ConnectWise PSA → payroll · corrected 6 Aug 2026
This page used to say that nothing moves CW PSA hours into payroll, and it proved it with a marketplace search that returned zeros. The zeros were real. The search was not. Here is what we measured, what we missed, and the part that survives.
If you are an MSP who came here looking for a tool: skip to what we missed. There is one, it is listed in the ConnectWise marketplace, and it is free at small headcount.
This page is research, written down. Nothing on it is for sale, and now nothing is going to be.
In March 2026 an MSP owner with 35 to 40 staff asked r/msp for a payroll platform that imports CW PSA timesheets. Four people answered from experience. He edited his own post afterwards:
“For future posterity, it looks like basically everything is going to require middleware.”
r/msp · original poster · 25 Mar 2026“My team looked into this exact thing. Everything ended up needing some kind of middleware or manual sync. Rippling technically had an integration but it wasn’t as plug-and-play as we expected. Ended up being more export/import plus cleanup than true sync.”
reply · 14 Apr 2026, three weeks later“The payroll person goes in and just pulls the weeks she needs.”
reply · 10 Apr 2026 · the fallback everyone lands onConnectWise runs an open marketplace. Anyone who builds an integration can list it after an approval process. We searched it, and published this:
Every one of those numbers reproduces today. The reasoning on top of them does not.
On 6 August 2026 we pulled all 461 of 461 marketplace partners through the marketplace’s own AJAX endpoint, a count that matches the site’s own partner counter, fetched every product page, and built a full-text corpus. Then we ran the site search against terms we could count independently.
| Query | Search returns | Listings that contain it | Recall |
|---|---|---|---|
| invoices | 1 | 49 | 2% |
| utilization | 1 | 12 | 8% |
| profitability | 3 | 26 | 12% |
| quickbooks | 3 | 13 | 23% |
The search indexes listing titles and a short blurb. It does not index the listing body. So a search for payroll returns nothing even when listings say “payroll” repeatedly, because none of them are called payroll.
A control row proves a search returns rows. It does not prove the search can find the thing you are looking for. Those are different claims and we treated them as one.
Tinq. It is listed at marketplace.connectwise.com/tinq-time, filed under Productivity, last modified 22 May 2026. It was live and checkable on 4 August, when we ran our searches. It was one of the 22 results in the row we called the control.
It surfaces under time and nothing else, because “Time” is in its name. Its listing says “payroll” three times and names Gusto by name.
“Tinq assists with payroll integration through trusted platforms such as Gusto and QuickBooks … automatic sync for payroll wrap, lunch, PTO, and holidays … support overtime calculations.”
ConnectWise Marketplace · Tinq Time listing · read 6 Aug 2026“Import employees from Gusto to Tinq. Sync your team’s hours from Tinq into Gusto for quick and accurate payroll.”
gusto.com/product/integrations/tinq · “100+ companies have connected this integration” · read 6 Aug 2026Rendered price: free up to three users with payroll integration included in the free tier, then $4 per user per month. A fifteen-tech MSP pays about $60 a month. We were going to charge $99.
| Tool | What it does with CW PSA time |
|---|---|
| Tinq | Added 6 Aug 2026, after we found it. A time clock. Your techs punch in and out in Tinq, and Tinq pushes those hours to Gusto or QuickBooks. It does not read time entries out of CW PSA. It replaces the need to. Free to three users, then $4 per user per month. |
| Rewst | Documents 80+ integrations. BambooHR is the only HR or payroll one, and it moves employee records. No timesheets, no hours. |
| Wise-Sync | Invoices, payments, procurement, inventory and expenses into Xero or QBO. No payroll. |
| LaborCast | Reads CW PSA time and allocates labour cost by line of business. Runs after payroll is imported, so it answers a different question. $149/month. |
| Rippling | Has an import. Operators above describe it as closer to CSV than to a sync. |
| Gusto, BambooHR | Same story per the thread. CSV import or middleware. |
Enumerating the marketplace also let us check the other direction properly. Zapier’s CW Manage app exposes 12 triggers and 18 actions and none of them is a time entry. Rewst and MSPbots both stop at BambooHR, which moves employee records rather than hours. Gusto’s own directory lists 260 integrations and not one PSA; its /connectwise page is a 404 while /tinq returns 200. ConnectWise ships nothing first-party.
After reading all 461 listings rather than searching them, this much still holds: nothing reads approved time out of ConnectWise PSA and puts it into payroll. Tinq does not do that. It sidesteps it, by becoming the place the hours are recorded in the first place.
That leaves one question worth asking: do MSPs need payroll hours to be the ticket hours? If agreement labour has to be costed against billed time so that utilisation, effective rate and cost of delivery all reconcile, a punch clock is the wrong source and direction matters. We went and checked. The answer is no, and it is no for a reason we had not considered.
Across 528 r/msp threads read on 40 different owner-vocabulary queries, with 590 comments read in full across 21 of them, fifteen operators describe running a clock or a payroll punch while ticket time stays in the PSA. Six pay from ticket time. The question was asked in 2018, again in 2024, and again in 2026, and it came back the same way all three times.
“If you’re looking for clock in/out for staff, definitely use gusto. If you’re looking for tracking time on tasks then it should be your PSA.”
r/msp · 12 Jul 2025A PSA emits hours logged. Overlapping entries mean two tickets can consume the same minute, so logged time does not reconcile to a working day.
“If they are working 2 tickets at the same time, they could in theory end up with 16 hours of payroll time… If it is used for straight client side billing, it wont adversely affect your payroll.”
r/msp · 2022ConnectWise’s own documentation says the timesheet should not be used as the primary method of time entry. A clock is not a degraded substitute for the pay leg. It is the correct source for it.
If you currently pay your techs from logged ticket time, this is worth ten minutes of your time. In a 67-comment thread from 31 December 2024, an MSP doing exactly that was told by an owner running 25 techs: “You need to pay everyone for time worked not time logged. You’re putting yourself in a position to get sued.” We are not lawyers and this is not advice. We are flagging it because the product this page proposed would have automated that practice for you.
The costing argument does not rescue it either. Effective rate and cost of delivery are annual loaded cost divided by ticket hours. Ticket hours are the denominator; the numerator is a salary. Costing and paying are separate ledgers and MSPs treat them that way.
Here is the shape the original idea had, left up for the record:
you press run, the same way you do now
We also said Gusto publishes an endpoint that accepts shift level entries with hours split by pay category, and that CW PSA time is already shift shaped. We never verified that. It was the whole build premise and it went up unchecked. Treat it as unconfirmed.
The old version of this page ended with a promise: “If enough answers come back, we build it and you hear first. If they do not, we will say so on this page.”
We are not building it. Nobody had to answer. The research the page was built on had a hole in it, and the hole was ours. A free tool at your headcount already covers the outcome for most MSPs. And the one version of the problem that might still have been real turned out to be a practice an MSP owner will tell you to stop, not a requirement to build for.
There was a price on this page. It said $99 a month, anchored against LaborCast at $149. That is gone. We are not going to anchor a price against a competitor while a free option sits in the same marketplace.
The transferable finding is not about payroll. It is that a marketplace search is not an instrument you can trust, and a zero result is a fact about your query until you prove it is a fact about the world.