Set Up a Personal Clock-In Link for a Driver

Your delivery driver starts their shift from the parking lot, not the back office. The shared tablet by the kitchen does them no good. They need to punch in from their phone, before they ever reach your door. That is exactly what a personal link is for, and setting one up takes about two minutes once you know the order.

Here is the whole sequence, from adding the driver to their roster to watching their first punch land on your dashboard.

Step 1: Add the driver to your roster

Sign in to the admin pages (magic link, no password to remember) and open your roster. Add a new worker and type the driver's name as you want it to read on reports: "Marcus D." or "Marcus Delgado," whatever your CSV reader needs to be clear. The driver never gets an account and never signs in. You are just creating the name their hours will attach to.

If you track more than one off-site person, put them in a worker group now. Call it "Drivers" or "Delivery." Later that lets you pull a report filtered to just the people who work off-site, separate from your in-house crew.

Step 2: Generate the personal link

Open the driver's entry and copy their personal link. This is a single URL tied to that one worker. Anyone who opens it lands straight on the driver's own clock-in screen, with no name list to scroll and nobody else's name in sight. That is the point of a personal-link clock-in: one worker, one link, no shared screen.

This is the right method when the person is never standing at your location. A kiosk works for the kitchen because everyone passes the tablet. A driver passes nothing. If you have a mix of both, you can run a name-tap kiosk for the people on site and personal links for the people who are not. The two methods feed the same timesheet.

Step 3: Send the link the way the driver already gets messages

Paste the link into whatever the driver reads: a text, a WhatsApp thread, an email, or a note saved to their phone's home screen. Text is usually fastest. Something like:

Hey Marcus, this is your clock-in link. Tap it when you start, tap it again when you finish. Save it so you have it every day. [link]

Tell them to bookmark it or pin it to their home screen. The link does not expire between shifts. It is the same URL every day, so once it is saved they never need you to resend it. No app to install, no account to create, no password.

Step 4: Confirm the first punch

Have the driver open the link while you watch. They tap once to clock in. Your admin dashboard shows who is on the clock right now, and the driver's name should appear there within a few seconds. Seeing it land confirms the link works and the driver knows the motion before their real first shift.

When they finish, they open the same link and tap to clock out. One tap in, one tap out. If you want to see the full lifecycle of that entry and how it becomes a reportable total, the glossary explains what happens when they tap to clock out.

What happens if the driver forgets to clock out

Drivers forget. They finish a run, head home, and the entry stays open. Without a safety net, an open punch would keep counting all night and hand you a wildly inflated total.

Kangaroo Clock handles this with a cutoff that closes stale entries. A forgotten open entry gets closed at its start time plus your cutoff, not at the current time. So a shift that started at 9 a.m. and was never clocked out does not log fourteen hours. It logs the cutoff length and nothing more. Your reported hours stay honest even when your driver's memory does not.

This matters more for off-site workers than anyone, because you are not there to notice the tablet still showing them on the clock. The auto-close is doing the noticing for you.

Step 5: Tag the entries so the report reads clean

If deliveries are a distinct activity you need to count separately, add a tag to the driver's entries, like "delivery" or the name of the route. Tags label time entries; worker groups label people. Together they let you filter a report down to exactly the hours you care about: all delivery time, all drivers, one pay period.

When you need the numbers out, run a CSV export with a stable column layout. The columns never shift between exports, so whatever you paste it into for payroll or reporting keeps working month after month. You also get a distinct-worker count, handy if you report how many people drove for you in a given stretch.

When to use a personal link instead of a kiosk

Use a personal link any time the worker is not reliably at your physical location: drivers, a field volunteer, a tutor who meets students at the library, a crew lead running an off-site setup. Use the kiosk for everyone who walks past the same tablet every day. You can mix both freely on one workspace, and nobody needs a login either way.

If you are still deciding how to run your crew, the solutions overview walks through common setups by team type. Ready to try it on your own roster? You can start a free workspace and send your first driver a link today. It stays free for the first 500 recorded hours, so you can clock a real month before anyone asks for a card.