Ran HR for a regional distributor before buying a landscaping business on Chicago's North Shore. Managing 19 people across summer lawn crews and winter snow removal has given me a pretty direct look at how most time tracking tools are built for 9-to-5 office work and quietly fall apart when your headcount doubles in May and halves in November.
The real problems aren't exotic irregular schedules, workers spread across multiple sites, payroll that needs to be clean despite chaotic weeks. Most tools handle the steady-state case fine. Seasonal variance is where they get sloppy.
What's actually helped us: GPS-based punching so I'm not chasing down who was where, geofencing per job site, and payroll exports that don't require me to manually clean the data before sending it over. Buddy Punch handles this reasonably well for our scale. Not perfect, but the accountability features were the main reason we picked it over Homebase.
Curious whether others managing seasonal teams have found tools that handle the ramp-up/ramp-down gracefully, or if everyone's just cobbling something together.