A Tutoring Center's First Payroll Run in CSV

Westside Learning runs after-school math and reading help with six tutors. They get paid every two weeks. Nobody has a company email, nobody wants to install an app, and the center director does not want to spend a Friday night adding up index cards. Here is their first pay period, start to finish, with the real numbers.

The setup took one evening. The director posted a tablet at the front desk running the kiosk and taped a QR sign-in poster next to it as a backup. Tutors tap their name to clock in when they arrive and tap it again when they leave. No tutor has a login, because workers never sign in. Only the director does, by magic link.

Two weeks of sessions, exactly as they happened

The pay period ran Monday March 3 through Sunday March 16, a standard biweekly pay period. Tutoring sessions are not uniform. A reading tutor might do a single 90 minute block; a math tutor might stay for a three hour stretch during exam week. By the end of the two weeks the center had recorded entries like these:

• Maria, reading: eight sessions, mostly 90 minutes, 13.5 hours total.
• Devon, math: six sessions, longer during exam week, 17.0 hours.
• Priya, math: five sessions, 11.25 hours.
• Sam, reading: seven sessions, 10.5 hours.
• Aisha, test prep: four long Saturday blocks, 12.0 hours.
• Leo, reading: three sessions, 4.5 hours, plus one problem (below).

That is 68.75 hours across six people, before one correction.

The missed clock-out, and why it did not wreck the numbers

On Thursday March 13, Leo clocked in for a 4:00 PM session and walked out at 5:30 without tapping his name again. His entry sat open overnight. In most hand-kept systems this is the moment a timesheet goes wrong: either someone guesses, or the entry runs until it gets noticed and suddenly shows Leo on the clock for 19 hours.

That did not happen here. Kangaroo Clock uses auto-close, which closes a stale open entry at its start time plus a cutoff, never at the current time. Leo's forgotten clock-out got closed based on when he started, so it could not inflate the report. The director still reviewed it, saw the real session was 90 minutes, and adjusted the single entry to 1.5 hours. One edit, not a detective project. Leo's corrected total: 4.5 hours.

The point is the failure mode is bounded. A missed tap costs you one small review, not a payroll that reports phantom hours you have to catch by eye.

The dashboard check before closing the period

Before exporting, the director opened the dashboard on Sunday night to confirm nobody was still shown on the clock. The dashboard shows who is currently clocked in, so a tutor left open from Saturday would have stood out immediately. Everyone was closed out. That thirty second glance is the whole "did we miss anything" step.

The CSV columns handed to the bookkeeper

The center does not run payroll in-house. Kangaroo Clock is not a payroll processor and does not move money, so the hours go to an outside bookkeeper who cuts the checks. The handoff is a CSV export with a stable column schema that does not change between exports, which matters because the bookkeeper built her spreadsheet around those exact headers the first time and never has to rebuild it.

The export for this period included worker name, worker group, clock-in time, clock-out time, duration in hours, any tags on the entry, and a distinct-worker count for the period. All times are stored in UTC and shown in the director's local time, so the clock-in and clock-out columns read as the actual Pacific times the tutors worked.

Here is the summary the bookkeeper worked from:

Distinct workers in the period: 6. Total paid hours: 68.75. The worker group column let the bookkeeper split costs between the reading program and the math program for the center's grant report without a second export. If you want the mechanics of that handoff spelled out, the page on getting tutor hours into payroll via CSV walks through it field by field.

If you pay hourly and want decimals and HH:MM

The export gives duration in decimal hours, which is what most payroll math wants. If your bookkeeper prefers to double-check a few entries in HH:MM, a decimal to HH:MM converter flips between the two in a second. Devon's 17.0 reads as 17:00; Priya's 11.25 reads as 11:15.

What the next period looks like

The second pay period took the director about four minutes: glance at the dashboard, export, email the file. No cards, no app, no per-seat charge as the roster shifts, because pricing is flat and unlimited people. Clock-in stays free until 500 recorded hours, then it is $10 a month or $100 a year, and clock-in never stops working regardless of the hour count.

If this maps onto your center, the fastest way to see the flow is to tap through the live kiosk demo, then set up your six tutors and run a test period before the real one.