Un-Archive a Volunteer Who Comes Back

Maria ran your Saturday food pantry shifts last spring, logged 60-odd hours, then disappeared for the summer. You archived her so the kiosk roster stayed short. Now it is September and she texts that she is back. You do not need to add her as a new person, and you should not, because that would split her history into two names. You un-archive the one you already have. Here is the exact order.

First, confirm she is archived and not deleted

Archived and deleted are different things. Archiving hides a worker from the kiosk and from the live roster, but keeps the person and every entry attached to them. Kangaroo Clock does not quietly delete workers, so if Maria clocked in with you before, she is sitting in your archive waiting. If you are fuzzy on exactly what archiving does to past entries, the short answer is on the page that explains archive and restore: hours stay put, the name just stops showing up on the kiosk.

Open your admin dashboard. The default worker list shows active people only. That is by design, so coordinators are not scrolling past twenty retired volunteers to find the five on tonight's shift.

Find Maria in the archived list

Switch the worker list to show archived people. Look for the filter or toggle on the worker list that says it includes archived workers, then flip it on. Now the list grows to include everyone you have ever set aside.

Search by her name. If your season had three Marias, use the worker group she belonged to (say, "Saturday pantry") to narrow it, since groups stay attached through archiving. Groups are the labels you put on people, as opposed to tags, which label the time entries themselves. A quick refresher on both is in the glossary if the distinction has gone blurry over the off-season.

When you spot the right Maria, check the detail before you restore. Her past entries should be listed under her name with their original dates and totals. If the dates match your spring calendar, you have the correct person and not a same-name stranger.

Restore her in one click

On her worker record, choose Restore (or Un-archive, depending on where you are looking). That is the whole action. There is no re-import, no form to re-enter her details, no new worker to create. The moment you confirm, three things happen:

• Her name reappears on the shared-tablet kiosk, so she can tap it and clock in again that same evening.
• Her QR code and personal link, if she had one, start working again.
• Her worker group membership comes back with her, so filtered reports for "Saturday pantry" include her again without extra setup.

She still has no account and no password. Workers in Kangaroo Clock never sign in, archived or active. Restoring her does not create a login she has to manage. She just taps her name on the tablet like she did in the spring.

Confirm her past hours are intact

This is the step people skip and then worry about. Do not skip it. You want to see with your own eyes that un-archiving added nothing and removed nothing from her history.

Open her worker detail and look at her entries from last spring. Each one should show the same start and stop times it always had. Times are stored in UTC and shown in your local time zone, so if you set her up in one time zone and are checking from another, the clock times may read differently while pointing at the same moment. That is display, not a change to the data.

For a clean check, run a report filtered to her name across the whole year and look at the distinct-worker count and her total hours. Her spring total should match what you recorded then, and the CSV export uses a stable column schema that does not shift when you archive or restore someone. If you reported 62 hours to your grant in June, the export still says 62 after she comes back.

Un-archiving is reversible and non-destructive. If you restore the wrong person, archive them again and nothing is lost.

What to do if she forgot to clock out once

Seasonal volunteers leave open entries. Maybe on her last spring shift Maria clocked in and walked out without tapping her name again. You might see one dangling open entry in her history. Kangaroo Clock handles this with auto-close for forgotten clock-outs, which closes a stale open entry at its start time plus your cutoff, never at the current moment. So a clock-in she forgot about in May does not quietly rack up four months of phantom hours when you un-archive her in September. The capped entry is what shows up, and your totals stay honest.

Get her first shift back on the record

Once she is restored and her history checks out, the rest is normal operation. Post the roster on the kiosk, let her tap in, and watch her appear on the live "on the clock right now" view when she arrives. If you want her returning season to generate a tidy end-of-term document for her school or her own records, the volunteer hours certificate generator pulls from the same totals you just confirmed.

That is the full loop: find her in the archive, restore in one click, confirm the spring hours are untouched, and let her clock in tonight. If you have not set up your workspace yet and want to try this flow on real data, you can start a free workspace and the first 500 recorded hours cost nothing.