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How to Switch Time Tracking Apps Without Losing Your Hours (2026)

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How to Switch Time Tracking Apps Without Losing Your Hours (2026)

The short answer: Canceling a time tracking subscription does not cancel your obligation to produce those hours later. Federal law makes you keep payroll records for three years and the underlying time records for two, several states require more, and a wage claim can reach back three years. So export everything before the account closes, then import it into the new system instead of leaving it in a folder nobody can search. Punch reads timecard exports from ClockShark, Connecteam, QuickBooks Time, and Buddy Punch directly, or any spreadsheet you build yourself.

The Records Do Not Belong to Your Old App

This is the part owners get wrong. The recordkeeping duty sits on the employer. It does not transfer to the vendor, and it does not expire when the invoice does.

Under 29 CFR Part 516, you preserve payroll records for at least three years. The documents the wage computations were built from, including time cards, work schedules, and records of additions to or deductions from wages, are preserved for at least two years. The Department of Labor summarizes the same split in Fact Sheet #21.

States stack on top of that floor.

  • California requires payroll records showing daily hours worked and wages paid to be kept for not less than three years under Labor Code 1174.
  • New York minimum wage orders require weekly payroll records, including time records, to be kept for six years.

Now line that up against the clock on claims. Under 29 U.S.C. 255(a), an FLSA action runs two years back, or three if the violation was willful, and unpaid wages are commonly doubled as liquidated damages. A former employee can file in year two about hours worked in year one, on a platform you stopped paying for in between.

And if the record is gone, the gap does not work in your favor. In Anderson v. Mt. Clemens Pottery Co., the Supreme Court held that once an employee shows uncompensated work and a just and reasonable inference of its amount, the burden shifts to the employer to produce the precise record or disprove the inference. The Court was explicit about why: any other rule would put a premium on the employer's failure to keep records. Missing data is not neutral. It is the other side's evidence.

Export Everything Before You Cancel

Do this while the account is still active and you still have owner access. Once billing lapses, the export button is usually the first thing to go.

Pull, at minimum:

  1. Every punch, at the raw level. Timestamps per person per day, not a weekly summary. Summaries cannot be recomputed into daily detail, and daily detail is what a state with a daily overtime rule will ask for.
  2. Lunch and break records. Start and end times, not a subtracted total.
  3. The full date range, not the last 90 days. Default export windows are short. Set it to the beginning.
  4. Approved and paid history, including who approved and when.
  5. Edit history. Any timesheet changed after the fact, and by whom.
  6. Your roster. Names, emails, pay rates, hire dates, job site list.
  7. The pay period reports you actually ran payroll from.

Save it in a format you can still open in five years. CSV and XLSX qualify. A proprietary archive that only opens inside the vendor's app does not.

Do Not Let It Die in a Folder

An export sitting in a shared drive satisfies the letter of the retention rule and nothing else. When a claim, an audit, or a workers' comp premium review arrives, someone has to answer a specific question about a specific person on a specific day, and answer it fast. Scrolling a 40,000-row spreadsheet is not a system.

Load the history into the tool you are switching to instead, so old shifts and new shifts live in one searchable place, attributed to the same people.

Punch Imports Your Old Timecards Directly

Punch ships an import wizard for exactly this. It lives on the owner's side of the app, and it is owner-only at the database level, not just hidden in the interface.

Start from your old vendor's export. Punch parses timecard exports from ClockShark, Connecteam, QuickBooks Time, and Buddy Punch as-is. Pick the source, upload the file, and Punch already knows what its columns mean.

Or bring your own timecard. If you kept hours in a spreadsheet, or your old system is not on that list, use the generic path. Download the blank Punch template, or upload the file you already have and map the columns yourself. Punch auto-detects the mapping and lets you override every field.

Preview before anything is written. The wizard parses the file in front of you, shows sample rows, and counts the rows it could not read, so you find a broken date format before it becomes 800 bad shifts.

Match people, not just email strings. Old exports carry old email addresses. The match step pairs each identity in the file with a real member of your org by name or email, and you confirm the pairing. A crew member who changed their email still lands on their own timeline.

Job sites resolve by name. Punch matches the site name in your file against your job sites. Anything it cannot match imports with the site left blank and flagged in the error log, with a link to fix it inline. Nothing gets silently filed under the wrong address.

Choose how the history lands. Import old shifts as already approved, since they were already paid, or as pending if you want to review them.

Every run is on the record. Import history keeps each run with its row counts and error log, timestamped, so the migration itself is auditable.

Imported shifts are tagged as imported, so a year from now you can still tell the difference between a historical row and a live punch from the field.

Pick a Clean Switch Date

Do not cut over mid-workweek. Overtime is computed on a fixed and regularly recurring workweek, and splitting one week across two systems is how a crew member ends up with 38 hours in one place, 9 in the other, and no overtime paid on the 47 they actually worked.

Cut over on the first day of a workweek, and ideally on the first day of a pay period. Run the old system through the end of the current period, pay that period out of the old system, then start the new one clean. Import the history afterward, once nothing is still moving.

Give the crew one week of overlap warning, not a surprise. The punch itself should be the only thing that changes for them.

Why Teams Choose Punch Over ClockShark, Connecteam, QuickBooks Time, and Buddy Punch

Punch wins on price shape and on scope, and both show up the day you switch.

Pricing is flat per organization. You are not billed per seat, so a summer hire does not raise the invoice and you never have to price out whether a part-timer is worth a line item. Owners are always free. Per-user pricing turns growth into a cost decision instead of a hiring decision.

Every plan includes every feature. Geofenced punch in, lunch tracking, weekly and bi-weekly pay periods, manager approvals with bulk approve and reject, overtime presets for more than 50 countries, PTO requests, split shifts, shared-iPad kiosk mode with a PIN, offline punching, Reports with exports, QuickBooks Online, and Square. Nothing waits behind a higher tier, a hub, or an add-on. Your plan is about your size, not about which features you are allowed to have.

Verification without a camera. Punch confirms a shift with a job-site geofence, never a photo of your crew's face. No facial recognition, no punch-time selfie. Trust beats surveillance.

The record travels. Reports export to Excel and to a QuickBooks-ready CSV, and Punch connects to QuickBooks Online directly. The discipline that made this article necessary applies to us too: your hours should be yours to take.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long do I have to keep time records after switching?

Three years for payroll records and two years for the time records the wage math was built on, under 29 CFR Part 516. California requires three years for records of daily hours and wages, and New York requires six. Keep the longest period that applies to you.

Can I just keep the old app active in read-only mode instead?

You can, and some owners do for a few months. It is a recurring bill for data you already own, and it fails the moment that vendor changes plans or sunsets the account. Exporting and importing ends the dependency.

What if my old export has no email addresses?

Use the name columns. Punch's match step pairs identities by name when emails are missing or stale, and you confirm each pairing before anything is written.

Will importing old shifts change what I already paid?

No. Imported history is a record of what happened, not a recalculation. Import those shifts as already approved so they read as settled, and run new overtime math only on shifts worked in the new system.

What about shifts that were still open when I exported?

A row with a punch in and no punch out imports as an in-progress shift. Punch accepts it and you can complete it afterward, so an unfinished day does not get dropped or invented.

Do I need my old vendor's cooperation to leave?

No, as long as you export while you still have access. Do it before you cancel, not after.

Take Your Hours With You

The switch is not the risky part. Leaving three years of hours inside an account you are about to stop paying for is the risky part, because the law still expects you to produce them and gives the employee the benefit of the doubt when you cannot.

Export everything, cut over on a workweek boundary, and import the history so it is searchable next to the punches your crew makes tomorrow.

Start with Punch and bring the record with you.

This article is general information, not legal advice. Recordkeeping and retention requirements vary by state and are often stricter than federal law. Confirm your obligations with your state labor office or a qualified employment attorney.

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