How to track employee hours without sending a single byte to the cloud
There’s a quiet assumption baked into almost every time-tracking product on the market: that an employee’s clock-in event is a piece of data that should be uploaded somewhere. Usually to the vendor’s cloud. Sometimes mirrored across three regions for “redundancy.” Often retained indefinitely under a vague “as long as needed for the service” clause.
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Time tracking for cafes and restaurants — what actually works on a busy Saturday
A friend of mine runs a coffee shop in Lisbon. Twelve staff, three managers on rotation, a constantly-shifting student crew. Last summer he sent me a long voice note around 2 a.m. on a Sunday. The gist of it: their cafe’s WiFi had crapped out at 11 a.m. on Saturday, taking down the time-tracking app that runs on the iPad by the till. Nobody could clock in for four hours. Nobody knew whether to wait it out or scribble names on a napkin. By the end of service the shift log had gaps in seven different places, and reconstructing payroll for that day cost him most of his Sunday.
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