The everyday problem: hours that are worked in one place and recorded in another
Any business whose people work away from the office has the same small headache at the end of each pay period. A cleaning company has staff spread across offices and strata buildings at night. A landscaping crew moves between three gardens in a day. An IT support business sends technicians to client sites. A pest controller does six or seven stops before lunch. The work happens in one place, and the record of it is made somewhere else, often days later.
So the hours arrive as a text message, a photo of a paper sheet, or a best guess on a Friday afternoon. The office then chases the missing ones, checks them against the roster, and hopes they match the jobs that were invoiced.
Irregular hours make this harder. The ABS found that in August 2025, 17% of Australian employees did not usually work the same number of hours each week, about 2.0 million people.1 The same survey counted 2.4 million casual employees, 19% of all employees.1 When hours change from week to week, a standard roster is not a reliable record of what was actually worked.
There is also a legal side, and in Western Australia it depends on how your business is set up. Sole traders, unincorporated partnerships, and trusts with no Pty Ltd trustee are in the WA state system. Pty Ltd companies that are trading or financial corporations are in the national Fair Work system.2
- WA state system: for each day of work, employers must record the time the employee started and finished, details of breaks including meal breaks, and the periods the employee was paid for. Most employment records must be kept for at least seven years from when they were made.3 For an employer who is an individual, the maximum penalty is $18,000, or $180,000 for a serious contravention.3
- National system: business.gov.au lists information about hours of work, including overtime, among the employment records to keep for seven years. Pay slips go out within one business day of pay day and should show the hours actually worked.4
However you collect hours, the record has to be made and kept, and that is hard to do well from memory a week after the work.
How Field work and Timesheets in EasyDone help
Field work gives the team the job details on their phone. They can open the day's visits and job information, record time, complete the right checklist and attach photos, and leave a useful note while the work is still fresh. What they save keeps the office up to date, so the record is made on the day rather than reconstructed later.
Timesheets brings the time worked into a clear team view. Recorded time stays connected to the job. You can check the job notes, see missing or changed entries that need a look, and then review and approve the valid hours, without chasing everyone at the end of the fortnight.
Used together, the two features close the gap between doing the work and recording it. Time goes in against the job on site, and the office reviews it in one place. A short entry on a long job, or a visit with no time at all, is easier to spot because the job and its notes are right there.
An example: a fictional Perth commercial cleaning business
This is an example, not a customer story. Picture Swan Coastal Cleaning: eight cleaners, most of them casual, working evening shifts across a dozen offices, two medical suites and a strata building. The owner runs the office with one part-time administrator.
- Before the shift. Each cleaner opens their phone to see tonight's sites, the access notes and the checklist for each one.
- On site. At the medical suite, a cleaner records time against the visit, works through the checklist and photographs a damaged bin enclosure for the strata manager.
- A change in the night. One office asks for an extra kitchen clean. The cleaner records the extra time against that job and leaves a note saying who asked for it.
- Monday morning. The administrator opens Timesheets. Two entries are flagged for a look: one cleaner has no time recorded at a site that was on the schedule, and another entry was changed after the shift. A quick call sorts out both.
- Approval. The owner reviews and approves the valid hours. Because the time sits with each job, the extra kitchen clean is easy to find when it is time to invoice the client.
The same pattern suits a landscaping crew, a mobile IT technician or a pest controller. The work differs, but the aim is the same: record the hours where the work happens, then review them in one place.
What it doesn't do
- It is not payroll or legal advice. Field work and Timesheets help you record and approve hours. Working out the right award or agreement rates, and whether your business is in the state or national system, is for your payroll process, your adviser, or the WA Government's Wageline and the Fair Work Ombudsman.
- It does not decide what your records must contain. The WA state system asks for start and finish times and details of breaks for each day of work.3 Talk to us about how your team records time, so we can check together that the way you use EasyDone captures what your records need.
- It does not fix hours that are never entered. Missing entries are easier to spot, but someone still has to follow them up and get the right time recorded.
- It does not replace a conversation with your staff. Review and approval are there so a person checks the hours. They are not a reason to change a timesheet without talking to the employee first.
How to get started
EasyDone is built in Perth, and setup and support are personal. Tell us how hours reach your office today: on paper, by text, through another app, or from memory. We will show you the field and timesheet parts of EasyDone that would fit, and be straight about the parts that would not.
If you want to talk it through, use the form below. It helps to bring one recent pay period's timesheets, including the ones that needed chasing, so we can work from your real process rather than a made-up one.
