Running a small business with hourly employees often means juggling schedules, time clocks, messaging, compliance, and payroll — and sometimes all of it on paper or in spreadsheets. That’s why Homebase exists: to bring all these tasks into one unified platform so business owners can spend less time on admin and more time on growth and customer experience.
Trusted by over 150,000 small businesses, Homebase empowers managers and team leads to hire, schedule, track, pay, and communicate with their hourly workforce from one place.
What Is Homebase?
Homebase is a cloud-based workforce management tool designed specifically for small and mid-sized businesses that rely on hourly employees.
Founded in 2014 and headquartered in San Francisco, Homebase started with scheduling and time tracking and has since grown to include payroll, team communication, HR compliance support, and integrations with POS and accounting systems.
Key Features of Homebase
Homebase brings together many operational features. Here are some of the standout ones:
- Employee Scheduling: Build schedules based on availability, forecast labor cost vs sales, let employees trade shifts.
- Time Clocks & Timesheets: Turn any device into a time-clock; track hours, breaks, overtime; sync into payroll.
- Team Messaging & Communication: Send messages to individual staff or the whole team, alert about shifts, requests, and changes.
- Payroll & HR Compliance: Run payroll for hourly teams with auto-calculate wages/taxes; help stay compliant with labor laws and record-keeping.
- Hiring & Onboarding: Post jobs, track applicants, and onboard new employees within the same platform.
- Integrations and Reporting: Links to POS systems, accounting platforms and provides analytics on labor costs, hours, and performance.
How Homebase Works
Using Homebase generally follows this workflow:
- Sign up and select your plan (there is a free tier for single-location teams).
- Add your employees, their availability, roles, and desired shifts.
- Create schedules quickly, avoiding conflicts and ensuring coverage; employees receive notifications.
- Track time via device or app; employees clock in/out, data flows into timesheets automatically.
- Run payroll or export to your payroll provider; stay compliant with labor laws and background checks.
- Communicate with your team: shift alerts, messaging, updates — all in one place.
- Analyze metrics: labor cost as a percentage of sales, overtime trends, staff turnover, and use those insights to improve.
Why Businesses Choose Homebase
Small business owners (especially in retail, restaurants, services) choose Homebase because it solves many hourly-team pain points:
- They want to save time on administrative tasks and shift away from spreadsheets/paper.
- They need to control labor costs, reduce overtime inadvertently, and align hours to business needs.
- They desire a single tool covering scheduling, time-tracking, payroll export, and team communication.
- They value flexibility and mobile access, enabling remote/field teams to access schedules and clock in/out easily.
- They appreciate a free or low-cost entry point, making the tool accessible for smaller operations.
Pros and Cons of Homebase
Pros:
- Very user-friendly, especially for non-tech-savvy managers.
- Strong feature set covering scheduling, time tracking, messaging, payroll and HR compliance.
- Free tier available for smaller locations / single-site use.
- Mobile app experience is solid — employees and managers can manage tasks on the go.
- Good reputation and usage scale — trusted by many small businesses.
Cons:
- Some advanced features (multi-location management, deep integrations, custom reporting) may be locked behind higher tiers.
- As with any cloud tool, you’ll need reliable internet/mobile access for full benefit.
Final Thoughts
For small-to-mid-sized businesses with hourly teams, Homebase offers a compelling, modern solution to what used to be the tedious side of operations. By combining scheduling, time-tracking, payroll export, and team communication into a single platform, Homebase helps business owners reclaim hours they’d otherwise spend on paperwork and coordination.
If you want to streamline your hourly workforce management, gain clearer visibility into labor costs, and empower your team with mobile tools — Homebase is a strong contender.
Efficient. Unified. Designed for hourly teams. That’s Homebase.
It’s time to check it out — Get Homebase Now
