Aviation Shop Time Clock Software: Turning Hours Worked Into Hours Billed

Every shop owner has done this math. Payroll says the crew worked 320 hours last week. The invoices say you billed 214. Nobody stole anything, nobody sat around, and yet a hundred hours vanished between the punch clock and the invoice. That gap is the most expensive number in a repair station, and most shops cannot explain it because their time clock and their work orders are two systems that never talk.

Aviation shop time clock software solves a narrower problem than a general timekeeping app: it has to answer for hours twice. Once for payroll, which is a Department of Labor question, and once for the job, which is a profitability and billing question. A punch clock only answers the first one.

The three numbers every repair station needs

Before you evaluate any system, get clear on which number you are chasing:

• Clock hours. Time on the property. This is what payroll and the DOL care about.
• Job hours. Time charged against a specific work order and, ideally, a specific discrepancy. This is what tells you whether the annual you quoted at 28 hours actually took 41.
• Billed hours. What made it onto the invoice. The spread between job hours and billed hours is either a write-off you chose or one you did not notice.

Shops that track only the first number fly blind on the other two, and shops that ask techs to reconstruct job hours on Friday afternoon get fiction rounded to the nearest half hour.

What the recordkeeping side actually requires

Timekeeping for a repair station is a labor law question, not an FAA one. The Fair Labor Standards Act requires employers to keep records for nonexempt employees including the employee's name and identifying information, hours worked each day and each workweek, straight time earnings, overtime premium pay, and any additions or deductions from wages. Payroll records are generally kept at least three years, and the underlying records wages are computed from, such as time cards and work schedules, at least two years. Some states go further: California requires four years and New York six.

The FLSA does not require a particular clock. Paper, punch, or software are all acceptable as long as the records are accurate and complete. What it does require is that the records exist and can be produced. State wage and hour rules apply on top, and your own employee handbook governs how you run it. This is not legal advice; check with your counsel or payroll provider.

Where labor hours leak

The usual suspects, in rough order of how much money they cost:

• Retro entry. Techs writing down job time at the end of the day or the end of the week. Memory rounds down, and it rounds toward whatever job the tech thinks is already over budget.
• Jobs with no bucket. Shop cleanup, tool room, hangar moves, training, and warranty rework land nowhere, so they quietly get charged to whatever job is open.
• Multi-tasking with one clock. A tech who touches four aircraft in a shift and clocks to one of them makes three jobs look profitable and one look terrible.
• Unbilled add-work. A discrepancy found mid-inspection gets fixed and never makes it onto the invoice because it never made it onto a line.
• Overtime nobody saw coming. Without a running weekly total per tech, the first anyone hears about overtime is when payroll runs.

What to look for in a system

The test is simple: can a tech start work on the right job in under five seconds, and does that action produce both a payroll record and a job cost record at the same time? If clocking to a job is slower than not doing it, the crew will not do it, and no policy memo will fix that.

Beyond speed, look for time that attaches to a work order and to the discrepancy inside it, so you can see which line ate the budget. Look for supervisor corrections that are logged rather than overwritten, because an edit history is what makes the record defensible later. Look for a clean handoff into accounting so the same hours drive the paycheck and the invoice instead of getting keyed twice.

Orion handles this with a time clock and labor module that runs against the same work orders and discrepancies your techs are already documenting, with QuickBooks sync so labor flows to accounting, and full audit logging behind it. The labor picture feeds the same records that drive MRO invoicing and billing, which is the point: one entry, two answers. Orion is modular, so you can build a plan with just the pieces you need on published pricing, add-on modules at $95 per month each, with unlimited users on every plan.

Want to see technician time running against live work orders? Schedule a call and we will walk through a job from clock in to invoice.