Add Your First People Before Your First Shift

You have a shift starting Saturday morning and 14 people showing up. Before any of them can tap their name on the tablet, those names have to exist in your workspace. That is the whole job right now: get the roster in, group it so your reports make sense later, and confirm the picker shows everyone. Fifteen minutes, once, and you never touch it again unless someone new joins.

Here is the order to do it in.

Add a handful of names by typing them

If you have five or six people, typing is faster than any import. Open your workspace, go to People, and use Add person. The only required field is the person's name. That name is exactly what shows on the kiosk, so write it the way the person will recognize it at a glance. If you have two people named Chris, add a last initial now (Chris B, Chris M) so nobody taps the wrong one at 7am.

You are not creating logins. Workers never get accounts and never sign in, so there is no email to collect, no password to set, and no invitation to send. You add the name, it appears, done. The full field-by-field version lives in the walkthrough on adding your first people if you want to follow along screen by screen.

Paste a whole list at once

Most new admins already have their people somewhere: a sign-up sheet, a spreadsheet column, an email thread. Do not retype it. Use Bulk add and paste one name per line. If your list looks like this:

• Dana Okafor
• Marco Ruiz
• Priya Anand
• Sam Whitlock

paste all four lines together and each becomes its own person. Copy a single column out of your spreadsheet (just the names, not the header row) and it drops in cleanly. Before you confirm, scan for duplicates and stray blank lines, because a blank line can create an empty person that clutters the kiosk. Fix those in the paste box, not after.

Apply a group tag so reports filter later

This is the step people skip and regret at the end of the month. Kangaroo Clock separates two labels: worker groups label people, and tags label individual time entries. Right now you care about worker groups. Assign every person you just added to a group like Saturday Crew, Front of House, or Reading Program.

Why bother before anyone has worked a minute? Because when you pull a report later, a group lets you show hours for just that program or role instead of everybody at once. If you run a tutoring center with a math program and a literacy program, two groups now means two clean totals later with no manual sorting. When you finally do a CSV export for payroll or a grant report, the group carries through, and so does the distinct-worker count. Grouping at setup is far cheaper than untangling one flat list of 40 names in April.

You can put one person in the group that fits them. If someone works both the morning and evening crew, you can decide whether that is one group or two based on how you want the numbers to add up.

Open the kiosk and confirm every name is there

Now check your work from the worker's side. Open the kiosk on the actual device you will use Saturday, the shared tablet by the door or the front counter. The picker should list every name you added, sorted so people can find themselves fast. Tap through and make sure there are no blanks, no duplicates, and no misspellings that will make someone hesitate.

If you plan to use a posted QR code instead of the tablet picker, generate it now and tape it up where people enter. A quick printable QR sign-in poster gives you something to hang before the first person arrives. Either way, the same roster feeds both, so you only build the list once.

Run one real test. Tap your own name, confirm the dashboard shows you as on the clock, then clock out the same way. If that round trip works for you, it works for everyone. You can also poke at the live kiosk demo first if you want to see the tap-your-name flow before you commit your own list to it.

What you do not have to set up right now

Two things new admins worry about that need no action before the first shift.

First, forgotten clock-outs. Someone will leave without tapping out. You do not need to babysit that, because auto-close for stale entries closes a forgotten entry at its start time plus your cutoff, never at the current moment, so a whole night of open time never lands in your totals. Set the cutoff once and move on.

Second, time zones. All times are stored in UTC and displayed in the viewer's local time, so you do not configure a zone per person. What you see on the dashboard matches your clock.

That is the complete setup. Names in, grouped, and verified on the kiosk. If you have not created the workspace yet, start a free workspace and do the typing-and-pasting steps above in one sitting, then leave the tablet ready by the door. When your crew walks in Saturday, the only thing left for them to do is tap.