Pick Your Setup: Volunteer, Restaurant, Event, Tutor

The four setup paths in Kangaroo Clock aren't four different products. They're the same tool pointed at four different headaches. Pick the wrong one and nothing breaks, you just end up doing a little manual sorting at export time that a different starting point would have done for you. So the choice is worth two minutes up front.

Three things decide it: how your people record time, how you want hours grouped when you pull a report, and what the export has to feed when the period ends. Everything else is shared. Workers never get accounts, admins sign in by magic link, times are stored in UTC and shown in your local zone, and the first 500 recorded hours are free on every path. Start from the headache, not the label.

How your people clock in decides more than you think

A volunteer check-in table at a one-day event is a different animal from a restaurant where the same twelve people clock in five days a week. There are three ways to record time, and the path you pick mostly reflects which one fits your space.

A shared-tablet kiosk sits at a fixed spot. People walk up and tap their name to clock in, no login, no app. That suits a restaurant pass, a tutoring center front desk, or any place with one entrance everyone passes. A posted QR code works when there's no tablet to spare: you print it, tape it up, and people scan with their own phones. Good for a loading dock, a field, or a check-in tent. A personal link gives each person their own clock that works from anywhere, which fits volunteers logging remote hours or a crew spread across a venue.

Most teams end up using two of these. A gala might run a kiosk at the main door and QR posters at the back entrances. You can try the kiosk in a live demo before you decide, and if you print a code you can make one with the QR sign-in poster generator. The path you start from is just the default, not a cage.

How you group hours is the real fork

This is where the paths actually diverge. Grouping is done with two tools: tags label time entries, and worker groups label people. The question is which one your reporting leans on.

Volunteers usually group by program or by event. You want to show that the food drive took 140 hours across 22 people and the tutoring program took another 90. Tags on entries carry that. Restaurants group by role or by person, because front-of-house and kitchen are separate lines and you're paying individuals. Worker groups carry that. Event crews group by shift or by area, often with tags for the specific event when you run several a season. Tutoring centers usually group by program and sometimes by tutor, so they lean on both.

None of these is locked. You can tag entries in a restaurant workspace and group people in a volunteer one. The path just pre-sorts your defaults toward the grouping that team tends to need, so your first report looks right instead of being one undifferentiated pile.

What the export feeds is the last question

At the end of the period you pull a CSV export with a stable column schema that doesn't change on you between runs. What matters is where that file goes next, and it's different for each team.

Volunteers feed a grant report or a board summary. The distinct-worker count in the export is what grant forms ask for, so that column matters more than payroll ever would here. Restaurants feed payroll: hours per person, often converted to decimal hours for a payroll system that doesn't take HH:MM. Event crews feed a reconciliation against what was budgeted. Tutoring centers often feed both a funder report and payroll for paid tutors.

Kangaroo Clock doesn't process payroll or move money, and it isn't a monitoring tool: no GPS, no screenshots, no activity tracking, ever. The export is the handoff, and what you hand it to is the honest difference between the paths. If payroll is the destination, the payroll hours converter turns the file into the decimal format most systems expect.

When the paths overlap, and how to choose anyway

They overlap a lot, which is the honest truth. A tutoring center that pays some tutors and counts volunteer hours for others is using every feature at once. An event with a paid crew and a volunteer check-in table looks half like a restaurant and half like a nonprofit. If you see yourself in two paths, you're not confused, you just run a mixed team.

Pick the path that matches your hardest reporting job, the one with a deadline and someone waiting on it. If a grant form is due, start from volunteers so the distinct-worker count is front and center. If payroll runs every two weeks, start from restaurant so hours sort by person out of the box. The other features are still there; you're just choosing which one is one click away instead of two.

One more thing that makes the paths easier to live with: auto-close handles forgotten clock-outs on all of them. A stale open entry closes at its start time plus your cutoff, never at the current time, so a volunteer who forgot to tap out doesn't show a 14-hour shift. That protects your export no matter which path you took.

Read the short writeups on the solutions overview to see which one lines up with your deadline, then start a free workspace and change the defaults later if you guessed wrong. Nothing about the path is permanent except the hours you record.