Track Tutor Session Hours for Payroll, No Logins

You have six tutors coming in and out across three afternoon blocks, and you need their hours right the first time so Friday payroll doesn't turn into a text-message scavenger hunt. Nobody wants to set up an account, and you don't want to chase down a login reset when a new tutor starts. Here is the whole cycle, from the moment a tutor walks in to the CSV you hand to your payroll processor.

Before the first session: add your tutors once

Do this one time in the admin dashboard. Open the People screen and add each tutor by name. That's it. There is no invite email, no password for them to set, no app for them to download. Workers never get accounts in the first place, which is exactly why tracking tutor sessions for payroll stays simple even when your roster turns over between semesters.

While you're on the People screen, sort tutors into worker groups if you run distinct programs. A Reading group and a Math group means you can filter hours by program later without hand-counting. You can also plan to add tags to entries, so a Saturday SAT prep block reports separately from weekday tutoring.

Now set up how they'll clock in. For a front desk, the shared-tablet kiosk is the fastest: prop up a tablet, open the kiosk URL, and it shows a grid of tutor names. If your tutors scatter across rooms, print a QR poster instead. The QR sign-in poster generator gives you something to tape by the door that a tutor scans on their own phone.

At session start and end: the tutor taps in and out

When a tutor arrives, they tap their name on the tablet. The screen confirms they're on the clock. That's the entire interaction, two seconds, no typing. If you're using QR, they scan the code and tap their name on the page that opens. No download either way.

At the end of the session, they do the same thing to clock out. The kiosk shows who is currently on the clock, so at a glance you can see that four tutors are in and two have left. If a tutor forgets to tap in at the start, you can fix it later on the admin side, so a busy afternoon never blocks a session from starting.

Every tap is stored in UTC and shown to you in your local time. You never have to reason about time zones, and neither do they. Want to see exactly what the tutor sees before you set it up in front of real students? The live kiosk demo runs the whole tap-in flow in your browser.

Friday: review the week and fix the one missed clock-out

Open the Entries screen and filter to the current week. You'll see a row per session: tutor name, clock-in time, clock-out time, and duration. Skim it. Most rows are clean. The one you're looking for is the tutor who tapped in Tuesday at 3:15 and never tapped out.

Kangaroo Clock handles that for you with auto-close. A stale open entry gets closed at its start time plus your cutoff, never at the current moment. So a Tuesday session that should have run two hours never balloons into a 40-hour entry because someone forgot to tap out and went home. The reported hours stay honest without you doing math.

If the auto-closed duration is wrong (say the tutor actually stayed until 5:30), edit the clock-out time on that entry directly. Type the correct time, save, and the duration recalculates. This is the only manual touch most weeks need. If you want to check a total by hand before trusting it, the time card calculator adds up in-and-out times for a single tutor in a few seconds.

What the review looks like in practice

Three rows, one edit. That's a normal week.

Export the hours your payroll processor wants

Once the week reads clean, click Export to pull a CSV file. The column schema is stable and never shifts between exports, so the mapping you set up in your payroll system keeps working month after month. The file includes a distinct-worker count, which is handy when a director asks how many tutors you actually paid this period.

Kangaroo Clock does not move or hold money. It is not a payroll processor. It hands you the hours; you feed them into whatever system cuts the checks. If that system wants decimals instead of hours-and-minutes, run the file through the decimal and HH:MM converter so 2:30 becomes 2.5 before you import.

If you pay on a two-week cycle, filter Entries to the full pay period rather than a single week, then export. The distinct-worker count and the per-tutor totals cover the range you selected.

Next week, you repeat almost none of this

The setup was one-time. From here the weekly cycle is: tutors tap in and out on their own, you glance at Entries on Friday, fix the occasional missed tap, and export. No logins to reset, no per-seat fee as your roster grows, no monitoring of any kind. Start a workspace and add your tutors, and your next payroll run comes from a screen you already trust. You can start a free workspace and have the kiosk running before the afternoon block.