Questions People Ask Before Their Free Workspace

You are one form away from a working time tracker, and you are hovering over the button. Fair. Before you hand over an email, you want to know what happens after signup, whether your volunteers or line cooks have to create accounts, and what it costs once you have real hours logged. Here are the questions people actually ask, answered in the first sentence each time.

Is it really free, and what happens after that?

Yes, the first 500 recorded hours are free, then it is $10 a month or $100 a year, flat, for unlimited people. There is no per-seat charge and no per-location charge, so a team of 8 and a team of 80 pay the same. Clock-in never stops working, even past 500 hours; only the admin pages ask for a card once you cross that mark. So your crew can keep tapping in during a busy stretch while you sort out billing later. This is what a single flat price means in practice: the bill does not move when you add people or a second site.

Do my workers have to sign up or install an app?

No, workers never sign up, never install anything, and never have accounts. Only admins sign in, and they do it with a magic link sent to their email, so there is no password to reset. Workers reach the clock three ways: they tap their name on a shared-tablet kiosk, scan a posted QR code, or open a personal link you send them. Pick whichever fits your space. A tutoring center with one front desk usually runs a kiosk; an event crew spread across a park does better with a printed QR sign-in poster on the wall. You can try the tap-your-name flow yourself on the live kiosk demo before you commit.

Is my team's data safe, and are you tracking their location?

No, there is no location tracking, no GPS, no screenshots, no activity monitoring, and no facial recognition, and there never will be. Kangaroo Clock records one thing: when someone clocked in and when they clocked out. That is the whole scope. This matters if you manage volunteers who would (correctly) bristle at being surveilled, or hourly staff who deserve to punch in without a camera reading their face. Times are stored in UTC and displayed in each viewer's local time, so a report you open in Denver shows Denver hours even though the data underneath is standardized. Nothing about a worker's whereabouts is collected because nothing about their whereabouts is measured.

What if someone forgets to clock out?

A forgotten clock-out gets closed automatically at its start time plus a cutoff you set, never at the current moment. That distinction is the point. If a volunteer taps in at 9 a.m. and walks off without tapping out, a naive system would leave the clock running for 14 hours and wreck your report. Instead, the auto-close rule caps that entry so it cannot inflate reported hours. You still see the entry and can correct it, but your grant summary or payroll export does not silently absorb a phantom shift.

How do I get numbers out for payroll or a grant report?

You export a CSV with a fixed column layout that does not change between exports, including a distinct-worker count. Because the schema is stable, a spreadsheet or formula you build in month one keeps working in month twelve. You can filter what lands in that file using tags on time entries and worker groups on people, so you pull hours for one event, one role, or one program without hand-sorting rows. If you want to preview the shape of a report before you have real data, the time card calculator shows how raw punches turn into totals.

How do I invite my team once the workspace exists?

You set up your workers as names, then share one of the three clock-in methods, and they start punching immediately with nothing to accept or install. Practically, that means: add your people, decide whether the room gets a kiosk tablet or a QR poster, and post it. There is no invitation email for workers to miss because there is no account for them to join. For a small restaurant, you might stand a tablet by the time clock; for a nonprofit with a dozen volunteers, personal links dropped into a text thread often work better. If you are weighing which method fits, the solutions overview walks through common setups by team type.

Can I cancel or stop without losing my hours?

Yes, your recorded hours are yours, and the CSV export means you can pull a complete copy at any point. If you stop paying, clock-in still functions; the paywall sits on the admin dashboard, not on the act of tracking time. So you are never in a spot where a lapsed card erases a shift someone already worked. Export before any change and you hold the full record in a file you control.

What does the very first step look like?

You enter an email, get a magic link, and land in an empty workspace ready for your first worker. That is it. No credit card, no sales call, no onboarding sequence. From there you add names, choose a clock-in method, and run a test punch to see it appear on the live dashboard. When you are ready, start a free workspace and have your first worker clocked in within a few minutes. If more questions come up as you go, the full answers to common questions cover the details this overview skips.