How Long to Keep Volunteer Hour Records

Your kiosk name list has 140 people on it and 30 of them last clocked in during the spring cleanup. New volunteers now have to scroll past a wall of names they've never met. You want to clean it up, but you also filed a grant report last quarter and you're nervous about deleting anything the funder might ask to see. Here are direct answers to the retention questions that actually come up.

How long should you keep volunteer hour records?

Keep the hour data itself for at least three years, and longer if a grant agreement says so. Most nonprofit grant terms require you to retain supporting records for three to five years after the funding period closes, and volunteer hours often count as in-kind match. If a funder ever audits the match, you need the raw entries: who, what date, how many hours.

The safe rule is to keep the records for years, but you do not need to keep every name active on the kiosk that whole time. Those are two different things. A record is a row of data. An active name is a tile someone taps to clock in. You can retire the tile without touching the row.

How long should a past-season volunteer stay on the active list?

Leave a volunteer active until you're confident they won't clock in again this season, then archive them. For a program that runs in seasons (a summer camp, a holiday food drive, a school-year tutoring center), a reasonable cutoff is one full season of no clock-ins. If someone hasn't tapped their name since the last program ended and the new one is underway, they're taking up space on the screen for no reason.

Archiving is what handles this without deleting anything. When you archive a worker, their name comes off the clock-in screen but all their past time entries stay in your reports and exports. If they come back next season, you bring them back. The details of what archiving does and how to un-archive are worth reading before your first cleanup so you know exactly what changes.

Does archiving a volunteer delete their hours?

No. Archiving removes the name from the kiosk and personal-link options, but every hour that person ever recorded stays in your data and in any report you run. This is the whole point of having archive as a separate action from delete. You get a shorter, cleaner list for the people standing at the tablet, and you keep the full history for grant reporting and year-end summaries.

If you want proof before you archive anyone, run an export first. A clean CSV of your hours gives you a snapshot with a stable column layout, including a distinct-worker count, so you have last season's numbers saved outside the app no matter what you change on the roster afterward.

When is it safe to archive a batch of past volunteers?

It's safe once you've exported the period you might report on and the season those people worked has closed. Work through this order and you won't lose anything you need:

1. Confirm every open time entry is closed. Forgotten clock-outs get handled by the auto-close rule, which closes a stale entry at its start time plus your cutoff, so a missed clock-out never inflates the hours you report.
2. Export the season or grant period to CSV and save it somewhere durable.
3. Archive the names that haven't clocked in for a full season.

Once the export is in hand, archiving is reversible and low-risk. You are not erasing the row, only hiding the tile.

What about volunteers who might return next year?

Archive them anyway, because bringing a name back is a single step. There's no penalty for archiving someone who returns. When your fall program starts and a familiar face shows up, you un-archive them and their name reappears on the kiosk with their full prior history intact. This is much cleaner than leaving 50 maybe-returning names on the screen all summer and hoping people find themselves.

If you run several programs at once, worker groups help more than keeping everyone active. Group people by program or role, filter your reports by group, and archive whole cohorts when a program wraps.

Should you keep records differently for grant reporting?

Keep them the same way, but build the report before you archive, not after. The distinct-worker count in your export matters for a lot of grant narratives, and it reflects whoever recorded time in the period you selected, so archiving after the export doesn't change last quarter's numbers. If you produce a recurring summary, the monthly volunteer summary tool can turn a period's entries into a tidy figure you can drop into a board packet or a funder update.

One caution: Kangaroo Clock is not a payroll processor and does not move money, and it does not track location, take screenshots, or monitor activity. Your records are the times people recorded and the tags and groups you applied to them. That's what you archive around, and it's all a grant reviewer would ever ask to see.

A simple retention rhythm you can run every season

At the end of each program cycle, do three things in one sitting. Export the period. Save the file. Archive the names that didn't clock in this cycle. Ten minutes of housekeeping keeps your kiosk short for the people using it and your history complete for the people funding you. If you haven't set up a workspace yet, you can start a free workspace and try one full season before you ever think about record cleanup.