Summary
The advertised price is rarely the price. Time and attendance software is sold on a headline per-user figure, and the number you actually pay is shaped by the pricing model, the add-ons that turn out not to be included, and a few costs that never appear on a pricing page at all.
This is a guide to working out your real number before you sign, rather than after your third invoice.
The four pricing models
Per employee, per month
The most common model. Simple, and it scales linearly — which is the point to understand. At 12 staff it is cheap. At 55 staff, including a casual pool, it is a materially different number, and it grows every time you hire.
The question to ask is what counts as a user. Every employee on file, or only those who clocked in that month? For a business with seasonal casuals the difference is substantial. A team of 20 permanents and 30 summer casuals pays for 50 all year under one definition and closer to 20 for most of it under the other.
Per active user, per month
Better for seasonal businesses, because you pay for people who actually worked. Check what "active" means precisely — one clock-in in a month usually counts, so a casual who did a single Saturday is a full user that month.
Flat tier
A fixed monthly price for a band of staff and locations. Predictable, and it means hiring does not change your bill until you cross a boundary. The trade-off is that you pay the full tier price at the bottom of a band — a business with 11 staff on a 10-to-30 tier is paying for capacity it is not using.
This is our model, and we think it is the right one for shift businesses specifically, because headcount in hospitality, retail and care churns constantly and a bill that moves every fortnight is genuinely annoying to forecast.
Per location or per device
Common for kiosk-based systems and hardware terminals. Fine for a single site; expensive for a business with ten small locations, where the per-site fee can exceed the per-person cost entirely.
The costs that are not on the pricing page
- Implementation and onboarding fees. Common at the enterprise end, occasionally in the mid-market. Always ask whether it is one-off, mandatory, and what it includes.
- Hardware. If the product needs a terminal or a biometric reader, that is capital cost plus replacement. A system that runs on a tablet you already own does not have this line.
- Payroll integration as a paid add-on. Check whether the export to your accounting system is included or extra — this is a frequent surprise, and it is the feature you are buying the product for.
- Support tiers. Whether real support is included or sold separately, and what the response time actually is.
- Minimum contract terms. Twelve months is common. A monthly plan you can leave is worth a premium over an annual one you cannot.
- Modules. Leave, rostering, GPS, mileage and reporting are sometimes separate line items. Price the configuration you actually need, not the entry tier.
- The annual increase. Ask what happened to pricing over the last three years. Vendors will not always answer, and that is itself informative.
Working out your real number
Do this on paper before any demo, using your own figures:
- Count your real headcount, including every casual who worked in the last twelve months.
- Count your locations.
- List the features you will not do without. Be strict — this list is what stops you buying a tier you do not need.
- Price it under each model at today's headcount, and again at plus 50%.
- Add the hidden costs above for a three-year total.
- Divide by 36 for a real monthly cost of ownership.
Step four is the one people skip and regret. A per-employee model that is cheapest today is often not cheapest at the headcount you are planning for, and migrating systems later costs more than the difference.
What it is worth, honestly
The return is real but it is not the one usually advertised. Three sources, in order of reliability:
- Payroll processing time. Chasing timesheets, transcribing them, and querying the illegible ones is the largest and most predictable saving. Measure your own hours before and after rather than trusting a vendor's multiplier.
- Accuracy in both directions. Accurate records stop unrecorded overtime and unpaid handovers, and they stop over-payment from generous rounding. Which direction dominates depends on your business, and you will not know until you measure.
- Compliance exposure. Hardest to quantify and most consequential. Without records, the burden shifts to you to disprove an underpayment claim — see record-keeping. The value of not being in that position only becomes obvious once you are.
Be sceptical of vendors quoting a percentage of payroll recovered. Those figures come from somewhere, but almost never from a business like yours. Our guide to the real cost of paper timesheets sets out a way to calculate your own number instead.
Our pricing, for reference
Flat per plan, per month. Yearly billing is ten months for twelve.
- Free — $0. 3 staff, 1 location.
- Starter — $29. 10 staff, 2 locations.
- Professional — $69. 30 staff, 5 locations.
- Business — $119. 60 staff, 10 locations.
No implementation fee, no hardware requirement — it runs on a tablet or phone you already have — no minimum contract, and payroll export included rather than an add-on. A 14-day Professional trial with no card. Above 60 staff or 10 locations, we are not the right product.
Questions to ask every vendor
- What exactly counts as a billable user?
- Is there an implementation or onboarding fee?
- Is payroll export included in this tier?
- What is the minimum contract, and the notice period?
- What has this plan's price done over the last three years?
- Can I export my complete history if I leave, and in what format?
- Which of the features I listed are in this tier, and which are add-ons?
Correct as at November 2026. We have deliberately not stated competitors' prices, because they change and a stale figure is worse than none. Get current pricing from each vendor in writing.