How Tags Work and Where You Apply Them

You run a food pantry that also does a weekend meal delivery and a monthly clothing drive. Same volunteers, three different things you have to report on. Tags are how you keep those hours separate without running three different workspaces or hand-sorting a spreadsheet at the end of the month.

Below are the questions people actually ask about tags, answered directly.

What is a tag for?

A tag labels a time entry so you can filter and total hours by whatever category matters to you: an event, a program, a task, a grant. A single volunteer might log two hours tagged meal-delivery on Saturday and three hours tagged clothing-drive the next weekend. Both entries belong to the same person, but they roll up into separate totals when you report.

Tags describe the work. That is different from worker groups, which describe the people. If you are labeling a shift, that is a tag. If you are labeling a person (say, marking someone as a driver or a tutor), that is a group. Both exist so your reports can be filtered without manual sorting. You can read the full breakdown on how tags work and where you apply them.

Where do I apply a tag to a shift?

You apply a tag to a time entry, not to the whole workspace, so the tag travels with a specific block of clocked time. When someone taps their name on the kiosk or scans the posted QR code, that clock-in creates an entry. The tag lands on that entry. That means the same worker can carry different tags on different days depending on what they showed up to do.

Because tags sit on the entry rather than the person, you never have to change a worker's setup between a Tuesday tutoring session and a Friday fundraiser. The person stays the same. The entry gets tagged for the thing that happened.

Where do I apply a group to a worker?

A worker group is applied to the person, so it stays attached across every shift they log until you change it. If you coordinate a tutoring center, you might put every reading tutor in a reading group and every math tutor in a math group. Then a report filtered to the math group shows only those tutors' hours, no matter which sessions they clocked into.

Groups are the right tool when the category is about who someone is on your team. Tags are the right tool when the category is about what a given shift was. Use both together and you can answer a question like "how many hours did math tutors spend on the exam-prep program" in one filtered view.

How do tags drive a filtered kiosk?

A tag lets you set up a kiosk that stamps every clock-in with the same label, so workers at that station do not have to pick a category. If you park a tablet at the loading dock for meal delivery, every person who taps in there gets the meal-delivery tag automatically. Nobody chooses it. Nobody forgets it.

That matters when you are running more than one thing at once. Put one tagged kiosk at the front desk and another at the event tent, and the two streams of hours stay separate on their own. If you want to see the tablet flow before you set this up, the live kiosk demo shows what a worker sees when they tap in. You can also generate a QR sign-in poster for each station so a phone scan does the same thing without a tablet.

How do tags show up in the CSV export?

Tags appear as a column in the export, so you can filter or pivot your hours by category in whatever spreadsheet or payroll tool you use. The column schema is stable and never shifts on you, which means a report you built last month against a tag column still works this month. The export also carries a distinct-worker count, so a grant report can show both total hours on a program and how many separate people contributed them.

A concrete example: you filter the export to clothing-drive, and you get every entry tagged that way, the hours for each, and the head count. That is the number a funder asks for. For the mechanics of pulling the file, the CSV export glossary entry covers the format.

Do tags change how forgotten clock-outs are handled?

No. A tag labels an entry but does not affect how that entry closes. If someone forgets to clock out, auto-close ends the entry at its start time plus your cutoff, never at the current time, so a forgotten clock-out never inflates the hours reported under any tag. The label and the closing rule are independent.

This keeps your tagged totals honest. A volunteer who tapped in for the clothing drive and walked off without tapping out will not leave an eight-hour phantom entry sitting under that tag. If you have not set your cutoff yet, the details are in the auto-close reference.

How should I plan my tags before I start?

Pick tags that match the questions you already have to answer, usually the categories on your reports: each event, each program, each grant. Keep the list short. If you find yourself creating a tag for a one-off task nobody will ever report on, skip it. Tags are only worth the keystroke if you will filter by them later.

Set up your workspace, add your first two or three tags, and put a tagged kiosk at each station. Start a free workspace and you can have a food pantry and a delivery route logging into separate totals before your next shift.