Tracking hours in a spreadsheet is falling apart

A spreadsheet or a paper sign-in sheet works fine for five people. Past that it quietly turns into a second job: chasing illegible handwriting, retyping times, summing columns, and discovering at payroll time that three rows never got a clock-out.

What breaks first

• The tally. Adding up start and end times by hand is slow and error-prone, especially converting minutes to decimal hours.
• Missing rows. A sign-in sheet with no sign-out is just a name. You cannot reconstruct the hours later.
• Two people at once. A single shared sheet or one laptop becomes a line at the door.

The shift

Let each person clock themselves in and out by tapping a name on a tablet, scanning a posted QR code, or opening a personal link. The times are captured automatically and accurately, with no handwriting to decode and no one retyping anything.

When payroll or a report is due, open Reports, pick a date range, and click Download CSV. Durations are already computed in both decimal hours and seconds, so there is no manual math. The column schema is fixed, so the same file imports into your payroll tool every time.

You keep the parts spreadsheets were good at

Want to slice by program or location? Use tags to label people, then filter the report by tag. Want the raw data? The CSV is yours to drop into a spreadsheet whenever you want the pivot tables back. You are removing the data-entry, not the analysis.

Missed clock-outs still happen, and that is handled

Auto-close caps runaway entries and flags them for a quick review, so a forgotten clock-out is a 10-second fix, not a corrupted total. See forgotten clock-outs. Try the demo and export a sample CSV.