Time clock for restaurants

Restaurant time tracking, minus the workforce platform

If you run a small restaurant and you've shopped for a time clock, you've found two kinds of tool. The first is a workforce-management platform, Homebase, 7Shifts, Deputy, that bundles scheduling, messaging, HR, and time tracking together, prices per location, and asks you to learn a lot of screens to do one thing. The second is a billable-hours tracker, Clockify, Toggl, that doesn't fit your workflow at all.

If you already do scheduling somewhere else (Google Calendar, a paper schedule, an old text-message group), most of the workforce platform is wasted overhead.

How Kangaroo Clock fits a restaurant

Put a tablet on the counter or in the back office; staff tap their name to clock in and tap again to clock out. Optional PIN if you want a verification step. Tag entries by station (kitchen, front-of-house, bar) and the reports filter cleanly.

At week's end, export a CSV with hours, names, tags, and durations, feed it into your payroll provider (Gusto, ADP, or whatever you use). The schema is locked, so once your payroll process accepts the file, it won't break on you.

The auto-close protection handles "Sandra forgot to clock out at end of shift" , sessions older than a configurable cutoff cap automatically and land in a review queue for you to confirm or adjust, instead of either becoming 18-hour ghosts or silently disappearing.

What Kangaroo Clock doesn't do (on purpose)

No scheduling, keep whatever scheduling system already works for you. No tip pool calculations (we don't want to be in the position of computing wages and getting it wrong). No payroll processing, we end at a CSV. No POS integration. No team messaging.

If you need scheduling and messaging and HR in one tool, Homebase or 7Shifts is a defensible single pane of glass. If you just need clean hours out and you'd rather not pay per location, this is the simpler version.