Test Every Clock-In Method From Your Phone First

You want to know one thing before you ask your crew to use anything: does clocking in actually work the way you were promised, from the phone in your hand, right now? You can find out in about five minutes. No account, no email, no app store. The live kiosk demo runs in your browser and lets you try all three clock-in methods on real screens.

Here is the full walkthrough, in the order you should do it, plus a plain answer to the question everyone eventually asks: what does the demo save, and what does it throw away?

What you need before you start

A phone with a browser. That is the whole list. You do not need a tablet to test the kiosk, because the kiosk is just a web page and it renders fine on a phone screen. If you happen to have a spare tablet nearby, prop it up and use it, since that is closer to how it works in a real doorway. But your phone alone is enough to test every path.

You do not create a workspace, and you do not add worker names. The demo comes pre-loaded with sample workers so you can tap a name and see what happens. Nothing you do is tied to your real team.

Test the shared-tablet kiosk first

Open the demo and you land on the kiosk screen. This is the shared view you would post on a stand or a wall tablet by the entrance. You will see a grid of sample worker names.

Tap a name. That worker is now on the clock. The screen confirms the clock in and shows a timestamp.
Tap the same name again. This time it offers to clock the worker out, and records the elapsed time.
Tap two or three different names so you can see several people on the clock at once.

Notice what the kiosk does not ask for. No password. No login. Workers never have accounts, so there is nothing for them to forget and nothing for you to reset. The one screen handles both in and out, which is exactly what you want when a line of people is filing past a tablet at the start of a shift.

Test the QR sign-in from your phone camera

The second method is a posted QR code. In a real setup you print it and tape it up; anyone with a phone points their camera at it and lands on the clock-in page. To test this in the demo, find the QR option and either scan the code shown on screen or open the link it represents.

If you are doing this on a single phone, the easiest test is to pull the demo up on a laptop, then scan the on-screen code with your phone. You will see the same tap-your-name flow, now running on the device the worker actually holds. When you want the real thing for your entrance, the QR sign-in poster generator builds a printable sheet you can post the same day.

Test the personal link for remote or solo workers

The third path is a personal link. Instead of a shared screen, each worker gets their own URL that clocks only them. This is the one you send to a tutor working off-site or a volunteer driving between locations. Open the personal-link example in the demo and clock in and out. There is no name grid here, because the link already knows who it belongs to.

Between the three methods, you have covered the doorway tablet, the taped-up poster, and the person who is nowhere near either one. That is every situation a small team runs into.

What the demo saves and what it drops

This is the part worth reading twice. The demo is a sandbox. Every entry you create lives only in that demo session so you can watch the dashboard update and see a clock out land. None of it becomes a real record, and none of it follows you into a workspace.

Concretely:

The sample workers are not your workers. You cannot enter your real crew's names in the demo, and you would not want to.
The time entries you make are temporary and are not exported anywhere.
Nothing you do requires or collects a login, because that is true of the product itself, not just the demo.

What the demo will not show you is your own report with your own people in it. For that you need a workspace, and only the admin signs in (by magic link) to see it. If you want the exact rules on what carries over, the short answer on trying it without a signup spells out where the sandbox ends and a real workspace begins.

What to look for while you click around

Do not just confirm that clocking in works. Check the things that will bite you later. Watch the admin dashboard show who is on the clock in real time as you tap names. Note that the times shown match your local clock, since everything is stored in UTC and displayed in the viewer's zone, so a crew across two time zones still reads correctly.

Think about forgotten clock-outs while you are here. In a real workspace, a stale open entry gets closed at its start time plus your cutoff, never at the current moment, so a volunteer who walks out without tapping out does not end up billed for sixteen hours. Read how auto-close handles that so a missed tap-out never inflates your totals.

When you are ready to use it for real

Once the three methods feel right, the next step is a workspace of your own. You add your actual roster, print your own poster, and start collecting hours you can pull as a clean CSV for payroll or grant reporting. You can start a free workspace with just your email as the admin. Test first, then commit. That order saves you the awkwardness of introducing a tool to your crew before you have tried the exact screens they will tap.