Straight answers, before you ask

Get in touch and tell us how your week works. If Costworks fits, we send you an access code, and you set the company up in three short steps: your company and the day your week starts, your own details, then a code emailed to you and a password. You’re then the company’s owner, and you invite your crew by email. See Getting started.

Not yet. Every firm starts from an access code we issue after a short conversation, because the pay rules are worth getting right before anybody is paid from them. If you’ve already been sent a code, you can use it on the Getting started page.

No. Costworks runs in the phone’s own browser at app.costworks.co.uk, on iPhone and Android, and on a tablet or computer in the office. Add it to the home screen once and it opens like any other app. See Signing in for the first time.

There’s no import button in the app. If you have a job register or client list in a spreadsheet, talk to us about loading it for you when you start. And you can keep your paper job numbers: type them in as they are, and 26 156 finds 2026-0156 in any search.

No. Who you are comes from your sign-in, so the crew only ever see their own hours, and nobody on the crew ever sees a rate or a gross figure. The one thing shared is who else is off when somebody asks for holiday: names and dates, nothing more.

No, on purpose. Hours save against a live connection, because two copies of a payroll record that can disagree are worse than walking to the gate to send the week. If there’s no signal, nothing typed is lost: get to signal or wifi and tap Save again.

Each job is its own shift. Save the first, then tap the day again and choose Add another shift, which starts where the first finished. Shifts that cross are refused, so no hour is paid twice; a handover on the hour is fine. See Two jobs in a day.

Yes. A shift that finishes after midnight is one shift, worked out from the real times, and the two nights a year the clocks change come out right.

Yes. Each person signs in as themselves and sees only their own week; when they’ve finished, Settings → Sign out hands it to the next person. On a shared device, don’t tick Keep me signed in.

They ask the office to send it back. It returns to them with the office’s reason, the days open again, and they resend it. See Sending your week.

No, and it isn’t meant to. It produces hours and gross pay for every person and exports them as a spreadsheet for your payroll bureau or software. PAYE, National Insurance, pensions, RTI and payslips stay where they are.

Yes. You set the daily and weekly overtime thresholds, the multipliers for overtime, Saturday, Sunday and bank holidays, and switch each rule on or off. A change starts from a week you choose, and a week already approved is never re-priced. The order the rules apply in is fixed. See Setting your pay rules.

Add a new rate with the date it starts — it can be in the future. Every day is priced at the rate in force on that day, so earlier hours keep their old rate for good. See Pay rates and pay rises.

Not at all. The day your week starts is a company setting, and the payroll month is the whole weeks ending in it. See Changing the day your week starts.

A CSV with a row per person: hours per multiplier, the total, fabrication and installation, the rate, gross pay, unpriced hours, stay-away nights and pay, and how many of the month’s weeks are approved. It opens cleanly in Excel. See The monthly report.

The office enters their days off each invoice, per day and job. Those hours count on the job and its audit report, and never on the payroll. Subcontractors have no sign-in. See Subcontractor hours.

Hours belong to the person who worked them, so the office sends a week back with a reason and the crew member corrects it. The office can add or remove materials and tick stay-away nights for anybody, in any week.

It records weld traceability: the wire, gas and plant on each shift, signed off in the office by somebody other than the welder, and printed on every job’s audit report. It records the evidence — it doesn’t certify anything. See The job audit report.

The crew ask in whole or half days from their phones and see who else is off. Nothing is booked until somebody you’ve chosen approves it, and then it goes straight onto their timesheet. See Asking for holiday and Holiday approvals.

From the holiday on people’s timesheets. Days taken are never typed in, so the balance can’t drift away from the sheets. You set each person’s entitlement for the year, plus any carry-over and adjustment.

Yes — the bank holidays for England and Wales are built in, so holiday requests skip them and a bank holiday worked is paid at your bank holiday rate. If you work to Scottish or Northern Irish bank holidays, talk to us first.

On Amazon Web Services in London (eu-west-2), with every connection encrypted. Each firm’s data is kept apart from every other’s, and we hold no National Insurance numbers or bank details. See Security & your data.

Nothing is ever hard-deleted. People, clients and jobs archive; a removed shift or material is marked removed, not erased. Approvals, send-backs, reopenings and rate changes are recorded in a log that can be added to and never edited.

Archive them. Their sign-in is suspended the same second, so a leaver can’t still send a week in, and their records stay for the payroll questions that come later.

We don’t publish a price list yet. Costworks is quoted per firm, based on the size of your crew and what you need, so the figure you get is a real one rather than a starting price. See Pricing, or ask us for a quote.

Talk to us. We’ll show you the app working on your kind of week — your overtime rules, your job numbers — before you decide anything.