How to Download a Payroll CSV, Column by Column
· 4 min read
It's the Monday your pay period closes. You have fourteen people who worked across two events, and payroll needs numbers today. Here is the exact sequence to get a clean file out of Kangaroo Clock and know what every column in it means before you hand it off.
Set the date range to match your pay period
Open the dashboard and go to the export view. The first thing you set is the start and end date. This is where most mistakes happen, so be deliberate.
Pick the exact days your pay period covers. If you run a two-week pay cycle, that might be the 1st through the 14th. The range is inclusive on both ends: choosing the 1st and the 14th captures every entry that started on the 1st and every entry that started on the 14th. Set the range one day short and you drop a full day of hours without noticing until someone asks why their check is light.
All times are stored in UTC and shown to you in your own local time. You do not convert anything by hand. If your center closes at 9 PM your time, an entry that ended at 9 PM shows as 9 PM.
Filter by tag so you export only what you need
If everyone in the workspace worked one program, skip this and export the whole range. Most teams don't. You run a Saturday tutoring session and a Sunday food drive, and payroll for each comes from a different budget line.
That's what tags are for. Every time entry can carry a tag like saturday-tutoring or food-drive. Filter the export to one tag and the file contains only those entries. Worker groups do the same thing for people: filter to the kitchen group and you leave the front-of-house crew out of this file.
Run the export once per budget line. Two tags, two downloads, two clean files. No spreadsheet surgery afterward to pull apart hours that never should have been mixed.
Download the file
Hit export. You get a CSV, the plain-text format every payroll and spreadsheet program reads. The steps to download a CSV for payroll are the same whether you open it in Excel, Google Sheets, or Numbers: double-click the file, and each column lands in its own cell.
The column schema is stable and never breaks. The headers you get this pay period are the headers you get next quarter, in the same order. If you built a formula or a grant-report template against this file once, it keeps working. That matters most when a grant officer wants the same format every reporting cycle.
Read every column when you open the file
Here is what each column holds and how to use it.
| Column | What it holds |
|---|---|
| Worker name | The name the person tapped or the link they opened. Workers have no accounts, so this is the label you assigned them. |
| Clock in | The moment the entry started, in your local time. This is the clock-in timestamp that anchors everything else. |
| Clock out | When the entry ended. If a stale entry was auto-closed, this is the start time plus your cutoff, not the current time. |
| Duration | The worked time for that single entry. |
| Tag | The label on the entry, like the event or role you filtered on. |
| Worker group | Which group the person belongs to, so you can sort by program or team inside the file. |
The export also gives you a distinct-worker count: how many different people appear in this file. When a grant asks "how many volunteers served this quarter," that number is your answer, and you don't have to deduplicate a name list by eye.
Why a forgotten clock-out won't inflate your hours
Someone left Saturday without tapping out. Without a guardrail, that open entry would run until you noticed, turning a four-hour shift into a thirty-hour one. Kangaroo Clock's auto-close feature handles this by closing a stale open entry at its start time plus a cutoff you set, never at the current time. A forgotten clock-out lands as a normal-length shift in your file, not a wild overcount you have to hunt down and fix.
Turning duration into payroll numbers
Durations show as hours and minutes. Some payroll systems want decimal hours instead, where 90 minutes reads as 1.5. If yours does, run the totals through the decimal and HH:MM converter before you paste them in. Kangaroo Clock does not process payroll or move money; it hands you accurate hours, and you take those numbers wherever your pay runs.
What to check before you send it
Before the file leaves your hands, scan for two things. First, any duration that looks off, either near zero or unusually long, which usually points to a mistaken clock-in you can correct. Second, that the distinct-worker count matches the number of people you expect for that tag. If it's higher, a stray entry from another program slipped in and your tag filter needs a second look.
That's the whole loop: set the dates to your pay period, filter to one tag, download, read the columns, and check two lines before you send. Do it once and the next close takes five minutes. If you haven't set up a workspace yet, you can start one for free and run your first export this week.
Tags: csv export, payroll, reporting, workflow
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