Meet TradeHours — Apprentice OJT hour logbook

Business

TradeHours

Apprentice OJT hour logbook

What TradeHours does

Every registered apprentice in a licensed trade carries the same quiet burden: prove your hours or repeat them. Plumbing, HVAC, electrical, sheet metal, pipefitting — state licensing boards require 4,800 to 8,000 documented on-the-job hours, broken out across mandated work-process categories, before you can sit for your journeyman exam. And the tool most apprentices are handed for a four-year, career-defining record is a paper booklet or a spreadsheet that lives on someone else's computer.

TradeHours replaces the little green book with a logbook you actually own. Set up your trade profile once: name your work-process categories exactly the way your state defines them, give each one its target hours, and set your total. Then log your day in seconds — date, category, hours, employer — and watch a progress ring fill for every category. You always know which buckets are on pace and which ones your foreman needs to rotate you into before year three.

Worked for three shops across your apprenticeship? Every entry keeps its employer, so your record follows you — not the company. Moved states mid-apprenticeship and the category letters no longer match? Build a second scheme and remap your logged hours into the new buckets without retyping a single day. Classroom time counts too: related supplemental instruction gets its own track with course names and providers, right beside your field hours.

When the board or your program asks for proof, TradeHours assembles a clean, dated report — hours grouped by category and employer, with subtotals, a cumulative total against each target, and signature lines for supervisor verification — ready to print or send as a PDF.

TradeHours is deliberately private. No account, no cloud, no GPS, no supervisor dashboard watching your entries. Your hours live on your phone, offline, and they are yours when you change employers, change programs, or change states. Four taps a day now saves you from reconstructing two years of work from memory later.

• Daily quick-log: date, work-process category, hours, employer, notes • Progress rings per category against your state's target hours • Fully custom category schemes — any trade, any state, any program • State-switch remapping that moves logged hours into a new scheme • Classroom and related-instruction hours tracked alongside field time • Dated PDF hour report with category subtotals and signature lines • Offline and private: no account, no GPS, no employer in the loop

A look inside

Tap any screenshot to open the full-resolution version.

What's inside

• Daily Hour Log — Log a workday in four taps: date defaults to today, last-used category and employer pre-selected, quick-hour chips for common shift lengths, optional notes. Entries list groups by month with per-category color coding.
• Category Progress — A ring per work-process category showing logged hours against the state target, plus a cumulative exam-readiness bar for the whole apprenticeship and an on-pace indicator based on your start date.
• Scheme Builder — Define your trade profile and category scheme exactly as your state or program mandates — codes, names, and target hours — and remap logged hours into a new scheme when you switch states or programs.
• Classroom Hours — A separate track for related supplemental instruction: course name, provider, date, and hours, with its own yearly target so both halves of the apprenticeship requirement stay visible.
• Hour Report — Assembles a dated report for a chosen range — hours grouped by category and employer with subtotals, cumulative totals against targets, and supervisor signature lines — rendered to PDF for print or share.

Why we built it

Apprentices must document 4,800-8,000 on-the-job hours split across state-mandated work-process categories over 3-5 years to sit for their journeyman exam, but the status quo is a losable paper logbook or an employer-owned spreadsheet — so months of hours vanish and apprentices reconstruct years of work when the board…

What makes it different

The incumbents are employer-sold, not apprentice-owned: WorkHands and GoSprout are program-administered B2B platforms an individual cannot just download (and WorkHands' own reviews report the app failing to open), while ApprentiScope and myOneFlow are likewise sold to sponsors. SparkShift IS individually downloadable…

Who it's for

Operations leaders and small teams who want a tool in their workflow without buying another platform.

In one line: Apprentice OJT hour logbook

Try it

See the Apprentice OJT hour logbook for the full feature list, the info table, and support links.

Use TradeHours, found a bug, or have a feature request? Comments are open below — anonymous is fine.