ExakTime vs ClockShark vs BusyBusy: What None of Them Do for Prevailing Wage

You searched for a time tracking app and found 50 options

You typed "best construction time tracking app" into Google and got a wall of listicles written by people who have never stood on a job site. Half the lists are sponsored. The other half rank products by whoever has the best affiliate commission.

Three names keep showing up: ExakTime, ClockShark, and BusyBusy. All three are solid products. All three solve real problems. And all three leave a massive gap if your company does prevailing wage work.

This is not a hit piece. But if you are a contractor running prevailing wage jobs alongside private work, you need to understand what these tools do, what they do not do, and where the gap is going to cost you.

ExakTime: the heavyweight

ExakTime is the most established name in construction time tracking. Built for the industry from the ground up.

Pricing: Field Basic starts at $30 per user per month. Field Premium runs about $45 per user per month. Enterprise pricing is custom. Budget another $500 to $2,000 for implementation and up to $5,000 for training.

What it does well: GPS tracking with breadcrumbs, biometric verification, cost code tracking, and integrations with QuickBooks, Sage, Viewpoint, Foundation, and ADP. ExakTime also markets a "prevailing wage tracking" feature that lets you tag hours with different wage classifications.

Where it falls short: That prevailing wage feature is really just rate tagging. It does not automatically split drive time between rate categories. If a worker drives from the yard to a prevailing wage site and then to a private site, someone still has to manually classify each leg. Users also report rigid multi-year contracts and mobile app syncing issues that delay payroll data.

ClockShark: the user-friendly option

ClockShark is the one your crew will probably complain about the least. The interface is clean, the mobile app works well, and the learning curve is gentle.

Pricing: $40 base fee plus $9 per user per month on the Standard plan. $60 base fee plus $11 per user per month on Pro. For a 20-person crew, you are looking at $220 to $280 per month. That is significantly cheaper than ExakTime.

What it does well: Drag-and-drop scheduling, GPS tracking, job costing, real-time reporting, and a genuinely intuitive mobile experience. For a small to mid-size contractor doing private work, ClockShark is hard to beat on value.

Where it falls short: ClockShark does not support prevailing wage tracking at all. No per diem rates. No multi-rate classification. No double time or triple time pay rates. User reviews consistently mention this as a dealbreaker for prevailing wage contractors. There is a third-party workaround through Points North, but that means paying for two systems and managing the data handoff between them.

BusyBusy: the job costing specialist

BusyBusy has carved out a niche with strong job costing and daily reporting tools. The company claims 55,000 customers in construction.

Pricing: BusyBusy offers Free, Pro, and Premium tiers. They do not publish specific pricing for the paid plans, which means you have to go through a sales call. Custom plans are also available.

What it does well: Job costing with specific cost codes per project, GPS time tracking, daily reports that generate and send automatically, unlimited photo storage, and document sharing. Genuinely useful for tracking labor costs against estimates in real time.

Where it falls short: BusyBusy has no native certified payroll functionality. No prevailing wage automation. No union rules processing. If you need WH-347 reports or Davis-Bacon compliance, you are back to spreadsheets or third-party tools.

The real problem: none of them handle the hard part

All three tools can tell you that a worker was on site from 8:00 AM to 4:00 PM. They can pin that time to a GPS location. They can assign a cost code. What none of them can do is handle the scenario that plays out every single day on prevailing wage jobs.

A worker leaves the yard at 6:30 AM and drives 45 minutes to a prevailing wage site. That drive time is compensable at the prevailing wage rate. They work until noon. They drive 30 minutes to a private job. That drive time is compensable at the regular rate. They work the private job until 4:30 PM and drive home.

That is four time entries with two different wage rates for one person for one day. With a crew of 15, that is potentially 300 individual time entries per week that need correct classification. We wrote about the math on this and the numbers are ugly. Overpaying costs $15,000 or more per year. Underpaying can trigger DOL penalties starting at $13,508 per violation.

None of these three tools will split that drive time for you. That classification still happens manually, in a spreadsheet, by someone who has to get it right every time.

The blended overtime problem nobody talks about

It gets worse. When a worker puts in more than 40 hours in a week and worked both prevailing wage and private jobs, you need to calculate blended overtime. The FLSA requires a weighted average of all rates earned during the week to determine the overtime premium.

If a worker earned $45 per hour for 24 hours of prevailing wage work and $30 per hour for 20 hours of private work, you cannot just apply 1.5 times either rate. You calculate the weighted average across all 44 hours, then apply the overtime premium to the 4 hours over 40.

All three tools assume a single overtime rate. None of them calculate blended overtime across multiple wage classifications. This is exactly what triggers audits.

What to look for in a prevailing wage solution

If you are doing prevailing wage work, your time tracking needs to understand wage classification at the entry level. That means automatic drive time splitting based on job type, per-job rate tagging that changes when a worker switches sites, blended overtime calculation using the actual weighted average math the DOL requires, and certified payroll output that generates WH-347 forms from the same data your crew enters in the field.

That is what we built PW Time Tracker to do. It does not compete with ExakTime on breadcrumb trails or ClockShark on scheduling or BusyBusy on photo documentation. It handles the specific compliance gap that those tools leave open.

The bottom line

If you do not do prevailing wage work, all three of these tools are worth considering. ExakTime is the most feature-rich. ClockShark is the easiest to use and the best value for smaller crews. BusyBusy has the strongest job costing.

If you do prevailing wage work, even part of the time, none of them solve the compliance problem that actually keeps you up at night. The drive time split. The rate tagging. The blended overtime. The certified payroll. That is the gap, and closing it with spreadsheets is how contractors end up writing six-figure checks to the DOL.

You can try PW Time Tracker free for 30 days and see how it handles the split automatically. Or if you want to talk through your specific setup first, reach out to us directly. We will tell you honestly whether the tool fits your situation or whether one of these three is actually the better call.