Hubstaff Review: Manage productivity, payroll, and expenses for your remote team and business.

As hybrid and remote work becomes part of our work lives, employee monitoring, expense management, and time tracking have become important ingredients to the survival of remote-first companies.  

Hubstaff is one of the best tools that offer resources for small businesses and remote companies to manage their employees and operations. Here, we take a deep dive into the platform, its features, and how to use it in your remote startups. 

1. What is Hubstaff
2. About Hubstaff, the company
3. Major Tools/Features of Hubstaff
4. Hubstaff’s extra tools
5. Who can use Hubstaff?
6. Plans and pricing 
7. Advantages of Hubstaff
8. Devices supported
9. Hubstaff Integrations

What is Hubstaff

Hubstaff is an all-in-one time tracking, operations, payroll, and productivity management software for small and midsized businesses, remote teams, and digital consultants. It also has a suite of tools to help small businesses and remote teams manage work, people, and operations. 

Hubstaff’s time tracking app is the perfect program for anybody working in the field or remotely. With a robust, customizable reporting feature, you’ll be able to track how your employees spend their day and communicate that to your team. Plus, Hubstaff’s invoicing software will ensure you get paid on time.

Hubstaff comes with your own management dashboard for tracking time, payroll, and more; live-chat tools for instant help; cloud-based time-trackers to ensure accurate data and seamless integrations with your favorite project management tools.

Hubstaff, the company

Founded in 2012, Hubstaff currently has over 90 remote employees spread across 28 countries. It boasts more than 40,000 customers and exudes transparency, accountability, freedom, and a customer-first approach to managing people. 

The company’s flagship product is Hubstaff – a time tracking software for remote teams that helps companies monitor their team’s work hours, productivity levels, and quality of work.

 

Major Products/Tools/Features

 

Hubstaff Time

A tool that allows teams to track projects, time worked, and which tasks employees are working on. It also helps teams to turn time tracked into timesheets, which are useful for payroll processing, invoice tracking, project budgeting, and analytics.

Hubstaff Desk

Desk is an up-to-date tool on team performance through real-time monitoring, benchmarking, and issues tracking. Teams can use Desk to spot opportunities for employees to improve productivity, reduce waste, monitor milestones, and recognize employee performance by sending automatic achievement badges. 

Hubstaff Field

Field is used by field teams to track workers’ locations and optimize routes for field technicians through a GPS tracker. It’s an excellent tool to automatically track work hours and streamline payroll through smart invoicing and timesheet approvals. From attendance, expenses, and route optimization to scheduling and integration with your already existing business software, Hubstaff Field is a comprehensive tool for anyone managing field workers such as plumbers, electricians, construction workers, lawn professionals, and more. 

Payroll features

Hubstaff has a built-in payroll feature that allows teams to issue and manage employee payroll. Once you input an employee’s schedule, time world, and hourly rate, Hubstaff’s payroll feature will automatically process gross pay calculations and payments. It’s integrated with Wise, PayPal, Bitwage, meaning you can use it to pay remote employees regardless of their location either through fiat or cryptocurrency. 

Hubstaff Tasks

Hubstaff Tasks is an agile project management tool with sprint planning, Kanban boards, to-do lists, automated standups, and time tracking features. From auto-assigning and project roadmaps to customizable templates, Tasks is a great tool to enhance collaboration and communication for all remote teams. 

Time off and holidays

Employers are legally obligated to track the time off and holidays of their employees. This is important for both the employer and the employee as it ensures that they get paid for all the time they have worked. It is not just about keeping track of hours, it is also about making sure that employees are able to use their time off and holidays in a way that suits them.

With Hubstaff’s time tracking system, companies can make sure that all of their employees are taking time off as they are entitled to do so. They can also make sure that they have enough staff on hand during peak periods in order to meet customer demand.

Work break policies

Work break policies are essential for the well-being of employees. It is important to keep in mind that people have different needs when it comes to breaks. This ranges from a few minutes to a few hours. The best way to create a work break policy is by making sure that it is flexible and has enough options for people who need different types of breaks. With Hubstaff, you can create a flexible break policy to suit your company’s needs. It also offers you the opportunity to get rid of the time clock and control breaks with its customizable timer and geo-monitoring tools.

Team management

This is a Hubstaff feature that makes it easy to assign jobs to your team and stay connected to their progress. It’s a great way to manage remote employees and freelancers, as well as makes it easy to log time from anywhere, set reminders for upcoming deadlines, and monitor the clock from any device.

Proper budgeting

Hubstaff’s budgeting features allow your team to know exactly how much time your remote, freelance, or in-house team spends working on your project and what they’re doing while they’re there. It’s the easiest way to understand where your money is going and spot trends and patterns in your team’s working behavior. You can also set your own rates for projects and track your budget.

Expense management

There are many ways to manage your remote company or business’ finances, and it’s great that you categorize expenses by project or client budgets. Hubstaff makes it dead-simple to track time and expenses for your team. With the Hubstaff app, you can upload your receipts and categorize expenses with just a few taps. You can then connect them to the projects or clients they were made for. Our powerful analytics will give you a detailed breakdown of how you’re spending your time and money, so you can make adjustments as needed.

 

Extra Hubstaff features/tools

 

Hubstaff Talent

Hubstaff Talent is a freelance marketplace developed and operated by Hubstaff. Over 50 remote full-time and freelance jobs are listed on this platform every week. It’s free to use for both freelancers and individuals or businesses looking to hire remote talent. From content writing and social media management to web development and UI/UX design, there are lots of talent for startups and businesses. One downside, though, is that some of the jobs listed are low-paying, sometimes starting at $2/hour. 

 

Time Tracking Resources

Hubstaff has a suite of time tracking resources and templates to help teams save time. These resources include to-do lists, hourly rate calculators, payroll calculators, timesheets, time tracking statistics, Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), Directive on the Organization of Working Time, and many more.

 

Who can use Hubstaff

Hubstaff is ideal for different businesses and different situations because of the many tools it offers. Here’s who can use it:

1. Remote-first startups – Companies managing a global remote workforce can use it to run payroll, manage expenses, and track time.
2. Hybrid Teams – Firms with both remote and in-house teams can use it to manage operations, payroll, and productivity. 
3. Small businesses looking to track time, optimize routes and location, as well as streamline operations. 
4. Teams and individuals, including accountants, healthcare professionals, architects, nonprofits, landscaping and lawn professionals, engineers, design teams, and eCommerce merchants can use Hubstaff tools to manage their businesses. 

 

Hubstaff Plans and Pricing 

Hubstaff’s pricing comes in different forms depending on the product you want to use.

Hubstaff Time

For Hubstaff Time, there is a free plan for one user where they get access to time tracking, timesheets, limited reports, and limited payments.

The Time Starter plan starts at 2 people for $7 per user per month and comes with all features in the free plan, one integration, 24 hours support, and per-user settings.

The Time Pro plan starts at $10 per user per month with numerous features. For companies that need lots of customization and special care, the Enterprise plan is ideal.

Hubstaff Desk

Hubstaff Desk also comes with similar pricing as Time, with $7 per user per month for the Desk Starter Plan, $10 per user per month for the Desk Pro Plan, $0 per user per month for the Desk Free plan, and a highly customizable and VIP support plan for the Enterprise model.

Hubstaff Field

Hubstaff Field has three plans (there’s no free plan). The Field plan starts at $12 per user per month and comes with many features including, payroll, invoices, budgets, timesheets, API, Time off and holidays, fleet tracking, mobile GPS tracking, time tracking, unlimited integrations, payments, and many other features. The Desk & Field plan starts at $15 per user per month with all features from the Field plan and a host of other features. There’s also an enterprise plan that comes with VIP support, concierge setup, higher limits on public API, and more. 

Hubstaff Time and Desk

Hubstaff Field

 

Advantages of Hubstaff

• Easy to schedule tasks and shifts – schedule tasks, employee shifts, and manage all workers in one place. 
• Seamless productivity measurement – track time, know each employee’s time commitment, and streamline time with output. 
• Capturing keystrokes and automatic screenshots – know the sites and platforms remote employees spend their time on. 
• Geological features for exact location tracking – know where your field staff are located and streamline their operations
• Excellent third-party integrations – integrate with Bitwage, Wise, or Payoneer for easy expense management and salary payments. It also offers lots of integrations, communication and collaboration tools to CMS and HR platforms. 
• 24-hour support – get support whenever you need it.
• Integrates with payroll tools – integrated with Gusto and other platforms to make payroll calculation simple.
• Recurring payments and auto-invoicing

Devices supported

Teams can work with Hubstaff on all major devices, including on:

1. Windows
2. Chromebook
3. Android
4. iOS
5. Mac, and 
6. Linux. 

Hubstaff Integrations

Hubstaff is integrated with numerous tools, from project management and communication to payments, accounting, invoicing, and help desk. Some of these integrations include Asana, ClickUp, GitHub, GitLab, Wise, Bitwage, Gusto, PayPal, Payoneer, and many others.

 

Get Hubstaff for your startup or business now