Track Front of House and Kitchen Hours Separately

It's Sunday night. You have a stack of clock-in times and one question: how many hours did the kitchen run this week, and how many did front of house? If your answer right now is "count it by hand off a printout," here is a setup that gives you both totals in one export, week after week, without changing how your staff punches in.

The trick is to label people and time before you ever pull a report. Do the labeling once. Then every report after that splits itself.

Group your staff by station first

Open your worker list and assign each person to a worker group. Make two groups: Kitchen and Front of House. Line cook, prep, dish, expo go in Kitchen. Servers, bartenders, host, bussers go in Front of House. A worker group labels the person, so you set it once when you add someone and never touch it again unless they switch roles.

If someone genuinely works both, say a bartender who jumps on garde manger during a rush, pick the group they spend most of their hours in. You will handle the exceptions with tags, covered below. Don't overthink the edge cases on the first pass. Get the bulk of your staff sorted into the two groups and move on.

This is the same structure that powers splitting hours by station, and it costs you nothing in extra steps at the kiosk.

Let staff clock in the way they already do

Nothing about the punch changes. Your crew still taps their name on the shared tablet by the office door, scans the posted QR code at the time clock, or opens a personal link on their phone. No login, no app to install, no account to remember. The station label rides along automatically because it's attached to the worker, not the punch.

If you don't have a kiosk up yet, the fastest start is the shared tablet. A cook walks in, taps "Marco," and is on the clock in two seconds. You can see exactly how that feels in the live kiosk demo before you set anything up. Prefer a wall poster over a tablet? Generate one with the QR sign-in poster generator and tape it by the back door.

Because the group is already assigned, every entry Marco creates this week is stamped Kitchen without him doing a thing.

Use tags for the cross-station hours

Worker groups handle the 90 percent of staff who stay in one station. Tags handle the rest. A tag labels a single time entry, not a person, so it's the right tool when the same worker's hours need to land in two buckets.

Two common cases in a restaurant:

• A bartender covers a kitchen shift on Saturday. Tag that one entry kitchen-cover so it reports against the kitchen even though the person sits in Front of House.
• You run a private event and want catering hours pulled out of both normal totals. Tag every entry from that night event-mar15, regardless of station.

Tags also let you slice the week other ways without a second system: brunch versus dinner, a specific manager's hours, training time you want excluded from the labor number. Apply a tag, and the report can filter on it later.

Pull the split report

At the end of your pay week, open the dashboard and export to CSV. The column schema is stable and never breaks, so the file opens the same way every time and your spreadsheet formulas don't shift columns on you. Filter by worker group to get a Kitchen total and a Front of House total as two clean numbers. The export also carries a distinct-worker count, so you can see that 6 kitchen people and 9 front of house people generated those hours, not just a lump sum.

From there the math is yours. If you split a tip pool by hours worked, the front of house total is your denominator, and you can read more about working tip shares from clock-in data. If you need decimals instead of HH:MM for a labor cost line, run the file through the payroll hours converter.

Why the kitchen total won't be inflated

Line cooks forget to clock out. It happens every busy Friday. If a forgotten entry stayed open until you noticed it Sunday, that one cook would show 50-plus phantom hours and wreck your kitchen number.

Auto-close prevents that. A stale open entry gets closed at its start time plus a cutoff you set, never at the current moment. So a 4 p.m. punch that never got a matching clock-out closes at, say, 4 p.m. plus eight hours, not at Sunday midnight. The hours that hit your Kitchen total stay honest. If you want the mechanics, the auto-close entry in the glossary spells out exactly how the cutoff is applied.

This matters most for the station you're watching for labor cost. An inflated total sends you chasing a problem that doesn't exist, or worse, hides a real one.

What this setup does not do

It tracks and labels hours. It does not run payroll, move money, or cut checks. It does not watch your staff: no screenshots, no GPS, no location pings, no activity logging. The tablet by the door records a tap and a timestamp, nothing else. If a server asks whether the QR code tracks where they are, the honest answer is no, and that won't change.

It also isn't a scheduler. If you need to build next week's roster, that's a separate job from counting last week's hours, though both can sit side by side.

Set the two worker groups tonight, post the kiosk, and let a week of real punches accumulate. Next Sunday your kitchen and front of house numbers will fall out of one export instead of off a calculator. When you're ready, start a free workspace and assign your first two groups in under five minutes.