How a Shift Becomes a Row in Your CSV

Maria taps her name on the tablet by the kitchen door at 4:58 PM. Six hours later she taps it again. A week after that, her shift shows up as one row in the CSV you hand to whoever runs payroll. Here is every step in between, with the actual field names, so you can tell where each number came from and trust it.

The tap that starts the clock

When Maria taps her name on the shared-tablet kiosk, Kangaroo Clock writes a new time entry with her worker ID and a start timestamp. That timestamp is stored in UTC, down to the second. There is no login, no app, no account for her to manage. The action of starting a shift is one tap, and the same thing happens whether she scans a posted QR code or opens her personal link instead.

At this point the entry has a start and no end. It is open. On your dashboard it appears in the "on the clock right now" list, so if you walk past the screen at 6 PM you see Maria is still working.

What gets recorded, exactly

The new entry holds four things that matter later: the worker, the start time, any worker group she belongs to (say, "Kitchen"), and any tag applied to the entry (say, "Dinner Service"). Groups label people; tags label the time. You will use both when you filter the report, so it pays to get them set before the shift, not after.

The second tap that closes it

At 11:02 PM Maria taps her name again. Kangaroo Clock finds her open entry and writes an end timestamp, also in UTC. Now the entry is complete: start 4:58 PM, end 11:02 PM. The tap that ends a shift turns an open row into a finished one, and the duration becomes a real number instead of a running count.

The gap between those two timestamps is her worked duration: 6 hours and 4 minutes. That number is computed from the two stored times, not typed in by anyone, so there is nothing to fat-finger.

When the second tap never happens

Say Maria forgets to tap out and goes home. Without a guard, her entry would stay open and eventually read as a 14-hour shift when you glance at it the next afternoon. Kangaroo Clock closes a stale open entry at its start time plus a cutoff, never at the current moment. So a forgotten clock-out lands as a short, bounded entry, not an inflated one. The rule that closes forgotten entries exists for exactly this, because real crews forget and your numbers should not pay for it.

From entry to timesheet row

A finished entry is one line. A timesheet is those lines grouped by person over a date range. When you open the dashboard and pick a start and end date, Kangaroo Clock gathers every entry in that window and rolls it up per worker. Maria's Tuesday dinner shift, her Thursday lunch, her Saturday double: they stack into her total for the period.

If you are new to the term, the plain definition of a timesheet is just this: a list of hours worked, by whom, over a set range, ready to be paid or reported on. The filters are where tags and groups earn their keep. Filter by the "Kitchen" group and you see only kitchen staff. Filter by the "Dinner Service" tag and you see only those entries, which is handy when a grant or a department wants hours split out by program.

Every time Maria's shift is displayed, it is shown in your local time, not UTC. The storage is UTC; the display is yours. That is why 4:58 PM reads as 4:58 PM on your screen even though the database holds a different number underneath.

From timesheet row to CSV cell

When you hit export, each timesheet row becomes a line in a CSV file with a fixed column schema that does not change between exports. The columns stay in the same order every time, so a formula you built in your spreadsheet last month still points at the right data this month. The downloadable hours file is the thing you actually hand off.

Maria's row carries her name, her start and end times, her worked duration, and the group and tag you filtered on. The file also includes a distinct-worker count, so when a grant report asks "how many people volunteered this quarter," you read it off the export instead of counting names by hand and hoping you did not double-count anyone who worked twice.

Durations export as real values you can sum. If payroll wants decimal hours instead of hours and minutes, the decimal and HH:MM converter flips 6:04 into 6.07 without you doing the arithmetic.

What the file does not do

Kangaroo Clock hands you the CSV. It does not move money, cut checks, or file anything. It is not a payroll processor and it is not a monitoring tool: no screenshots, no GPS, no location on any row. The file is the clean handoff, and what happens after it is up to whatever system you already pay people with.

That is the whole path: one tap, a second tap, a row, a cell. If you want to watch the first tap happen, try the live kiosk demo and then clock yourself in and out to see the entry fill in.