Splitting Conference Hours: Setup, Show, Teardown

Your crew shows up at 6 a.m. to unload a truck, works the floor all day, and tears the room down by 9 p.m. At the end you owe three different answers: how many setup hours, how many show hours, how many teardown hours. The venue wants one number, your grant report wants another, and your stipend math wants the total. If everyone clocked in once at 6 and out once at 9, you have fifteen hours per person and no way to split them.

Here is a full day worked through, with the timestamps and the tags, so you can see exactly where the split comes from.

The day: one room, nine people, three phases

Say you are running a single-day regional conference in a hotel ballroom. You have nine crew. Doors open to attendees at 9:00 a.m. and the last session ends at 6:00 p.m. Before and after that, it is all load-in and load-out.

You post a QR code by the loading dock and set a tablet at the back of the ballroom. Workers tap their name or scan to clock in. Nobody installs an app, nobody makes an account. If you have never seen that flow, the live kiosk demo shows the tap-your-name screen the crew will use.

The trick is not a second clock. It is a tag on the entry. In Kangaroo Clock, a tag labels the time entry itself, so one person can rack up a setup entry, a show entry, and a teardown entry across the day, each tagged, each a clean block of hours. You create three tags: setup, show, teardown. That is the whole system.

The timestamps, person by person

Not everyone works all three phases. That is the point. Here is how four of the nine fall out.

Dana clocks out and back in at each phase change, so her day is three tagged entries instead of one fifteen-hour blur. Marcus skips the show entirely: he runs audio setup, disappears during sessions, and comes back for strike. Priya only works the floor, so she has a single show entry. The whole model of keeping these as separate blocks is laid out on the page about tracking setup, execution, and teardown shifts separately, which is worth a read before your next big event.

Sam forgot to clock out, and the report still holds

Look at Sam's row. He clocked in for teardown at 6:45 p.m., helped load the truck, and left without tapping out. Next morning his entry is still open. If the system closed it at the current time, Sam would show roughly eighteen hours and your teardown total would be garbage.

That does not happen. An open entry gets closed at its start time plus a cutoff you set, never at the clock's current time. If your cutoff is four hours, Sam's 6:45 p.m. entry closes at 10:45 p.m. and reads four hours, not overnight. A forgotten clock-out never inflates your hours. The exact behavior is spelled out under how auto-close handles stale entries, so you know the number before you ever open the file.

What the export looks like

When the day is done, you export. The CSV with a stable column schema hands you one row per time entry, each with its worker, its start and end, its duration, and its tag. Nothing is merged or hidden.

Because every entry carries a phase tag, the split is a filter, not a calculator. Filter to setup and sum the hours. Do it again for show and teardown. For this crew of nine the totals land around 18 setup hours, 61 show hours, and 22 teardown hours, each traceable back to named people and real timestamps. The export also gives you a distinct-worker count, so when the grant form asks how many individuals worked the event, you read it off instead of counting names by hand.

Worker groups do the same job for people that tags do for time. Put Marcus and the two other techs in an AV group, and you can pull just their hours across all three phases, or exclude them when you report volunteer-only numbers. Tags slice the day by phase; groups slice the roster by role. Combine them and you can answer "how many teardown hours did the AV crew put in" without touching a spreadsheet formula.

Set this up before the truck arrives

Create your three tags the night before. Print the QR poster for the dock and set the tablet by the ballroom door. Brief the crew with one sentence: tap out and back in when you switch between setup, the floor, and strike. That single habit is what turns fifteen undifferentiated hours into a report that splits clean.

The first 500 recorded hours are free, which is more than a single conference day burns, so you can run the whole event, export it, and check the numbers before any card comes up. Start a free workspace and build your three tags now, while the day is still on paper.