Track Hours for a One-Weekend Event Crew

You have 22 people showing up Friday afternoon to build a stage, run a two-day festival, and tear it down by Sunday night. Nobody wants an app. Half of them you met last week. You still need honest hours at the end, whether that is for a grant report, a stipend, or just knowing who actually showed. Here is the order to set it up so the whole weekend runs clean.

Set up the workspace before the crew arrives

Start a workspace from the free workspace signup page. You sign in with a magic link sent to your email. There is no card to enter: the free tier covers your first 500 recorded hours, which a single weekend crew will not come close to burning through. Only you, the admin, ever log in. The crew never gets an account, never sets a password, never installs anything.

Add your people first. Type each name into the worker list. For a weekend crew you do not need emails or phone numbers, just the name they will recognize when they look for it on the screen. If you have 22 names, this takes a few minutes.

While you are in there, set up worker groups. Groups label people, not time. Make one for "Stage Crew," one for "Front of House," one for "Cleanup." Later this lets you pull hours for just one group without sorting by hand.

Decide: shared tablet kiosk or posted QR code

Two sign-in methods fit an event. Pick based on where your crew passes through.

If everyone funnels past one check-in table, use the kiosk. Prop a tablet at the table, open kiosk mode, and workers clock in by tapping their own name. No typing, no login. One device handles the whole crew.

If your crew spreads across a site with no single choke point, posted QR codes work better. Print a code and tape it near each zone. A worker scans it with their phone camera, taps their name, and they are on the clock. You can generate a printable sheet with the QR sign-in poster generator and hang one at the stage, one at the gate, one at the kitchen. Nothing stops you from running both at once: kiosk at the main table, QR codes out in the field.

If you want to see exactly how the tap-your-name screen behaves before the weekend, open the live kiosk demo and run a fake clock-in. The setup built for event organizers walks through the same choices with event-specific examples.

Tag setup and teardown so the phases stay separate

Hours for a festival are not one lump. The grant or the client usually wants to know how much went into build, how much into the event itself, and how much into cleanup. Tags handle this.

Tags label time entries, not people. Create three: "Setup," "Event," and "Teardown." When a worker clocks in, the entry can carry the tag for whatever phase is live. The practical move is to switch the active tag as the weekend moves: everything logged Friday afternoon is Setup, Saturday and Sunday daytime is Event, Sunday evening is Teardown. Because a person can wear more than one hat, the same worker shows up under multiple tags across the weekend, and that is exactly what you want in the report.

Groups and tags answer different questions. "How many hours did Stage Crew work?" is a group filter. "How many hours went into teardown?" is a tag filter. Having both means you can cross them: teardown hours for Stage Crew only.

Watch who is on the clock, and fix the inevitable missed clock-out

During the event, the dashboard shows who is on the clock right now. Glance at it to see if the cleanup team is still logged in at midnight when they left at ten.

Someone will forget to clock out. It happens every event. A volunteer finishes teardown Sunday, drives home, and leaves an entry hanging open. If that entry stayed open, it would count hours all the way to whenever you looked, which could be Monday morning, and your totals would be garbage.

Kangaroo Clock handles this with its auto-close rule. A stale open entry gets closed at its start time plus a cutoff, never at the current time. A forgotten clock-out can never inflate the reported hours. If you know the real end time, you can also edit the entry by hand to the exact minute they actually left. Either way, the number stays honest.

Export the totals Monday morning

Once the weekend is done, pull a CSV of the weekend's entries. The column layout is stable and never changes shape, so whatever you load it into (a spreadsheet, a payroll person's template, a grant form) reads the same columns every time. The export includes a distinct-worker count, which is the number you reach for when a report asks how many unique people you mobilized.

Filter before you export, or filter after in the spreadsheet. Pull Setup hours to see what the build cost you. Pull the Cleanup group to tally teardown labor. The CSV carries the tags and groups you set up, so the slicing you planned on Thursday pays off here.

Kangaroo Clock does not run payroll or move money, so it will not cut a check. What it hands you is a trustworthy hours file. If someone needs decimal hours instead of HH:MM for a stipend calculation, the payroll hours converter will do that conversion.

That is the whole loop for one weekend: add names, pick a sign-in method, tag the phases, watch the live board, fix the one hanging entry, export. Set the workspace up before Friday and the rest runs while you are busy with everything else.