Split Event Hours: Setup, Show, and Teardown

Your event budget has three lines: load-in, the event itself, and strike. Your hours report has one lump sum. That gap is where the trouble starts. You hand a funder a total of 412 crew hours, they ask how many went to teardown, and you have no answer because everyone clocked in once at 7am and out once at 11pm.

The fix is to treat setup, show, and teardown as three separate shifts, then label each one so it sorts back into the right budget line. Here is the full method, in the order you would actually run it.

Decide your three phases before crew arrives

Pick clear boundaries and write them down. Setup runs from when the first truck arrives until doors open. Show runs from doors to the last attendee out. Teardown runs from there until the venue is empty and swept. If a crew member works two phases, they get two entries, not one long one.

You also need names that match your budget. If your grant calls the line "site preparation," use that exact word as your tag. Matching the label to the budget line now saves you from translating later.

Create three tags up front: setup, show, and teardown (or whatever your budget calls them). Tags in Kangaroo Clock label time entries, so every clock-in can carry the phase it belongs to. That single label is what lets you split one pile of hours into three clean columns at the end.

Set up the kiosk so phase tagging is automatic

You do not want a tired crew member choosing a tag at 1am. So you remove the choice. The cleanest approach is one entry point per phase.

Post a separate QR sign-in poster for each phase. The load-in dock gets the setup poster. The crew door gets the show poster. The strike staging area gets the teardown poster. A worker scans whatever is in front of them and the entry carries the right tag without anyone thinking about it. Because Kangaroo Clock workers have no login and no app to install, scanning is the whole interaction: scan, tap your name, done.

If you are running off a shared tablet at a single check-in table instead, you can swap the active tag on the kiosk as the event moves from one phase to the next. That takes one admin action per phase change instead of a poster per location. Either way, the goal is the same: the crew member never has to remember which budget line they are on.

If volunteers are doing the labor, the mechanics are identical to a standard volunteer crew check-in at an event. The only addition is the per-phase entry point.

Handle the crew member who works two phases

Someone who builds the stage and then runs the show needs two entries. The boundary between them should be a real clock-out and a fresh clock-in, not a guess you make afterward.

The simplest rule: at each phase change, crew clocks out where they are and clocks in at the next phase's entry point. If you run a five-minute changeover between doors and the show, that is your natural break point. Tell crew this once at the start and most of them get it right.

For the ones who do not, you have a safety net. A forgotten clock-out gets handled by auto-close, which closes a stale open entry at its start time plus your cutoff, never at the current time. So if a setup volunteer wanders off without clocking out, their setup hours do not silently swallow the entire show. The entry closes at a sane length and the report stays honest.

Watch the floor in real time

During the event, the dashboard shows who is on the clock right now, grouped by the tag they came in under. That answers the questions you actually get asked mid-event: how many people are still on teardown, whether the setup crew has all checked out, who is unaccounted for at midnight.

If you also assign worker groups (riggers, ushers, parking), you can read the floor by role and by phase at the same time. Five people on the clock under teardown, three of them riggers, tells you whether strike is staffed or stalled.

Export hours that map straight to your budget

When the event closes, export the CSV. The column schema is stable and never breaks between exports, so the spreadsheet you built last year still works this year. Filter or pivot by the phase tag and you get three subtotals: setup hours, show hours, teardown hours. Those are the numbers your budget asked for.

The export also includes a distinct-worker count, which matters when a funder wants both total hours and how many individual people contributed. One person who worked all three phases counts as one distinct worker but three time entries, and the export keeps those straight.

If your budget tracks dollars per phase, run the phase subtotals through the payroll hours converter to turn HH:MM into decimal hours before you multiply by a rate. This whole approach is built around tracking setup, execution, and teardown shifts separately, so the report you hand over is already split the way the money was.

Scale it to a multi-day event

A festival repeats this cycle daily: setup Friday morning, show Friday night, partial teardown, setup again Saturday. Keep the same three tags and let the dates separate the days. The CSV carries the date on every entry, so you can group by day and by phase together. The pattern for spreading hours across several days is covered in tracking hours across a multi-day festival, and it layers cleanly on top of phase tags.

Set up your three tags and three QR posters now, before the trucks roll in. Once the entry points are posted, the split happens on its own and the report writes itself.