On a production floor, time has to be recorded against work orders rather than against a week, and the coding usually already exists in a scheduling or production system. The sensible arrangement is for the clock to read those orders rather than for somebody to maintain a parallel list that drifts out of step within a month.
Import the work orders
A product that cannot take work orders from your production system will require somebody to keep a second list current, and that list will be wrong by the end of the first month. Ask how orders arrive, how often, and what happens to time booked against an order that is subsequently cancelled or merged, because both happen regularly.
Setup, changeover and downtime need somewhere to go
If they have nowhere to be booked they land on the last job, and the costing that results will make one product look unprofitable for reasons that have nothing to do with it. Agree the non productive codes before go live and keep the list short, because a long list produces guesses at the point of booking.
Reconcile coded hours to paid hours
Coded hours must total exactly to paid hours, and the report that proves it is the one to ask for specifically. Products that split job time but cannot reconcile leave a small daily discrepancy that becomes a quarterly argument between the floor and finance, and nobody can settle it after the fact.
Questions people ask about manufacturing time tracking software
Should the clock and the production system be one product?
Rarely, and they must exchange work orders reliably. The integration is the thing to evaluate, not the interface.
How many codes is too many?
Beyond about twenty visible at once, accuracy drops sharply. Show operators only the orders relevant to their station.
Does this replace payroll time?
No, it feeds both. Job costing and payroll answer different questions from the same record, which is why the reconciliation matters.