People & HR

How to track pto and time off as Construction and Contractor Founders

People & HRFor Construction and Contractor Founders3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

You're running a crew of 12 carpenters and four subs, and PTO tracking lives in a group text thread and a sticky note on your truck dashboard. When Carlos asks if he accrued enough days to cover Thanksgiving week, you have to dig through last year's QuickBooks payroll exports or call your bookkeeper. Paylocity or ADP might have the data if you're on a real payroll system, but half your W-2 guys are on a hybrid arrangement and the subs are 1099 anyway. You lose billable hours chasing who's out which week, then get blindsided when three framers are off the same Monday you promised a foundation pour.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

People & HRFor Construction and Contractor Founders3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live PTO ledger that pulls accrued time from Paylocity or ADP on a schedule so you're never guessing balances before a crew-heavy week

A calendar-connected view that overlays crew time-off requests against your active job schedule, so you can see conflicts before they cost you a pour day

An automated weekly alert that flags any job where more than one key trade is out simultaneously, sent straight to your Slack or email

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

Scheduling Knowledge Management Task Manager

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Paylocity data on a schedule (employee records, time-off balances, payroll runs) and your Google Calendar on a schedule (job site events, pour dates, inspection windows). For shops on ADP, Starch syncs your ADP worker and pay statement data instead. If your crew availability or sub schedules live in Buildertrend or CoConstruct, Starch automates those sites through your browser — no API needed. Notion or Google Docs PTO policy docs connect from Starch's integration catalog and are queried live when the knowledge base needs to surface policy details.

Prompts to copy

Build me a PTO tracker that pulls employee balances from Paylocity and shows me who's scheduled off each week, flagged against my active job calendar from Google Calendar

Create a knowledge base page for our PTO and time-off policy — accrual rates for full-time W-2 crew, blackout weeks during peak framing season, and how subs should notify us of unavailability

Add a weekly task every Monday: review crew availability for the next two weeks and flag any job with two or more key trades requesting the same days off

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Paylocity (or ADP) — Starch syncs your employee records, time-off balances, and accrual data on a schedule. You'll see every W-2 crew member's current PTO balance without opening a payroll report.

2 Connect Google Calendar — Starch syncs your job site calendar including pour days, framing milestones, inspection windows, and sub visit dates. This is the schedule PTO requests will be checked against.

3 Tell Starch: 'Build me a PTO request tracker. When a crew member submits a time-off request, show me their current balance, the days requested, and whether any other crew member has the same dates flagged.' Starch builds the app.

4 Use the Knowledge Management app to document your PTO policy — accrual rates (e.g., 1 hour per 40 worked for full-timers), any blackout periods around peak schedule weeks, and the process for 1099 subs to notify you of unavailability. Tell Starch: 'Create a PTO policy page that new crew members can search to answer questions about accrual and approval without asking me.'

5 Set up a browser automation for Buildertrend or CoConstruct: tell Starch 'Every Sunday night, pull next week's scheduled labor from Buildertrend and compare it against approved time-off requests. Flag any job site where we're short a trade.' Starch automates this through your browser — no API needed.

6 Add a Task Manager reminder: 'Every Monday at 7am, remind me to review crew availability for the next 14 days and approve or deny any pending PTO requests before the week's work orders go out.'

7 For subs, build a simple intake: tell Starch 'Create a form where subs can notify me of unavailable weeks. Store responses and show me a monthly view of sub availability by trade — framing, electrical, plumbing, HVAC.' Starch builds the form and the view.

8 Wire a Slack alert (Starch connects to Slack from its integration catalog): 'Every Friday afternoon, send me a Slack message listing any crew member with a time-off request for the following week that hasn't been approved yet, and any job site that week with a staffing conflict.'

9 Build a seasonal blackout overlay: tell Starch 'Show me a calendar view that highlights our peak schedule weeks — late spring through summer, and the two weeks before Thanksgiving — and flags any PTO requests that land in those windows for manual review.'

10 At the start of each month, use the knowledge base to review accrual math: Starch surfaces current balances pulled from Paylocity so you can catch anyone who's overdrawn before it becomes a payroll dispute.

11 For year-end, tell Starch: 'Pull a summary of all PTO taken vs. accrued for each W-2 employee this year, formatted for my bookkeeper.' Export it straight from the app instead of reconstructing it from scattered timesheets.

12 As your crew grows, fork the app and add fields: trade classification (framing, finish, concrete), job assignment, and whether the employee is union or non-union. Describe the change in plain language and Starch updates the app.

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

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Worked example

Week of June 9, 2026 — Foundation pour on Lot 14

Sample numbers from a real run

Carlos M. (lead framer) — PTO balance	32
Days requested off (June 9–10)	2
Balance after approval	30
Other framers requesting same week	1
Scheduled pour day crew required (framers)	3

You have a foundation pour locked for June 10 on Lot 14 — a $340,000 custom residential build. Carlos, your lead framer, requests June 9 and 10 off. He has 32 hours accrued, so the balance math is fine. But Starch's weekly conflict check also surfaces that Danny, your second framer, already has June 9 approved. With both of them out, you're down to one framer on a three-person pour day. The Slack alert fires Friday afternoon, before you've confirmed the concrete truck. You move Carlos's days to the following week — he still takes his time off, the pour happens on schedule, and you didn't find out about the conflict when the truck was already rolling. Your Buildertrend calendar, pulled automatically through browser automation, updated the job timeline accordingly. The whole resolution took four minutes instead of a frantic Saturday morning phone tree.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

PTO accrued vs. taken per W-2 employee (monthly, pulled from Paylocity sync)

Crew coverage rate on job sites during requested time-off weeks (flagged conflicts vs. total requests)

Average PTO request approval lag time (days from request to your decision)

Peak-week conflict rate — how often a blackout week gets a time-off request that requires a manual override

Sub unavailability notification lead time — how many days advance notice you're actually getting from 1099 trades

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

Paylocity time-off module alone

Tracks W-2 balances and approvals fine, but has no connection to your job schedule — you still have to manually cross-reference who's off against what's on the calendar that week.

Buildertrend / CoConstruct crew scheduling

Shows job-site labor assignments but isn't built for PTO accrual tracking or policy enforcement — you're running two separate systems with no automatic conflict detection between them.

Paper timesheets and a group text

Zero cost and zero setup, but zero visibility — you won't know about a staffing conflict until the morning it bites you on a site that has a concrete truck on the way.

Gusto HR

Good PTO tracking and solid for small W-2 teams, but connects from Starch's integration catalog for live queries only — Starch can pull Gusto data on demand but won't have the deep scheduled sync it has with Paylocity and ADP.

Spreadsheet in Google Sheets

Connect Google Sheets from Starch's integration catalog and it works as a data source, but someone still has to manually update it — Starch won't automatically know when balances change unless you're also syncing Paylocity.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — scheduling, knowledge management, task manager all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

My crew is a mix of W-2 employees on Paylocity and 1099 subs. Can Starch handle both?

For your W-2 crew, Starch syncs Paylocity data on a schedule — employee records, balances, time-off history. For 1099 subs, there's no payroll record to sync, but you can build a simple availability intake form in Starch where subs submit unavailable weeks. Starch stores those responses and surfaces them alongside your W-2 crew calendar so you have one view of who's out, regardless of employment type.

My field schedule is in Buildertrend. Can Starch read that?

Buildertrend doesn't have a public API that Starch syncs directly, but Starch automates Buildertrend through your browser — no API needed. You tell Starch what schedule data to pull (labor assignments, milestone dates, inspection windows), and it reads the pages the same way you would. That data then flows into your PTO conflict checks.

Does Starch work if I'm on ADP instead of Paylocity?

Yes. Starch syncs ADP worker records, org units, and pay statements on a schedule the same way it does Paylocity. Connect whichever one you're on — the PTO tracker app works with either.

Is this going to work for a crew of 12, or is it built for bigger companies?

The App Store templates are built specifically for small operator teams — 5 to 30 people. A 50-person commercial GC would outgrow this faster than you would. For a 12-person framing crew where you're the one approving PTO requests, this is the right size.

What does Starch not do here that I should know about?

Starch is not a payroll system and won't calculate PTO payouts on termination or file anything with a state labor board. It reads and surfaces the data your payroll system already has. Also worth knowing: Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today, so if your HR data handling has a compliance requirement at that level, that's a real consideration.

What if I don't use Paylocity or ADP — I just do payroll through QuickBooks?

Starch syncs QuickBooks data on a schedule, including payroll-related entities. The depth of time-off balance data depends on how you're tracking it in QuickBooks — if it's in there, Starch can read it. If your PTO records live in a spreadsheet or a folder of timesheets, Starch can connect Google Sheets from its integration catalog and query that live, or you can paste the data in and build the tracker from there.