. Deputy integrates with Xero, MYOB, QuickBooks, ADP, and most Australian payroll platforms, making it a genuinely flexible choice regardless of your existing software stack.

ClockOn is a quietly powerful Australian HR and payroll platform that has been around since 1992 — long before the SaaS era — and it shows in the depth of its Australian compliance features. Where Tanda and Deputy are time tracking platforms that integrate with payroll, ClockOn is a time tracking and payroll platform in one. If you want to run timesheets and payroll inside a single system without connecting two different subscriptions, ClockOn is worth a serious look.

The Award interpretation is strong and built on decades of Australian payroll compliance experience. ClockOn maintains a library of pre-configured Modern Awards and handles overtime, allowances, and penalty rates correctly for most trade Awards. The system can process your payroll directly — calculating PAYG withholding, superannuation, leave entitlements, and STP reporting to the ATO — without needing to push data to Xero or MYOB (though it integrates with both if you want that option).

It's not as slick-looking as Tanda or Deputy, and the user interface has a more traditional feel. But for a trade business that wants solid Australian compliance, a single system for time and payroll, and Australian-based support, ClockOn delivers. Pricing starts around $10/month for a sole trader and scales based on employee count.

Connecteam is a US-based workforce management platform that has gained a meaningful following among Australian tradie businesses — largely because of its generous free plan and comprehensive feature set. The free tier covers up to 10 users with GPS time tracking, digital timesheets, shift scheduling, team messaging, and task management. For a small tradie business just getting started with digital time tracking, that's a compelling offer.

The platform handles GPS clock-in and out well, and the geofencing feature lets you set a virtual boundary around a job site — employees can only clock in when they're physically within the defined area. That eliminates buddy punching and guarantees your time records are site-verified. The mobile app is slick and easy for field workers to pick up quickly.

The critical limitation for Australian trade businesses is the absence of native Award interpretation. Connecteam is a US product and doesn't have built-in knowledge of Australian Modern Awards. You can manually configure pay rules, but getting them right for a complex Award like the Building and Construction Award requires significant setup work — and you're on your own if the Award is updated. For businesses with more than 10 employees or complex pay structures, Tanda or Deputy will save you money through compliance accuracy alone.

busybusy is purpose-built for the construction industry, and it shows. Where most time tracking platforms track hours against employees and shifts, busybusy tracks hours against jobs and cost codes. An employee clocks in by selecting their current job and the specific activity they're doing (excavation, formwork, fitout, cleanup). At the end of the day you have a detailed breakdown of labour hours by job phase — which is exactly what you need for accurate job costing and progress billing.

GPS tracking is central to how busybusy works. The app records location throughout the shift and ties that location data to the job address. If your employee says they spent six hours on the concrete pour but the GPS shows they were somewhere else for two of those hours, you'll know. The job costing reports integrate with QuickBooks and Sage, making it popular with builders who are already on those accounting platforms.

The limitations are real for an Australian context: USD pricing (around $14–22 AUD/user/month depending on plan), no Award interpretation, and US-based support. It's a brilliant tool for tracking labour by job, but you'll still need a separate solution for Australian payroll compliance. Best suited to builders and civil contractors who need deep job costing rather than Award compliance.

Hubstaff's GPS tracking is among the best in the market — and that's its primary value proposition for Australian trade businesses. The platform tracks employee location throughout the workday, logs routes driven (useful for fleet van tracking), captures active vs. idle time, and generates detailed location reports. If your main problem is proving that your team was actually on-site when they say they were, Hubstaff gives you watertight evidence.

The platform also offers optional screenshot monitoring — it takes periodic screenshots of employee screens — which is controversial but used by some trade businesses who have office staff or admin working from home. For purely field-based trades, this feature is irrelevant, but it's available if needed.

Hubstaff integrates with Xero, QuickBooks, Gusto, and various project management tools. However, like busybusy and Connecteam, there is no Australian Award interpretation. You'll track hours accurately, but calculating the correct pay rates for those hours still falls back to your payroll software. For Australian businesses with Modern Award employees, we'd rank Tanda or Deputy higher. Hubstaff makes more sense for a small trade business where the primary need is GPS location proof, and payroll is handled by an accountant who knows the Awards.