What a Tag Is and How to Group Crew Hours

A tag is a label you attach to a time entry so you can separate one slice of hours from another when you total or export them. Line cook clocks in, you mark the entry kitchen. Server clocks in, you mark it floor. At the end of the pay period you pull kitchen hours and floor hours as two clean numbers instead of one lump you have to sort by hand.

That distinction matters the moment your hours serve more than one purpose. A restaurant that runs the numbers by station. A tutoring center that reports reading-program hours to one funder and math-program hours to another. An event lead who needs setup crew hours split from teardown crew hours. Without labels, every entry looks the same and you are back to guessing from memory who worked where.

Tags label entries, worker groups label people

Two things get called grouping, and mixing them up costs you time. A tag lives on a single time entry. A worker group used as a tag lives on a person. The difference shows up when someone works two roles.

Say Maria buses tables on Friday and preps in the kitchen on Saturday. If you tag her as a person, all her hours land in one bucket no matter what she actually did. If you tag the entries, Friday reads floor and Saturday reads kitchen, and each set of hours goes where it belongs. Use worker groups for stable facts about people (this person is a volunteer, that person is paid staff). Use entry tags for what happened during a given shift.

Most teams use both. A group answers "who is this person." A tag answers "what was this time for." When you filter a report, you can combine them: all kitchen entries from the paid-staff group, for example.

How to split kitchen, floor, and crew hours in practice

Start with the smallest set of tags that answers a question you actually ask. A restaurant rarely needs twelve tags. It needs kitchen, floor, and maybe bar. If you cannot name the report a tag will feed, you do not need the tag yet.

Once entries carry tags, filtering is where the payoff lands. Pull one program, one station, or one crew and get a total for just that slice. When someone forgets to clock out, auto-close settles the open entry at its start time plus your cutoff rather than the current time, so a forgotten clock-out on a tagged entry never quietly inflates that station's total.

Here is how the same three workers might read across a week, tagged by where they spent their time:

Filter to kitchen and you get 30 hours across two people. Filter to floor and you get 25. Maria appears in both because her entries, not Maria herself, carry the tags.

Tags carry through to your export

Tags are only useful if they survive the trip out of the dashboard. When you run a CSV export for payroll, the tag travels with each row and the column schema stays stable, so a spreadsheet you built last quarter still opens correctly this quarter. The export also carries a distinct-worker count, which is the number a grant report usually asks for: not how many hours, but how many separate people showed up under a given program.

That combination is what makes tags worth the small effort of applying them. You filter to reading-program, export, and hand the funder a total and a headcount that match. No manual sorting, no reconciling two versions of the same week.

If you want the hours in decimal form for a payroll system, or in HH:MM for a printed timesheet, run the exported numbers through the decimal and HH:MM converter after you filter. The tag decides which rows you are converting; the converter decides the format.

Keep the tag list short and consistent

The failure mode is drift. Someone types Kitchen, someone else types kitchn, and now your kitchen total is split across three near-identical labels. Agree on a small written list and post it where people apply tags. When a tag stops matching a real question you ask, retire it. A tag you never filter on is just clutter on every row.

You do not need to tag every entry from day one. Add a tag the first time you catch yourself wishing you could pull one slice of hours on its own. Restaurant owners usually reach for station tags. Tutoring centers reach for program tags. Event leads reach for crew tags. Same mechanism, different labels.

Workers never see or manage any of this. They tap a name, scan a code, or open a link, and the tagging happens on your side. If you want to see how the clock-in itself works before you set up your labels, the live kiosk demo runs in the browser. When you are ready to organize your own hours by station or program, start a free workspace and add your first two tags.