Splitting a Weekend's Hours: Kitchen vs Front

You run a 40-seat place. Friday and Saturday are the only nights that matter, and when you sit down Sunday morning to total hours, you need two numbers that do not bleed into each other: what the kitchen worked, and what the front worked. One line cook stayed late to break down the walk-in. One server left early because the second seating never filled. If those land in the same pile, your labor cost per station is guesswork.

Here is a real version of that weekend, with the actual clock times, so you can map it onto your own crew.

The crew and how they punched in

Seven people across two nights. Nobody has an app. Each person taps their name on a tablet by the back door when they arrive, and taps it again when they leave. No login, no password, no account to set up. If you have never watched that happen, the live kiosk demo shows the exact screen a cook sees.

Before the weekend, each name got a worker group: Kitchen or Front of House. That group travels with the person, so every entry they create is already labeled by station. No tagging after the fact, no sorting a spreadsheet by memory.

Friday night, clock times as they happened

Dinner service, doors at 5.

Deshawn stayed past 11:30 to break down the walk-in and scrub the line. Sam, a second server, came in for the early rush and left at 9:30 when the room emptied. Both of those are normal, and both are the kind of detail that gets lost when you reconstruct the night from a paper sheet two days later.

Friday kitchen hours: Maria 7.75, Deshawn 7.67, Tomas 6.5. That is 23.92 hours in the kitchen. Front of house: Priya 6.25, Jordan 6.5, Sam 4.5, which is 17.25 hours. The gap between stations is already visible, and it is Friday.

Saturday, including the clock-out nobody remembered

Busier night, same crew minus Sam, plus Alex working the bar end of the front.

Deshawn walked out Saturday without tapping his name. On a paper sheet that entry sits open forever, and when you notice Sunday you either guess his out time or let it run to whenever you happened to look, which would charge the kitchen a phantom 14 hours.

That did not happen, because a forgotten clock-out gets handled by the auto-close rule: a stale open entry is closed at its start time plus a set cutoff, never at the current time. Deshawn's Saturday entry closed at a sane length instead of inflating the kitchen total. You can still edit it to his real out time once you check with him, but the default never pads the number against you.

Saturday kitchen hours after auto-close: Maria 8.83, Deshawn capped by the cutoff, Tomas 7.5. Front of house: Priya 7.08, Jordan 7.0, Alex 6.67, which totals 20.75.

How the two nights became a payroll number

Sunday morning you filter the dashboard by worker group and pull the weekend. The export gives you one row per shift with the station already on it, so kitchen and front separate without a single formula. The column schema never shifts between exports, which is the part that matters if you paste this into the same payroll sheet every week. Here is more on how station labels drive a clean split between kitchen and front hours when you run the report.

Weekend totals came out like this:

• Kitchen: 23.92 Friday plus Saturday's capped total, a clean station number with no front-of-house hours mixed in.
• Front of house: 17.25 Friday plus 20.75 Saturday, which is 38.0 hours across the weekend.

Two stations, two numbers, and you can see your labor cost per side of the pass instead of one lump that tells you nothing. If you want to convert those decimal hours back to hours and minutes for a pay stub, the decimal to HH:MM converter does it without any sign-up.

What made the split clean instead of a Sunday chore

Three things did the work. Workers tapped a name, so the clock times were real and not reconstructed. The station rode along as a worker group, so every entry was labeled the moment it was created. And the auto-close kept a missed clock-out from quietly charging the kitchen for hours nobody worked.

Kangaroo Clock is free for your first 500 recorded hours, then $10 a month or $100 a year, flat, for unlimited people and both stations. Workers never pay and never sign in. If this weekend looks like yours, start a free workspace and set your two worker groups before Friday service.