Your team's hours, schedule and pay —
in the same system as your sales
Your staff clock in and out on the counter tablet. You publish next week's rota once. On payday you open one screen that already knows everybody's rate, their bonus, the advance you floated them last month, and what is left to pay. Nothing is re-keyed from one app into another.
The time clocks a small store usually ends up buying — Homebase, When I Work, Deputy, Connecteam — are separate applications that, at best, talk to your register. UpChannels puts the clock in the same system as your orders, your deliveries and your service jobs, so the hours you paid for are already sitting next to the money they earned.
One time clock, not a second app your team has to remember
Most small stores end up with a time clock that lives on its own: a separate login, a separate app on everybody's phone, a separate bill, and a separate set of numbers that has to be carried across to payday by hand.
UpChannels puts the clock where the rest of the day already is. Someone punches in on the counter tablet with their own PIN, and the punch is captured with a photo, so nobody clocks in a colleague who is still in the car park. Breaks are their own record — a short rest break stays inside paid hours, and a proper unpaid meal break comes out of them, because the law treats those two things differently and so should the timesheet at a cleaning company or a bike shop.
By the end of the week paid hours are totalled, corrections are logged with the name of whoever made them, and the period can be approved and locked — so the pay run you do on Friday is the same one you can reproduce in March.
Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, a rest period of 20 minutes or less is paid working time. An unpaid meal period generally has to be 30 minutes or more, and the employee has to be “completely relieved from duty”.
— US Department of Labor, Fact Sheet #22
UpChannels records breaks separately for exactly that reason. Break start, break end, break minutes and total paid minutes are each their own field on the entry.
UpChannels does not offer fingerprint or face-scan clock-in, and that is a decision rather than a gap. Illinois' Biometric Information Privacy Act treats a fingerprint, voiceprint, or scan of hand or face geometry as a regulated biometric identifier carrying liquidated damages of $1,000 per negligent violation and $5,000 per intentional or reckless one, plus attorney's fees — and it explicitly excludes photographs from that definition. A photo on the punch gets a small retailer most of the benefit without the exposure.
What each person is owed, worked out before payday
A pay run in UpChannels pulls the period's approved hours and puts a number against every person: their rate, how they are paid, the bonus you promised for clearing the back room, the advance they took in August and the balance still running against it, and what remains to pay. Rate, pay type, bonuses, advances, remaining pay — on one screen, with the maths showing.
The arithmetic is on screen rather than in your head. You can see why the number is the number, change something, and see it move.
Then you export it. UpChannels is not a payroll provider and does not file payroll taxes. It calculates and records what to pay; your payroll provider still does the filing — because the IRS is unambiguous that “employers are ultimately responsible for the payment of income tax withheld and both the employer and employee portions of social security and Medicare taxes”, whoever presses the buttons. So the pay run comes out as a clean file to hand to Gusto, ADP, Paychex, your bookkeeper, or whoever a small retailer already trusts with the filings — an export you download, not a built connection to any of them. You stop doing the maths by hand. You keep the provider you already have.
“In the event of default by a third party, the employer remains responsible for the deposit of the federal tax liabilities and timely filing of returns.”
— IRS, Outsourcing Payroll and Third Party Payers
Payroll deductions are regulated differently in different states, so check the repayment rate on an advance with your payroll provider before you set it.
Next week's rota, published once
Build the week on a grid in UpChannels: who is on, when, and at which store if a clothing or furniture business runs more than one. You see the Saturday with nobody on the floor before your customers do, and staff who float between two locations appear on one roster rather than two.
When it is right, publish it. Everybody sees the same version, which is the entire point — a rota that lives in three group chats and a photo of a whiteboard is not a rota.
Because the schedule and the clock are the same system, scheduled hours and worked hours sit in the same place, and the gap between them stops being a mystery you solve on Sunday night.
UpChannels flags hours as they approach the overtime line you set. Federal overtime starts after 40 hours in a workweek at not less than one and a half times the regular rate, according to the US Department of Labor; some states add daily thresholds on top — California requires one and a half times beyond eight hours in a workday and double time beyond twelve, per the California Department of Industrial Relations.
UpChannels shows you the hours as they build. It does not give legal advice about which rule applies to your business.
When somebody says the hours are wrong
It happens in every business. Someone is certain they worked Saturday. The timesheet says otherwise. The conversation happens by text, gets resolved somehow, and three months later nobody can remember what was agreed.
In UpChannels that becomes a thread. The employee raises it against the pay period in question. You reply. What actually changed is recorded against the timesheet, with a date and a name on it. Time-off requests work the same way at a retail store or a plumbing company — asked for, approved or declined, and on the record.
It costs nothing to keep this record while everyone still agrees. It costs a great deal to reconstruct it eighteen months later.
The Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division “recovered more than $259 million in back wages for 176,957 employees nationwide in fiscal year 2025” — about $1,465 per worker.
— US Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division enforcement data
The Fair Labor Standards Act requires employers to keep payroll records for three years, and the records that back up wage calculations — time cards, work schedules, records of additions and deductions — for two.
— US Department of Labor, Fact Sheet #21
In UpChannels, those records keep themselves.
Labour cost sitting next to the revenue that paid for it
This is the part a scheduling app cannot do, no matter how good it is.
A time clock that lives in its own application knows how many hours Marcus worked. It does not know that the store took $19,400 that week, that eleven of Marcus's hours were spent on two delivery routes, or that four sales on his ticket carry commission that has not been paid out yet. Those four facts live in four systems, and the only thing joining them is the owner, on a Sunday, with a spreadsheet.
In UpChannels the join is already made, because it is one database. Labour cost as a share of what a gift or furniture store actually sold is a number you read, not a project you undertake. Hours booked against a delivery or a service call tell a lawn care or plumbing business what that job really cost before it quotes the next one like it. And a salesperson on an hourly base plus commission is one person with one figure, instead of two apps and a calculator.
For scale: total employer compensation costs for private industry workers averaged $46.89 per hour worked in June 2026 — $32.82 in wages and salaries and $14.07 in benefits — according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Labour is the largest controllable line in most small retailers, and it is the one most often measured last.
Labour against revenue
The week's paid hours, priced at each person's rate, against the week's sales — both read from the same system, with no export in between.
Cost per job and per route
A punch can be booked to the service assignment or the delivery route it was spent on, so what a job really cost in labour is a fact rather than a guess.
Hourly plus commission
The sale, the salesperson, the commission and the clock are all in UpChannels, so base pay and what somebody sold sit on one person in one place.
The record you would want if anyone ever asks
The law is refreshingly relaxed about how you keep time records and completely unrelaxed about whether they are right. The Fair Labor Standards Act “requires no particular form for the records”; employers “may use any timekeeping method they choose”, and any timekeeping plan is acceptable “as long as it is complete and accurate”, in the US Department of Labor's own words.
Complete and accurate is the hard part when the record is a paper sheet by the back door.
UpChannels records the punches, the breaks, the corrections and who made them, the schedule that was published, and the conversation when somebody disagreed. It keeps them for years, in one place, searchable, with a name and a timestamp on everything — for a ten-person electronics store the same way as for a lawn care crew.
What it does not do is tell you that you are compliant. Break rules, overtime thresholds and scheduling requirements differ by state and sometimes by city, they change, and what applies to your business depends on facts about your business that software does not know. UpChannels keeps the record. Whether the record shows what it should is a conversation for you and your employment lawyer — and having the record is what makes that conversation short.
What this replaces, and what it does not
Most small retailers we meet are paying for two or three of these already, on top of their point-of-sale and their accounting.
An illustration, not a quote
One store, eight employees, wanting a time clock, a rota, time-off controls and a way to work out pay: Homebase Plus at $70 per location per month, plus the Homebase payroll add-on at $39 a month and $6 per employee paid — $70 plus $39 plus $48 — comes to $157 a month, before the point-of-sale and before the accounting software. Those are Homebase's own list prices as published on 11 September 2026. What UpChannels Workforce costs depends on your plan, which is on the pricing page.
| Tool | What it is | Published price (11 Sep 2026) | Does it know your inventory, orders, deliveries and service jobs? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Homebase | Scheduling and time clock for hourly teams, priced per location | Basic $0 (one location, up to 10 employees) · Essentials $30 · Plus $70 · All-in-One $120, per location per month. Payroll add-on $39/mo plus $6 per employee paid | No. Integrates with a point-of-sale. Two stores means two subscriptions. |
| When I Work | Scheduling plus time and attendance, priced per user | Essentials $2.50 · Pro $5 · Premium $8, per user per month | No. |
| Deputy | Scheduling, timesheets and labour compliance tooling | Lite $5 · Core $6.50 · Pro $9, per user per month, with a $30 monthly invoice minimum since 1 September 2025. Payroll add-on $8/user/mo plus a $49 base. HR add-on $2/user/mo | No. Payroll and HR integrations only. |
| 7shifts | Scheduling, tips and labour, built for restaurants | A free tier plus paid tiers; the figures load client-side and were not verifiable | No — and it is built for restaurants, not retail or the trades. |
| Connecteam | Deskless-team app sold as three separate hubs | Free for up to 10 users. Each hub roughly $29–$35/mo for the first 30 users depending on billing term, then per additional user; Advanced and Expert tiers $49–$59 and $99–$119 | No. Workforce, comms and HR are priced as three subscriptions. |
| QuickBooks Time | Time tracking bolted onto QuickBooks Online | Premium $20/mo plus $10/user · Elite $40/mo plus $12/user. Requires a QuickBooks Online subscription | Knows your books. Not your inventory, orders, deliveries or jobs. |
| Gusto | Full-service payroll and HR — withholds, files, issues W-2s | The pricing page would not load for us; see their site | No. It is a payroll provider, and a good one. Different job. |
| Square Payroll / Staff | Payroll and team tools attached to the Square point-of-sale | Payroll $35/mo plus $6 per person paid; contractor-only $6 per person/mo. Advanced team controls sit inside Square Plus at $49/mo per location or Square Premium at $149/mo per location | Knows what rang through the Square till. Not your purchase orders, delivery routes or service jobs. |
| Clover | Point-of-sale with employee tools by plan, plus App Market add-ons | Varies by plan and hardware; scheduling is typically a paid App Market app | Knows the register. Scheduling is usually a third-party app on top. |
| UpChannels Workforce | Time clock, rota, pay runs and hours disputes inside the system that runs the business | Part of the UpChannels platform — see our pricing page | Yes. Same system, same database. |
Prices were taken from each vendor's published pricing page on 11 September 2026 and are subject to change — check them. Gusto, 7shifts, Clover and Square's team tiering did not render server-side and are described without figures. This is not an endorsement or a criticism of any product; several of these are excellent at what they do.
Questions owners actually ask
Is there a time clock app that also knows my sales, so I can see labour cost as a percentage of revenue without exporting spreadsheets?
Do I still need a separate scheduling app if I already run my orders and inventory in one system?
Does UpChannels file my payroll taxes or send out W-2s?
How do I stop employees clocking each other in?
How long do I actually have to keep employee time records?
Can I track meal and rest breaks for staff in California?
Someone says they worked hours that aren't on the timesheet. How do I handle that without it becoming a fight?
Can I pay somebody hourly and on commission at the same time?
Can I give an employee an advance and take it back out of their pay?
How much does workforce management cost for a shop with eight employees?
Workforce is one part of UpChannels
UpChannels Workforce is the time clock, staff rota and pay run for a small independent retailer or service business — cleaning, lawn care and HVAC crews, furniture and liquidation stores, gift and clothing shops. Staff clock in and out on a shared tablet with their own PIN and a photo on the punch, paid rest breaks and unpaid meal breaks are recorded separately, hours can be booked to a service job or a delivery route, and each pay period is approved and locked before a pay run applies every person's rate, pay type, bonuses and outstanding advances and exports the result. Because the clock sits in the same system as the sales, orders and jobs, labour cost is already beside the revenue that paid for it. UpChannels is not a payroll provider and does not file payroll taxes — your payroll provider or bookkeeper still does the filing.
UpChannels is an all-in-one platform for small independent retailers and service businesses — sales, inventory, customers, scheduling, delivery, payments and finance in one system — and a real team that builds your website, runs your ads, and automates the busywork. Every capability below is included in the same subscription, with no integration to wire up between them.
The product moves faster than this page. UpChannels ships updates most weeks, so a description here can lag what is already in the software. Where the two disagree, the running product is the current version — tell us if you find one and we will correct the page.
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One system for the counter, the schedule, the truck and the books — and a team that will build the website, run the ads and take the busywork off you if you would rather not do it yourself. Start with the trial, or have us walk you through it first.
