Billing Mistakes Seasonal Teams Make

Your busy season ends, you want to stop paying for a tool you won't touch for six months, and you make one of a handful of predictable mistakes on the way out. Most of them cost you nothing but a few minutes to undo. One or two can cost you the hours report you needed for grant paperwork. Here are the ones that come up most, in rough order of how often they bite.

Cancelling before you pull the final CSV

This is the most common one. The season wraps, you cancel the subscription the same afternoon, and two weeks later a board member asks for total volunteer hours by program. Now you are scrambling.

What it looks like: you hit cancel, the admin pages stop prompting you, and you assume you are done. The problem is not that your data disappears. It is that you skipped the one step that actually mattered for closing out the season.

The fix: pull your CSV export first, then cancel. The export has a stable column schema that never changes between seasons, so last year's file and this year's file line up column for column. It also includes a distinct-worker count, which is usually the number a grant report or a board summary asks for. Export, open the file, confirm the date range covers your whole season, and only then go to the cancel or change plan page.

Pausing when you could just stop paying

Seasonal teams often assume they need to keep the subscription running between seasons to hold their place, so they pay $10 a month through a quiet summer with zero clock-ins. That is money spent for nothing.

What it looks like: a restaurant that closes for the off-season, or an event crew that runs two weekends a year, paying flat monthly fees for the ten months nothing happens.

The fix: you do not lose your workspace or your history by cancelling. Clock-in keeps working at every hour count. Only the admin pages ask for a card, and only after your first 500 recorded hours. So the cleaner move for a team that runs in bursts: start a workspace, run your season, export, and stop paying when you go quiet. When the next season starts, your worker list, tags, and groups are still there. If your whole season fits inside 500 hours, you may never see a bill at all.

Archiving the wrong account and losing admin access

Only admins sign in, and they sign in by magic link. There are no worker accounts to confuse things, but admins sometimes tangle themselves up anyway.

What it looks like: the one person who set up the workspace leaves after the event, their email goes dead, and nobody else was ever added as an admin. Now the magic link lands in an inbox no one can open.

The fix: before your season ends, add a second admin whose email will still work next year. A shared ops inbox is better than a personal one that leaves with the person. Workers never sign in, so this only matters for the handful of people who manage the time tracking itself. Do it while you still have access, not after.

Leaving forgotten clock-outs in your final numbers

On the last day of a season, people rush out and forget to clock out. If you export before those entries are resolved, your totals look inflated and you spend an evening hand-correcting a spreadsheet.

What it looks like: three volunteers with open entries from closing night, each one showing hours that run until whenever you happened to look.

The fix: auto-close handles this for you. A stale open entry is closed at its start time plus a cutoff, never at the current time. A forgotten clock-out from Saturday night does not quietly rack up hours until Tuesday. Your final report reflects the shift that actually happened, not the gap until someone noticed. Pull the export after auto-close has done its work and the numbers are already clean.

Assuming cancelling will cost you per person or per location

Teams that have been burned by per-seat pricing sometimes over-manage their account, removing people before the season ends to shave the bill, or avoiding a second location.

What it looks like: a coordinator pruning the worker list in the last week to get the headcount down, worried that 40 volunteers cost more than 10.

The fix: pricing is flat. $10 a month or $100 a year, unlimited people, never per-seat, never per-location. Removing people before you cancel changes nothing about what you pay and only risks dropping someone from your final report. Leave your roster intact, export, then cancel. If you run across two sites or add a dozen helpers for one big weekend, the price does not move.

Forgetting what the off-season break does to your free hours

The first 500 recorded hours are free, counted across the life of the workspace, not reset each season. Some teams expect the counter to start over when they come back, and plan their budget around a reset that does not happen.

The fix: treat the 500 as a running total. If your spring season used 300 hours, you have 200 free left when fall starts, then it is the flat rate. Knowing this up front means no surprise prompt mid-season. If you want to check the mechanics before you commit, the FAQ spells out how hours and billing interact.

Run your next season in this order: add a backup admin, let auto-close settle the last entries, pull the CSV, confirm the dates, then stop paying. Four steps, and you never lose an hour or a report.