Tag Naming Rules for Sortable Station Exports

You export a month of hours, open the CSV, and try to total kitchen against front-of-house. But one entry says "Kitchen," another says "kitchen," a third says "Back of House," and a fourth is blank. Now you are sorting by hand. The fix is not more software. It is naming your tags once, on purpose, before the shifts pile up.

Kangaroo Clock uses tags to label time entries and worker groups to label people. Both flow into your export. If you want to split hours by kitchen and front-of-house, the tag is the thing doing the splitting, so its name decides whether the report sorts in one click or takes an afternoon.

Pick one word per station and never use a synonym

Why it matters: a spreadsheet treats "FOH," "Front," and "Front of House" as three different values. Sort by tag and they land in three separate blocks. Sum one and you miss the other two.

How to apply it: write down your station list before anyone clocks in. Two tags for most rooms: kitchen and foh. If you run a bar as its own line, add bar. Post the list by the kiosk. When someone asks whether it is "Back" or "Kitchen," the answer is already written down.

Lowercase everything, always

Why it matters: Kitchen and kitchen are different strings to a computer. Case drift is the single most common reason a station total comes out wrong, because the eye reads them as the same word and the sort does not.

How to apply it: pick lowercase and hold to it for every tag. It is one rule, easy to remember, and it survives being typed fast at 6pm. When you paste the column into a quick totals check, matching case means matching rows.

No spaces, no punctuation in the tag itself

Why it matters: a space or a stray comma inside a tag can shift columns in a CSV and break a filter. "Front of House" is three words a formula can trip over; a trailing space after "kitchen " reads as a fourth station nobody created.

How to apply it: join words with a hyphen or drop them. Use foh instead of "front of house," prep-kitchen instead of "Prep Kitchen." Short and unbroken. If you need to know what the columns mean before you filter, the stable export schema keeps the same headers every time, so a formula you write once keeps working next month.

Tag the station, group the people

Why it matters: a line cook who covers expo on Fridays is one person doing two stations. If you try to encode the station in the worker's name or group, the Friday hours land in the wrong bucket. Tags belong on the entry, not the person.

How to apply it: put people in worker groups for who they usually are (kitchen staff, servers) and use tags for what a given shift actually was. When the cook runs expo, that shift gets the foh tag even though the person sits in the kitchen group. Your station total follows the work, not the job title.

Decide your split rule for people who cross stations

Why it matters: a server who spends an hour rolling silverware in back is real hours that could go to either column. If half your team splits time and you have no rule, two managers will tag it two ways and the report will not reconcile.

How to apply it: write the rule down and keep it boring. A common one: tag the whole shift by where the person spent most of it. If you genuinely need the hour separated, have them clock out and back in with the other tag. Either works. What breaks the report is switching between them without a rule.

Keep the tag list short enough to remember

Why it matters: fifteen tags means fifteen chances to pick the wrong one, and half of them will get used twice all year. A short list is one people actually apply correctly under pressure.

How to apply it: cap yourself at the stations you actually report on. Most restaurants need three or four. Add catering or private-event only if you send those hours somewhere different. If a tag has not been used in a month, retire it. A tight list keeps the station hours you hand to payroll clean without a cleanup pass.

Run one small export before the pay period ends

Once your tags are set, test them. Export a single week mid-month and sort by the tag column. You are looking for one thing: does every entry land in kitchen or front-of-house, with nothing stranded in a fourth block or sitting blank? If something is off, you have days to fix it instead of finding out the night payroll is due.

If you have not set up stations yet, start a free workspace and create the two tags before your first shift. Naming them right the first time is the whole job. After that the CSV sorts itself.