Payroll software with time tracking: what it really means

There are two different jobs hiding behind "payroll with time tracking." If your team is paid by the hour, approved hours have to become the pay amount every period, and the integration that matters is how cleanly hours flow into the payroll calculation. If your team is salaried, hours don't change what anyone is paid, and the integration that matters is simpler: can you see attendance, leave, and logged time next to pay without exporting anything? Wrkbase payroll is built for the second job. Pay runs are generated from salary records, and attendance, leave, and task hours live on the same employee record, because they're one system, not two products synced together.

For a salaried team, the familiar month-end chore, export attendance from one tool, cross-check it against a payroll spreadsheet, chase the two people whose leave never got recorded, mostly disappears, because attendance, approved leave, and the pay run are in one place. Payment status, paid, partial, unpaid, is always derived from actual payment records, and a pay run moves through Draft, Approved, then Paid, with line-item edits only allowed while still in Draft, so a mistake never slips straight through to payment.

Two of the most common answers to "payroll with time tracking" are worth naming directly. Gusto starts payroll at $49/month plus $6/employee on its Simple plan, but time tracking only unlocks on the higher-priced Plus tier. Run Gusto payroll with a separate time-tracking tool instead, and you're syncing two subscriptions through an integration, not reading one shared record.

QuickBooks comes closer: because Intuit owns both products, hours approved in QuickBooks Time flow into QuickBooks Payroll directly, no export step. The catch is that QuickBooks Time isn't sold standalone, it requires an active QuickBooks Online subscription on top, and both Time tiers rose in July 2026 (Premium to $20/month plus $10/user, Elite to $40/month plus $12/user). Two products, two bills, synced, and built for hourly pay, which Wrkbase doesn't calculate.

Real payroll always needs a manual override somewhere: a bonus, a one-off deduction, a correction. That's supported per person, per run, but every adjustment is its own recorded entry, not an edit that silently overwrites the computed base number, so what was computed and what was added on top of it both stay visible afterward.

Worth being direct about what Wrkbase doesn't do. Its hourly pay is a rate times attendance hours with daily overtime at one multiplier, and no weekly or state overtime rules. It doesn't file payroll taxes or move money either: actual payment still goes through a bank transfer, an accountant, or a payroll processor, and gets recorded here once it's done. Gusto and QuickBooks Payroll run payroll end to end, tax filing, direct deposit, and overtime rules included, which is real value if that's the actual job. Wrkbase fits a small team that wants attendance, leave, time, and pay runs in one system at $8 per member per month, and it can sit underneath a tax-filing service rather than replace one.