What QuickBooks Time Customers Should Do Before the Next Price Hike
QuickBooks Time keeps raising prices. Here's the customer playbook to evaluate alternatives before the next renewal lands on the desk.
TL;DR
- QuickBooks Time (formerly TSheets) has raised prices steadily since the Intuit acquisition and bundle changes.
- The “QB Time is being shut down” rumors that circulate every six months are not credible — but the price trajectory is the real story.
- For a 40-user crew, the QB Time + QB Online bundle now runs roughly $1,150+/month all-in.
- The equivalent Klees Pro plan with PinShot, Live Map, and multi-state payroll runs $408/month.
- The migration window is the 60 days before your QB Time annual renewal hits. After renewal, you’ve paid for another year regardless.
The “QuickBooks Time is being shut down” rumor floats through every construction and cleaning operator’s Slack channel every six months. It is not credible. Intuit has not signaled deprecation, the product is actively maintained, and the QB Online + QB Time bundle is a strategic anchor for Intuit’s mid-market construction play.
What is credible — and what most QB Time customers should actually be evaluating — is the price trajectory. QuickBooks Time pricing has climbed every year since the TSheets acquisition, the bundle structure now forces customers to take on QB Online seats they did not need, and the per-user math at scale has crossed a line where the alternative-evaluation question is no longer optional.
This post is the customer playbook for evaluating that question before the next renewal lands on the desk.
What QuickBooks Time actually costs now
The published price is one number. The all-in cost on the actual invoice is another. Here is the realistic breakdown for a mid-size construction or cleaning operator.
| Line item | QB Time Premium | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Base plan | $20/mo | Required |
| Per-user | $10/user/mo | At list, before any promo |
| QB Online bundling requirement | $90+/mo | Most mid-market operators end up here |
| Add-ons (scheduling, advanced reporting) | $40-80/mo | Often required to match feature parity with alternatives |
For a 40-user construction crew: $20 + (40 Ă— $10) + $90 = $510/mo on the time-tracking side alone, plus the QB Online seats that Intuit increasingly bundles in. With even modest QB Online seat counts the all-in lands $1,050-1,250/mo.
For a 100-user multi-state cleaning operator: well north of $1,400/mo at list, depending on the QB Online seat mix.
These are not edge cases. They are the actual invoices we see when prospective customers walk us through their current stack.
Why the rumors keep circulating
There are three threads behind the periodic “QB Time is being shut down” speculation:
- Intuit has previously sunset adjacent products. Intuit retired QuickBooks Self-Employed for new customers in 2023 and renamed QB Time itself from TSheets in 2021. That history seeds the rumor mill.
- Bundling changes feel like deprecation signals. When Intuit changes how QB Time is sold (forcing QB Online inclusion, moving features between tiers), customers read the signal as preparing for sunset.
- The 2026 pricing schedule pushed costs up double-digits. Sticker shock generates outbound search for “is QB Time being shut down.”
For the record: QuickBooks Time is not being shut down in any signaled timeline. The product is actively maintained and the bundling is strategic, not exit-prep. The actual operator-side question is not whether QB Time will exist next year — it’s whether you should still be paying for it.
The customer playbook: what to do in the 60 days before renewal
The window that matters is the 60 days before your QB Time annual renewal locks in. Once you renew, you have paid for the next 12 months whether you migrate mid-cycle or not. Here is the playbook:
- Day -60: Pull your actual usage data. How many active users? How many users have logged in within 30 days? What features are actively in use vs sitting unused? The active user count is often 20-30% lower than the billed user count.
- Day -55: Identify the feature dependencies. What QB Time features does your team actually rely on? Most operators rely on three: GPS clock-in, scheduling, QB Online sync. Everything else is optional.
- Day -50: Run vendor evaluation in parallel. Klees, ClockShark, busybusy, others. Run side-by-side on actual crew workflows for two weeks each.
- Day -40: Pilot on one crew. Run the leading alternative on one small crew (5-10 users) live for two weeks.
- Day -30: Lock the migration plan. If the pilot validates, map the data migration timeline. QB Time data exports cleanly; both we and ClockShark provide importers.
- Day -15: Cancel renewal. Most QB Time annual contracts can be cancelled or downgraded with 30 days notice. Confirm your contract terms.
- Day 0: Migrate. Run parallel for the first two weeks, cut over per-crew on a rolling schedule.
This is the cadence that gives you optionality. Once renewal hits, you’ve forfeited that optionality for 12 months.
Side-by-side: QB Time vs Klees on a 40-user crew
The same 40-user construction crew, priced two ways at list:
| Line item | QB Time | Klees Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Base | $20 | $48 |
| Per-user (40 users) | $400 | $360 |
| GPS clock-in | Included | Included |
| Crew Clock (batch clock-in) | Add-on | Included |
| Selfie verification at clock-in | Not native | Included (PinShot) |
| Anti-spoof on selfie | Not available | Included |
| Live Map | Limited | Included |
| Multi-state payroll consolidation | Add-on tier | Included |
| Bilingual UI (EN / ES / PT) | EN + partial ES | Native EN / ES / PT |
| QB Online sync | Native | Native via connector |
| QB Online seats forced into bundle | Often required | None |
| Realistic monthly total | $1,050-1,250 | $408 |
The headline gap is roughly $700/mo at the 40-user crew size, or about $8,400/year. The PinShot and bilingual layers are the differences that matter most for crews working beyond direct supervision.
For the deeper feature-by-feature breakdown see QuickBooks Time vs Klees and the QB Time alternative buyer’s guide.
What about QB Online — do you still need it?
The other half of the question. QB Time customers often assume the QB Online seats they pay for are required for the time-tracking flow. They are not, in the Klees migration model.
Klees pushes time data into your existing QB Online instance via the native connector. The QB Online seats are unchanged — you don’t add or remove QB Online seats when you switch the time tracker. The QB Online cost is a separate line item from the QB Time cost.
That means the savings number from migrating off QB Time is clean — you are not losing QB Online accounting, you are switching the time-tracking source that feeds it.
Migration concerns and how they actually play out
The four concerns operators raise when we walk them through the playbook:
“What about our historical time data?” Exported from QB Time as CSV and imported to Klees during week one. Historical records remain queryable in your QB Online for accounting purposes.
“What about our QB integration?” Klees has a native QB Online connector. Same destination, different source. The integration mechanics are documented; see the migrate from QuickBooks Time playbook.
“What about the crew having to learn a new app?” Klees onboards a typical 40-person crew in one shift with bilingual UI. We cover this in the training cleaning crews article.
“What about scheduling?” Klees scheduling is built into the same app. No second tool. Dispatchers run schedules and Live Map from the same dashboard.
The Alta Janitorial pattern
The Alta Janitorial case study is the canonical migration narrative for cleaning operators moving off the QB Time bundle. Hundreds of customer accounts, five states, bilingual crews, and a 4-week migration that ran in parallel with no downtime. The QB Online integration on the back end stayed intact; the time-tracking source switched.
For a construction operator the switch playbook article is the directly comparable narrative.
FAQ
Is QuickBooks Time being shut down?
Not based on any signal from Intuit. The product is actively maintained. The “shutdown” rumors are speculation, often triggered by bundling changes that look like deprecation but aren’t.
Will my QB Online break if I leave QB Time?
No. QB Online is a separate Intuit product. Klees pushes time data into QB Online via the native connector. Your accounting workflow is unchanged.
What if I’m mid-contract with QB Time?
Check your contract terms. Most QB Time annual contracts can be cancelled or downgraded with 30 days notice. Some VAR-resold contracts have longer notice requirements.
How long does the migration actually take?
Four weeks end-to-end for most operators. Week one is data import, week two is foreman training, week three is rolling crew cutover, week four is payroll integration. See the Alta case study for the detailed playbook.
Are the prices in this post going to be accurate forever?
No. They are accurate at time of writing in May 2026. Both Intuit and Klees can change pricing. The directional gap — Klees is materially less expensive at scale than QB Time — has held consistently for the last 18 months.
Got a QB Time renewal landing in the next 90 days? Book a Klees walkthrough or see pricing and run the math on your own user count.
Leads field-ops migrations at Klees. 12 years rolling out time tracking and dispatch systems for construction and janitorial crews across the Americas.
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