How to choose where your team can clock in

How to choose where your team can clock in#

For: Admin You’ll need: Owner or Admin role.

There are two places a punch can come from: the kiosk — a shared tablet fixed at the worksite — and the phone an employee carries and is signed in on. You’ll decide which of the two your company allows, and narrow the phone down per location if some worksites need people at the door.

This is a separate question from how the kiosk checks who’s punching. For that, see How to turn on punch photos at the kiosk.

Set the two company-wide switches#

  1. Open the account dropdown (top-right) and click ‘Settings’.

  2. In the right column, find the ‘Time clock’ section.

  3. Turn ‘Kiosk’ on or off. On means employees may punch on a shared tablet or computer at the worksite.

  4. Turn ‘Phone (own device)’ on or off. On means employees may punch from their own signed-in phone.

  5. Click ‘Save’.

Both are on by default.

Note

Turning both off is a valid setup, not a mistake — it’s the manual-entry-only company, where managers type the times on the timesheet. Manager entries and the automatic clock-out backstop are never affected by these switches.

Typical choices:

  • Bought tablets so the door proves who was on-site? Turn ‘Phone (own device)’ off.

  • No hardware at all, everyone works from their own phone? Turn ‘Kiosk’ off.

Turn the phone off for one location#

Some worksites need people to sign in at the door even when phones are fine everywhere else.

  1. In the header, go to Company → Locations and open the location.

  2. Turn off the ‘Phone punching at this location’ toggle.

  3. Click ‘Save’.

Shifts at that location can no longer be punched from a phone; the kiosk is the way in. This is keyed off where the shift is, not where the phone is — Shiftavo never looks at anyone’s position.

Note

The location toggle can only narrow, never widen. If ‘Phone (own device)’ is off company-wide, no location can switch it back on. There’s no kiosk equivalent, because a kiosk is already tied to a location — the tablet paired to it is the enrolment.

Take a single tablet out of service#

For a repair, a renovation, or a room that’s closed for the week, take the device out of service instead of deleting it.

  1. In the header, go to Planning → Management → Kiosk and open the device.

  2. Turn off the ‘Active’ toggle.

  3. Click ‘Save’.

The tablet shows ‘This kiosk is currently disabled’ and refuses punches, retrying by itself until you switch it back on. Its pairing, credentials, and history are all kept, so switching it back on is a single click. Deleting the device stays the permanent option — see How to rotate or replace a kiosk device.

A policy change never strands an open shift#

If you change any of this in the middle of a working day, nobody gets stuck clocked in. Somebody who clocked in on a tablet can always clock out and start a break on that same tablet, and somebody who clocked in on their phone can always finish on their phone — even if you just turned that surface off. Ending a break is never blocked at all. The new policy applies to the next punch that starts something, not to the one already running.

Correcting a time on the timesheet isn’t a punch either, so it’s never affected.

Verify it worked#

If you turned the phone off, open the mobile app as an affected employee: instead of an armed clock-in button they see that they need to punch at the kiosk. If you turned a kiosk off, its tablet shows the disabled notice within moments. Either way, the ‘Time clock’ section reflects your choices after a reload.