Administrators: A Complete Reference Guide

This guide helps you master Pro's admin tools for managing employees, jobs, and schedules and assists with easy payroll prep and budget management. You'll find practical guidance and links to detailed help articles throughout.

As an administrator, you're key to your company running well and making money. Beyond time tracking and payroll, your role focuses on the early detection of issues that could impact the bottom line. Pro is your proactive monitoring system, helping you catch and resolve problems before they become costly.

Our most successful customers share a common practice: they log into Pro daily. Making Pro part of your morning routine, like checking your email, helps you master the system quickly while staying ahead of any issues.

Let's start by looking at how Pro structures your account to copy how you actually run your business.

Chronotek Pro uses a three-tiered role system—Administrator, Supervisor, and Employee—to control user access and responsibilities.

Within these roles, you can create custom positions (e.g., Owner, Site Lead, Floor Technician, etc) to match your company’s actual job titles. Roles determine access levels, while positions help organize employees based on their job functions.

📜Article to review: Your Organization: Roles and Positions

One of your administrative responsibilities will be to add people to your team. When you do, you will assign them to one of the roles and positions (your account has default positions you can use until you create your own.) Let’s discuss how you add people.

Chronotek Pro makes adding new employees easy with a Quick Add wizard. Simply click the ➕ at the top of the screen and follow four steps:

📜Article to review (includes video): How to Add People

Once you've added employees, you must set them up with the Pro mobile app. You can send app invitations via text message using the supervisor mobile app or by email from the admin website. You can track which employees have downloaded the app by checking the App Registered column on the People list view screen.

📜Article to review (includes video): How to Send Invitations to New Employees

Now that you know how to add and invite people, they need jobs to clock into. Let’s examine Pro’s unique design for tracking jobs.

Pro structures your information based on how you actually do business - you do Jobs for Customers at their various Locations. Pro uses this 3-tiered system to ensure employees clock into the right job with clarity:

This structured approach tracks hours and labor costs per job and location, providing valuable insights for business owners. Reports automatically total hours and costs by customer, location, and job—no more spreadsheet headaches!

📜Article to review: What Are Customers, Locations, and Jobs?

Your next question - how do I add customers, locations, and jobs?

Pro offers two ways to add jobs, depending on your needs - Quick and Advanced. Begin with the ➕ button at the top of any screen and choose to add a Job.

Quick Add is perfect for getting started fast—just link the job to a customer and location, assign a Team, and Pro will automatically create the job for a one-year term. If you need the job to continue beyond that, simply check "auto-renew" to extend it automatically.

Advanced Add gives you full control. You can customize dates, budgets, and revenue targets, create schedules upfront, and set these jobs to auto-renew.

Note: Once a job expires, employees can’t clock into it, and the job disappears from your view.

📜Articles to review:

Let's briefly discuss job instructions and alarm codes.

Job Instructions in Chronotek Pro help admins create, manage, and share important guidelines for employees on the mobile app. Whether it's task lists, training videos, or step-by-step procedures, instructions ensure consistency across jobs.

By using Job Instructions, admins can keep teams on the same page, streamline training, and make sure employees always have the right information.

📜Article to review: How to Use the Job Instruction Feature in Chronotek Pro

Chronotek Pro’s Alarm Codes feature lets you securely store and share entry codes and emergency contact details for job locations. Only authorized employees and supervisors can access codes, reducing after-hours calls and ensuring security. Codes can be added via the Admin Site and viewed in the mobile app when assigned to a location. Keep codes updated and include specific entry instructions for seamless access.

📜Article to review: Job Site Alarm Codes: Store & Share Securely with Your Teams

🔄Quick recap: You now understand the foundation of Pro: how to structure your organization through company roles, add your Team members, and create & manage jobs for them to work. Next, let's look at how your employees will clock in and out of these jobs.

Pro gives your employees multiple ways to clock in and ensure they are at the job. Everything starts with Team assignments - employees must be on the job's Team to see it as an option. Teams are a big deal, but don’t worry about them yet. We will get to Teams soon.

Methods 1 - 5 are with the Pro Mobile App

📜Article to review: Six Ways Your Employees Can Clock In

While Pro offers multiple ways to verify clock-ins, TimeTiles™ are our most powerful tool for ensuring employees are actually in the job site buildings when they clock in and out, not in the parking lot. Our customers absolutely love this solution. Let's take a closer look at how TimeTiles™ work.

TimeTiles™ are NFC-enabled tiles placed inside the job site—typically in a janitor's closet or breakroom. Employees must scan the tile with their phone to clock in, just like making a contactless payment. Unlike QR codes, TimeTiles™ are tamperproof and cannot be copied, ensuring employees are physically inside the building when clocking in and out.

GPS tracking enhances TimeTiles™ by identifying when employees leave the job site during their shift. Together, they form a powerful solution for managing remote teams and preventing time theft.

Got questions about TimeTiles™? No worries—we’ve got you covered! Whether you're wondering how to order them, set them up, or troubleshoot issues, these articles will walk you through everything step by step.

📜Article collection to review: TimeTiles™ - On-site Clock-ins Guaranteed

Now that your employees and jobs are in place and people are clocking in and out let's examine how Chronotek Pro helps you manage daily operations. Chronotek Pro is a proactive issue-detection system that catches problems before they impact your bottom line. Here's how it transforms you into an admin rockstar.

Log in daily to discover answers—even to questions you never thought to ask.

Your day begins with a review of the Time dashboard. The red and yellow issue tiles are your issue detection system and will make you a rockstar to the company owner. The red tiles are critical issues you must address before preparing payroll exports. They include:

Simply click a red tile, and the Time screen filters to show only the time cards with those issues. Clicking a time card cell takes you to the Daily Timeline, where you can review and fix it.

Resolving red tile issues will require you to edit time cards for various reasons.

📜Article Collection to review: Editing Time Cards

Yellow tiles will not block payroll prep; however, we suggest you review them for critical operational issues that may require immediate attention. Issues such as:

These are all issues that Pro proactively warns you about that can damage profitability and client relationships. Like the red tiles, you can click on the yellow ones to review the Daily Timeline, approve/disapprove, and make notes about the issue.

📜Articles to review:

Before going further, let’s talk about your field supervisors - your partners in operational success.

Your field supervisors are crucial partners in managing daily operations. Through the mobile app, they handle issues in real-time, becoming your eyes and ears on the ground.

They investigate and document:

When infractions occur, they:

Their responses sync instantly on the admin site, giving admins the answers they need to make adjustments—while ensuring supervisors cannot edit time cards.

📜Article to review: The Supervisor Mobile App: A Complete Guide

We’ve discussed issue tiles in detail and have mentioned notifications. What are their differences?

Issue tiles are not the only way Pro informs you of employee and job management issues. Let’s consider issue tiles as flags - they are color-coded and obvious like flags. Think about an NFL umpire who throws a penalty flag. The Pro system throws flags when it detects violations. However, notifications and activity feeds provide deeper visibility into daily operations.

Notifications inform users about real-time events affecting workforce operations. These alerts can be customized to appear on:

Users receive notifications via push alerts, mobile app feed, or admin site feeds (and can opt-in for SMS texts) for events such as:

Each notification type has four settings: Off, Low, Medium, and High. The admin sets the minimum notification level, and field supervisors can raise their settings but cannot lower them beyond the admin’s set threshold.

Field managers can track all issues in real time through the notification feed on their mobile app. Just tap the bell icon at the top right to see a chronological list of events affecting your teams and locations.

Activity feeds provide a historical record of all time card changes, approvals, deletions, and manually added entries. They also include any subscribed-to notifications, ensuring a full audit trail of workforce actions.

Where to Find Activity Feeds:

By distinguishing between customizable notifications and the permanent audit trail of activity feeds, Pro provides both real-time awareness and a reliable history of workforce actions.

📜Articles to review:

Earlier, we covered how Pro uses company roles (Administrator, Supervisor, Employee) to control system access and security. Now let's look at a different type of role - Team roles - that define how your workforce interacts within their groups, what notifications they receive, and what they see on the Pro mobile app.

Because notifications are crucial for keeping operations on track, the Pro System uses the Team roles of Managers, Observers, and Members to control what information people can see and what actions they can take in the system. The company roles, Administrators and Supervisors, can be Managers on some Teams while serving as Observers on others, giving you flexibility in how you structure oversight. Employees are Members. Anyone can serve on multiple Teams.

This structure ensures everyone has the necessary access and visibility without information overload.

📜Article to review: Team Roles in Chronotek Pro

You’ve heard about Teams throughout this guide—now let’s dive deeper into this powerful concept.

Chronotek Pro keeps things organized with a team-based system. Employees can only clock into jobs assigned to their Teams. This setup also ensures notifications and messages reach the right people at the right time—no more missed updates or confusion.

Keep people and jobs separate with Teams:

Teams consist of three primary roles:

📜Article to review: Teams: A Complete Guide to Organizing People, Work & Communication

Let’s talk more about Pro’s messaging platform, the Communication Hub. It plays an essential part in keeping all of your teams on the same page.

Chronotek Pro’s Communication Hub simplifies and centralizes workplace communication, eliminating the need for scattered texts, phone calls, and emails. It is accessible via the web portal for administrators and the mobile app for admins, supervisors, and employees.

The hub includes four messaging channels, each serving a specific purpose:

Chronotek Pro's Communication Hub supports automatic translations in 35 languages. Employees can set their preferred language in the app, or administrators can update preferences through the admin portal. This ensures clear communication without external translation tools. (The app functions are still in English.)

📜Article to review: Communicate with Your Teams and Get Notifications

Now that you know how to keep everyone on the same page with our messaging features, let’s learn how to keep your teams (and budgets) on track with Pro’s scheduling system.

Scheduling in Chronotek Pro helps organize shifts, ensure job coverage, and improve job costing accuracy. However, schedules aren't mandatory. Employees can clock in based on Team assignments and by being located there. But by using schedules, you'll maximize the benefits of Pro.

When we talked with service business owners about their biggest challenges, three things kept coming up: knowing where their people should be, ensuring jobs are covered, and controlling costs. That's precisely what good scheduling solves.

Let’s review the benefits of using schedules.

Everyone knows where they should be.

All jobs are covered.

The future isn’t a mystery.

The job must be set up before creating a schedule. The Schedule Wizard makes adding shifts, setting recurring schedules, and configuring alerts easy. You can access it through the Customers/Jobs menu or directly from the Schedules menu.

When setting up a schedule:

📜Article to review: How to Add Schedules

Schedules can be adjusted as needed. You can:

Important: Actual Breaks are not automatically deducted—employees must clock out for them. Additionally, at this time, recurring schedules cannot be edited once created. If changes are needed, the existing schedule must be deleted and rebuilt.

📜Articles to review:

Teams determine which jobs employees can see and clock into. Multiple teams, such as day and night, can work at the same job, each with their own shifts.

Even without a schedule, employees on a Team can still clock in if they meet company requirements, such as:

📜Article to review: How to Assign Teams to a Job with Shifts

Schedules don't just organize your workforce—they're also your key to predicting future profits. Learn more in the Profit Management section.

With schedules in place, the next step is efficiently preparing payroll.

Accurate payroll is critical. It ensures employees are paid correctly and keeps labor costs under control. For service businesses, payroll is typically the largest expense, requiring careful attention to overtime hours, special pay codes, and travel time between jobs. Pro helps you prepare accurate time cards, transforming payroll prep from a headache into a simple and manageable process.

Before preparing payroll, it’s important to ensure the essential settings in Pro are correctly configured. If your company has already been using Pro, these settings are likely in place—but if you're new to the system, reviewing them ensures accuracy.

With these settings in place, Pro organizes employee hours into a payroll-ready format, reducing errors and streamlining the process.

Chronotek Pro breaks payroll preparation into four straightforward steps:

Important Notes:

📜Article to review: Payroll Prep: Reviewing, Prepping, Exporting (Complete Guide)

Now that you are a rockstar payroll admin let’s discuss how Pro helps you manage and forecast your company's profits.

Service businesses often struggle with profitability not because they aren't generating revenue but because they don't have a clear picture of their true costs and future performance. Pro solves this by combining accurate labor cost tracking with powerful forecasting tools, helping you spot and address issues before they impact your bottom line.

A profitable service business starts with accurately calculating labor costs. Many owners mistakenly use base pay rates for budgeting and bidding, but this approach overlooks loaded pay rates—the total cost of an employee, including payroll taxes, workers' compensation, and benefits.

For example, a janitor earning $13 per hour may have a loaded pay rate closer to $16—about a 20% increase. Underestimating this cost can erode profitability, leading to underpriced contracts and tighter margins. By factoring in loaded pay rates, you gain a more accurate view of labor expenses, ensuring sustainable pricing and long-term success.

Configure loaded pay rates in Pro (Settings > Payroll > Labor Overhead) by entering your total labor overhead percentage, and the system will automatically calculate true labor costs for every employee. You can also create multiple pay profiles based on job roles, ensuring each employee's cost is correctly accounted for in projections and reports.

Labor costs become even more complex when multiple employees with different pay rates work on the same job. Chronotek Pro simplifies this by calculating weighted averages for accurate job costing:

Weighted averages provide a precise view of labor expenses, preventing underbidding and unexpected payroll overages.

📜Article to review: Pay Rates: Setting Up For Accurate Job Costing

Now that you understand true labor costs and how Pro uses loaded pay rates and weighted averages to calculate accurate labor expenses, you can create budgets that precisely reflect your desired profits.

💡Pro Tip: Create Job Config templates to set up Job Budgets quickly. Go to Company Settings > List Management > Job Config.

You can create a budget in two ways:

Use the Advanced Add job wizard during job creation. This guides you through setting up the job and its budget simultaneously.

In both cases, you'll enter key information like revenue, estimated hours, pay rates, and overhead percentages. The system uses these numbers to calculate accurate profit projections and track performance.

📜Articles to review:

Will your jobs be profitable in six months? With Pro’s Budget screen, you don’t have to guess. Budgets provide comprehensive data on labor costs, including projections for overtime, travel time, and pay rate fluctuations, allowing you to spot and correct potential losses before they happen.

📜Article to review (includes video): Forecast Job Profitability: Smart Planning Tools

Supply and inventory tracking is an add-on feature in Chronotek Pro that helps keep your inventory organized and prevents emergency stockouts. Here's what you should know:

No more panicked calls about running out of supplies - the system alerts you before levels get critical so you can plan ahead and reduce costs.

📜Article to review: User Guide - The Chronotek Pro Complete Supply Management System

You're now ready to be a rockstar administrator. By catching issues early, managing schedules efficiently, and keeping your teams connected, you'll help drive your company's success. Our support team is here if you need us.

Start at the question mark at the top right of your screen.

Find more answers to common questions in our Help Center. 😊