Construction staffing company · Multiple sites
Text your hours. Payroll has them in seconds.
Field workers across several construction sites had to report daily hours. Collection was slow, error-prone and depended on site supervisors chasing people. Many workers were only comfortable with WhatsApp. So that is the whole interface: they text, the system parses and validates, and the entry lands in the right Google Sheets tab. No app, no login, no training.
Press send to watch a morning of timesheets land in the payroll sheet
Timesheets · WhatsApp
Workers text their hours. No app, no login, no training.
What the workers send
Monday, 6:52 AM
Nine messages from six workers and a manager. Typos, abbreviations, one photo, one duplicate.
Timesheets · Pay period Jan 1 to Jan 14
Google Sheets · updated never
Rows appear here as messages arrive.
What the manager gets
Only entries that need a human reach the manager.
The problem
Payroll waited on whoever answered the phone last.
Every site, every day, someone had to collect hours from every worker and get them into the payroll spreadsheet. Supervisors spent the end of each day chasing. Entries came in late, by photo, or not at all, and someone re-typed all of it. Payroll was delayed by missing timesheets and nobody had a live picture of who was on which site.
A new app would not have fixed it. The crews have a wide range of phones and comfort with technology. What every one of them already uses, all day, is WhatsApp.
Before and after
Hours of chasing and re-typing, gone.
Before
- Site supervisors chased workers for hours at the end of every day
- Timesheets arrived late, on paper, by photo, or not at all
- Someone re-typed every entry into the payroll spreadsheet
- Duplicates and impossible shifts were caught at payroll time, if at all
- Nobody could see who was on which site today
After
- Workers text their hours from the app they already use
- Entry is in the correct sheet tab within seconds
- Duplicates dropped, unusual shifts flagged automatically
- Worker gets a confirmation, manager gets only the exceptions
- Live attendance across every site, all day
What we built
One WhatsApp number. Six things happen.
Worker texts
Name, date, time in, time out, site. In whatever format they naturally write: '7-330', '4 Jan', 'yesterday', 'kingst'. No app to install, no password to forget.
System reads it
Flexible parsing handles typos, abbreviations, multiple date and time formats. Site names are fuzzy-matched to the right spreadsheet tab, so 'dundas' finds 45 Dundas W.
Routed to the right sheet
The entry goes to the correct pay period spreadsheet and site tab. New date sections are created in order when a date does not exist yet.
Checked before payroll sees it
Duplicates are ignored. Shifts over 14 hours or under 30 minutes, future dates and old dates are logged but flagged and highlighted for the manager.
Worker gets a reply
Instant confirmation with what was recorded, or plain guidance on what to fix. Photos of handwritten sheets are forwarded to the manager with context.
Manager stays on WhatsApp
Alerts only for what needs a human. A 'summary' message returns the day's totals, flags and gaps. Every message is logged with its outcome.
Why it holds up
Built for how people actually text.
The system meets workers where they are. The cleverness is in reading messy input reliably and failing safely, not in asking anyone to change how they write.
- Dates in any form: 04/01/2026, '4 Jan', 'January 4th', 'yesterday'. Times as 7am, 7:00 AM or 07:00.
- Fuzzy site matching by street name and spelling distance, so abbreviations and typos still land on the right tab.
- Pay period routing across the current and previous spreadsheets at the same time.
- Duplicate detection so the same worker is never logged twice for the same shift.
- Every message logged with sender, time, content and outcome. Failed entries go to an errors tab, never lost.
- A WhatsApp outage does not block sheet writes, and one bad message never stops the rest.
Have a workflow like this?
If your business runs on messages, photos or spreadsheets that a person has to re-type, we can probably automate it. Tell us the workflow and we will say yes, no, or partly.
30-day money-back guarantee · Live in one week · Toronto & GTA