Getting started

Setting up ClockTap takes about five minutes and happens in three phases: you run the setup wizard to create your first location, you get your team onto it, and then attendance starts landing in your dashboard. This page follows that order.

See it in action

Before you start

Create your workspace. Sign up with your work email from the landing page. Your workspace is provisioned automatically on the free Starter plan — one location and up to five employees, no credit card. The setup wizard opens on its own the first time you sign in.

Know what a location is. A location is how ClockTap groups employees, kiosks, and attendance records. Each one has its own clock-in setup and its own attendance feed. It can be a branch, an office, a client site you deploy staff to, or anywhere else your team works — so "location" is about who reports where, not about a street address.

Decide how your team will clock in. This is the one answer that changes the rest of the setup, which is why the wizard asks it first:

You are not locked into one. Turn the other on later from location settings and both run side by side on the same location.

Part 1 — Run the setup wizard

The wizard has five steps: Mode → Location → Employees → Schedule → Complete. You can go back to any step you have already passed.

1. Mode

Pick Shared kiosk or Personal login. Everything below adapts to this choice — the location step asks for a kiosk email only in kiosk mode, and the employees step asks for staff emails only in personal-login mode.

2. Location

Give the location a name that your team would recognise. That can be your business name if you run one site, a branch like Ortigas Branch, or a client site you deploy staff to — it shows on the kiosk and in reports. The address, country, and timezone are separate fields below it; the timezone is what ClockTap uses to decide which day a clock-in belongs to, so check it before moving on.

In kiosk mode you also set a kiosk email. That is a sign-in account for the shared device, not a person's inbox — use something like kiosk@yourcompany.com. It has to be different from the email you signed up with.

3. Employees

Add each team member's first and last name. What else you enter depends on the mode:

• Shared kiosk — ClockTap generates a PIN for each employee. Nothing else is required.
• Personal login — every employee needs their own email address so they can be invited. It can't be the email you signed in with as the owner, and if some of your staff can't have an email, go back and pick Shared kiosk instead.

Flag anyone who should approve leave and overtime as a supervisor here. You can add the rest of your team later, one at a time or in bulk, from the Employees screen.

4. Schedule

Assign shifts so ClockTap can measure late arrivals and overtime against expected hours rather than just recording raw times.

You don't have to build a shift first. The step ships with two ready-made ones — Opening Shift (07:00–16:00) and Closing Shift (10:00–19:00). For each employee, pick a shift under Quick assign, then press Apply Mon–Fri. Every day starts as a rest day, so assigning the weekdays leaves the weekend off without any extra work.

Each employee gets their own week, so two people can sit on different shifts — one opening, one closing. A few shortcuts:

• Use <name>'s schedule for everyone — one switch, named after your first employee, for when most of your team works the same days.
• Copy from… — take another employee's week as a starting point, then adjust.
• Create a new shift… — your own start and end times, if neither preset fits.

Any single day can still be changed from its own dropdown. You can also skip this step entirely and add schedules later from Settings — until a shift is assigned, ClockTap records raw clock-in times and flags nobody as late.

5. Complete

Review the summary and finish. Two things happen at this point, and one of them is easy to miss:

• Shared kiosk — a kiosk sign-up invitation is emailed to the kiosk address you set.
• Personal login — an invite email goes out to every employee you added.

Part 2 — Get your team clocking in

If you chose Shared kiosk

1. On the device you want to use as the kiosk — a tablet, a spare phone, or any browser — open the invitation email you sent to the kiosk address.
2. Set a password. That account signs in once and the device stays paired to the location.
3. Open the Kiosk screen. Staff now clock in and out by tapping their PIN.

Open the invite on the kiosk device itself, not on your own computer, so the device is the one that ends up signed in. See Kiosk mode for pinning it to a screen and locking it down.

If you chose Personal login

1. Each employee opens their invite email and sets a password.
2. They sign in on their own phone and clock in from /app/clock.
3. Their first clock-in shows up in your dashboard the moment it happens.

See BYOD self-login for the full employee-side flow, and for the network and location rules you can put around it.

Part 3 — Review attendance

Open Attendance in the admin dashboard. Clock-ins appear live, with late arrivals and overtime flagged against each employee's schedule. Use the date range picker to move between a day, a week, or a pay period, and export to Excel when it's time to run payroll.

That's the loop — from here the rest of ClockTap is refinement: approvals, leave, holidays, and reports.

Next steps

• Kiosk mode — set up the shared device and lock it down.
• BYOD self-login — let staff clock in from their own phones.
• Managing approvals — how leave and overtime requests reach you.
• Share a location with a business partner or manager as a co-owner.
• FAQ — answers to the questions that come up during setup.