Time Tracking for Solar Installers: Multi-Site Days and Live Map

A residential solar install isn’t an all-day job. It’s a 4-to-6-hour job, and a working crew hits 2-3 of them a day in the busy season. Some commercial work goes longer; pre-install site surveys and inspections go shorter. The point: a solar installer’s day is multi-site by nature, and the time tracking system has to handle that without forcing the crew to fight the app between every job.

Most construction time tracking apps were built around the assumption that a crew shows up at a site at 7 AM and works that site until 4 PM. Solar breaks that assumption. This is what good time tracking looks like for crews that don’t.

What’s different about solar time tracking

The solar installer’s day looks more like cleaning route work than traditional construction:

Dimension	Traditional construction	Solar installer
Sites per crew per day	1	2-5
Time per site	Full shift	3-6 hours
Site geometry	Defined job site	Residential rooftop or commercial array
Customer present	Sometimes	Often (residential)
Weather sensitivity	Medium	High — rain delays cascade
Crew composition	Often stable	Lead + helpers, can split
Cost code complexity	Phase-driven	Site-driven
Travel time as % of day	5-10%	20-30%

That travel time line is the underrated one. A solar crew spends a quarter of their day driving between sites. How the time tracking system treats that travel — paid, unpaid, billable, non-billable — directly affects payroll accuracy and gross margin.

The core setup: per-site geofences, fast clock-in

For solar, the geofence and clock-in patterns matter more than almost any other field-ops vertical.

Geofence per site, tight radius

A residential rooftop install has a small footprint. A 30-50m geofence centered on the property is right. Tighter than that and GPS variance produces false negatives. Looser and the geofence loses meaning.

Commercial sites can be larger — a 200kW array on a warehouse roof might need a 100-150m geofence. Set it per site, not globally.

Crew Clock for batch site arrivals

When a 3-person crew arrives at a residential install, you don’t want each installer fishing out a phone to clock in independently. The lead opens Klees, taps Crew Clock, the whole crew is on the clock in 4 seconds. PinShot still runs per person for identity verification. See Crew Clock explained for the mechanics.

Site change as a single action

When the crew finishes site #1 and moves to site #2, the foreman taps “next site” inside the app. The first site’s time entry closes, the second site’s opens, and the crew is on the road. No re-clock-in for each crew member individually.

Travel time policy, explicit

Klees lets the operator define travel-time policy per cost code. Common solar policies:

• Travel from yard → first site: paid, billable.
• Travel between sites: paid, often non-billable.
• Travel from last site → yard: paid, non-billable.

Setting this explicitly in the app removes the daily ambiguity and the end-of-week reconciliation work.

Live Map: solar’s dispatch unlock

For an operator running 6-10 solar crews across a metro, Live Map is the difference between a clean day and a chaotic one.

The crew at site #2 finishes 90 minutes early. The dispatcher sees them on the map, sees a closer-to-them customer on the day’s backlog, taps “reassign” and the crew gets the new site pushed to their phones. The crew that was supposed to handle that site stays on their current job longer to finish properly.

Pre-Live Map, this same coordination took 4-6 phone calls and 25 minutes. Post-Live Map, it takes 90 seconds. Multiplied across a 10-crew day, that’s 4-5 hours of dispatcher time reclaimed.

The Live Map for construction supervisors piece covers the broader dispatch mechanics. Solar is just the most-multi-site case of the same pattern.

Weather windows and crew splits

Solar work is weather-sensitive. Rain delays at site #1 cascade to sites #2 and #3. A good time tracking system has to handle three weather scenarios:

1. Crew waits out a storm at site. Klees tracks the wait as paid on-clock time at the current site. No data fragmentation.
2. Crew breaks early due to weather. The shift ends at clock-out. The remaining sites move to tomorrow via Live Map drag-and-drop.
3. Crew splits — half stays at site #1 finishing, half moves to site #2. Klees handles crew splits by reassigning users to a new crew mid-shift. PinShot runs at the new site for the splitting half.

The third case is the one that breaks most time trackers. Klees was designed for it.

Bilingual UI for the solar workforce

The solar installation workforce is heavily Spanish-primary, particularly in the Sun Belt — California, Arizona, Texas, Florida, Nevada. The Solar Energy Industries Association workforce reports confirm the demographic pattern.

If your time tracking app is English-only, you’re either:

• Forcing crews to use it in their second language (slow, error-prone).
• Pushing the foreman into a translator role (steals supervision time).
• Having half the crew avoid the app entirely (broken data).

Klees ships EN, ES, and PT as first-class languages. See the bilingual onboarding case for the productivity math.

Cost codes that match how solar bills

Solar billing is typically per-job, often with milestones tied to inspection and PTO (permission to operate). Time tracking has to support that billing model:

• Per-site cost code. Every time entry tags to the site.
• Phase tag inside the site. Pre-install, racking, panels, electrical, inspection prep, PTO.
• Travel as its own cost code. Billable vs non-billable per company policy.
• Material delivery wait time tagged separately. So the operations team can audit supplier reliability.

Klees lets the operator configure all four. The reports export per cost code, per customer, per site, per crew — making job costing on Klees one of the cleaner workflows in the field-ops space.

Pricing math for a solar operator

A typical mid-sized residential solar operator running 8 crews of 3-4 installers each:

Item	Number / Cost
Total installers	28
Klees plan	Pro
Monthly subscription	$48 + (28 × $9) = $300/mo
Annual subscription	~$3,600
Operator hours reclaimed/yr	~400 (dispatch + payroll)
Loaded operator cost saved	~$20,000
Net ROI year one	~5x

Pull the live numbers on the pricing page. Enterprise pricing at $600/mo flat for 100 seats opens up to larger commercial solar operators.

Common solar setup mistakes

After helping solar operators move to Klees, the recurring issues:

1. Global geofence radius too wide. A 500m global geofence renders most residential sites useless. Set per-site.
2. No travel-time policy. Crews don’t know what to clock as paid time on the road. Set the policy, train the foremen, move on.
3. Skipping PinShot on partial-day sites. When a crew splits, PinShot at the new site is the only verification of who actually moved.
4. Treating multi-site days as multi-shift. Don’t end and re-open a shift between sites. Use the site-change action.
5. English-only app on Sun Belt crews. Crew adoption tops out around 50%. Switch to EN/ES/PT.

FAQ

Can Klees handle commercial solar arrays too?

Yes. Larger commercial sites use wider geofences (100-200m) and longer per-site time entries. The same crew can run residential and commercial sites in the same week.

How does Klees handle subcontractor crews?

Subcontractor crews are configured as separate crew groups under the same workspace, with their own users, PinShot policies, and cost codes. Their hours flow into the same payroll export.

Does Klees integrate with solar-specific CRM systems?

Klees pushes time data to QuickBooks, Gusto, ADP, and similar payroll/accounting systems. For solar-specific CRM integration (Aurora, OpenSolar, Enphase Enlighten), Klees exports CSV/API time data that those systems can ingest. Direct integrations are roadmap items — ask via contact.

What about prevailing wage on commercial solar projects?

Klees Pro supports prevailing wage rate uplifts per trade and per state, with certified payroll export. Useful for any commercial solar project tied to public funding or utility programs.

Can I trial Klees without committing?

Yes. 30-day free trial on Standard or Pro. Sign up and import your first crew in under an hour.

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Want a setup walk-through tailored to your solar operation? Talk to field ops — we’ll spin up sample sites and crews live.