Clocking in at a kiosk and the kiosk dashboard

1. Give employees a kiosk code

1. Open Employees, tick the people who need kiosk access, and choose Create Kiosk Codes from the mass actions.
2. The dialog counts three things before doing anything: how many you selected, how many will get a new code, and how many are skipped because they already have one.
3. Read the amber warning once and remember it: existing codes are never regenerated by this action. To give someone a new PIN, revoke the old one on their record first.
4. That is also why re-running the action is safe. Nobody gets a duplicate code, and nobody's working PIN silently changes under them.
5. Click generate. The whole batch is written in one database transaction, so a half-finished run is not possible.
6. For a single person, you don't need the mass action — kiosk access is on the employee's own record, next to their user account.

2. Hand out the codes

1. The result screen lists the batch and confirms that each person's kiosk access is now on.
2. Download CSV is the practical way to distribute them — one file to print or split per office, instead of copying codes one at a time.
3. Closing the dialog loses nothing. Every code stays visible on that employee's own record until it is revoked.
4. Treat the CSV like a list of passwords: it is exactly that. Deliver each person their own code, not the whole file.
5. If some rows report as failed, just run the action again for those people. Concurrent edits are the usual cause.

3. What the employee does at the kiosk

1. The tablet stays on the kiosk page. The employee types their PIN and confirms — no username, no application login.
2. "Invalid PIN" means the code is wrong, not that the person has no access. A digit mistyped is by far the most common cause.
3. "Kiosk is disabled" is about the device, not the person — an administrator has switched that terminal off.
4. "Kiosk PIN is not set" means that employee never got a code. Generate one as in step 1.
5. If the device has a login area drawn, a login from outside it is refused with a message saying so — see the setup guide.

4. Start work, switch activity, stop

1. After the PIN, the screen shows who is signed in — with their photo, if the device is configured to show it.
2. The status panel is the important part: it says whether the person is currently working, which activity is running, and how much time is logged today.
3. Start work by choosing the activity — regular work, a break, field work, and whatever else your company defines as hour types. That is what makes the totals meaningful later.
4. Switching activity does not need a stop first. Choosing a different one closes the previous stretch and opens the new one, so a break is a switch, not a logout.
5. Stop Work ends the session. Whether the employee also sees hours, absences or a request form depends on the per-device toggles.
6. Everything logged here lands in the ordinary timesheet, so nothing needs re-entering — see Entering hours.

5. Watch it live on the dashboard

1. Open Kiosk Dashboard under Reports. It shows, right now, who is clocked in and who is not.
2. The Active column lists each person with the device they used, when they started, and the activity they are on. Activity Totals summarises the whole company at a glance.
3. The Inactive column is the one that saves time. An amber warning appears only when a shift has started, the person has no absence, and no hours are logged — in other words, when it is genuinely worth a phone call.
4. Details on an inactive row compares the planned shift with the logged hours and states which of the situations it is: no shift and no hours, hours without a shift, a shift with nobody clocked in, hours outside the shift, or a planned absence.
5. Filter by device to see one entrance at a time, or by activity type to find everyone currently on a break.
6. Map View plots where people clocked in — but only for devices where geolocation is forced. Without that, there is nothing to plot.
7. Only employees with status Employed who have an account appear. Someone missing from both columns usually fails one of those two conditions.

6. Sessions that run over 24 hours

1. Forgetting to clock out is the classic kiosk problem. The system refuses to record a session longer than 24 hours rather than silently storing nonsense.
2. When the person next uses the kiosk, they are told the session has run over 24 hours and asked to pick when work actually ended.
3. An administrator can close it from the dashboard instead: Stop Session shows the start time and asks for an end time.
4. The dialog states the minimum and maximum it will accept — after the start, and no more than 24 hours later. Anything else is rejected.
5. Fix these the same day. A session left open blocks the person's next clock-in and distorts every total that includes it.
6. The dashboard also flags anyone logged in for more than 24 hours without interruption, so these do not have to be hunted for.

Related: Setting up a kiosk device · The mobile kiosk · Entering hours · Shift planning · Creating a user account.