From Empty Workspace to First Clock-In in Ten Minutes

You have ten minutes before your Saturday crew shows up and no time-tracking set up yet. That is enough. Here is the exact order to do it in so the first person who walks through the door can punch in without you standing over them.

Create the workspace (about one minute)

Go to start a free workspace and enter your email. You get a magic link in your inbox. Click it and you land in an empty dashboard. No password to invent, no card to enter. You are the only person who ever signs in; the crew never will.

The screen you land on is the Who's on the clock view. Right now it is empty, which is correct. Nobody has punched in yet. Leave that tab open on your laptop. You will come back to it at the end and watch it fill up.

Add a few people (two minutes)

Open the People page and add names. You do not need email addresses, phone numbers, or anything else. A name is enough because workers never get accounts. Type "Maria Vasquez," press add, type the next one. For a Saturday shift of eight people, this is under two minutes.

If your crew splits by role or program, set a worker group now. Put your kitchen staff in one group and front-of-house in another, or your morning tutors in one and afternoon in the next. Later this lets you filter a report to just one group without sorting rows by hand. You can skip grouping for now and add it after the first shift; nothing breaks if you leave everyone ungrouped.

Pick one clock-in method (one minute)

There are three ways a worker can punch in, and you only need to choose one to start:

• Shared-tablet kiosk. One device by the door. A worker taps their name, then taps clock in. Best when everyone passes one spot.
• QR poster. A printed code on the wall. A worker scans it with their own phone and clocks in from the page that opens. Best when there is no spare tablet.
• Personal link. A private link per worker. Best for people who work off-site or arrive at scattered times.

For a crew arriving at one entrance, the QR poster is usually the fastest to stand up because you do not need to buy or dedicate a device. If you want to see how the tap-your-name screen behaves before you commit, open the live kiosk demo on your phone and try a punch yourself.

Post the QR or open the kiosk (two minutes)

If you chose the poster, generate one with the QR sign-in poster generator, print it, and tape it at eye level where people walk in. Test it yourself: scan with your own phone, confirm the clock-in page loads, then close it without punching so you don't leave a stray entry.

If you chose the kiosk, open the kiosk link on the shared tablet, prop it up, and leave it on that screen. The names you added on the People page show up as tappable buttons. If a name is missing, you added it to a different spelling or forgot it; fix it on the People page and the button appears.

Watch the first punch land (real time)

Your crew starts arriving. Maria scans the poster, taps clock in, and within a second her name shows on your Who's on the clock view with a start time. That is a real clock in recorded and stored in UTC, displayed to you in your local time. You did not touch anything. She did not sign in.

As more people arrive, the list grows. When someone leaves, they punch out the same way and drop off the live view. If you never see a punch appear, the usual cause is that the person tapped a name but never confirmed clock in, or scanned an old code. Re-scan the posted QR yourself to confirm it points at your workspace.

Handle the person who forgets to clock out

Someone will leave without punching out. It happens on the first day and every day after. You do not need to chase them. A stale open entry gets closed by auto-close at its start time plus your cutoff, not at the current moment. So a tutor who forgot to punch out at 3 p.m. does not get logged until midnight. The forgotten punch never inflates the hours you report.

Pull the hours out when the shift is done

After the shift, open the report view and run a CSV export. The columns are always the same, so a file you export today lines up with one from three months ago. It includes a distinct-worker count, which is what you need for a grant report that asks how many people showed up, not just total hours. Filter by a tag or worker group first if you only want one event or one program.

That is the whole loop: add names, pick one method, post it, watch the live view, export at the end. No per-seat cost sits behind any of it because the price does not change with headcount. Add ten more people next week and nothing about your setup changes.

Your next real step is to run one live shift with a single method and one poster, then add worker groups once you see how your crew actually splits up. When you are ready, create your workspace and post a code before the next shift starts.