Implementation companion
A practical guide to moving your business to formal employee timekeeping
For small businesses and organizations moving from paper timecards, spreadsheets, handwritten records, text messages, or another informal process.
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This guide is for a small business or organization moving to a more consistent way of recording employee time. You may be replacing paper timecards, a spreadsheet, handwritten notes, text messages, or a process that has grown difficult to review.
Implementing Timekeeper is more than setting up software. It is also a business-process change. Workers need to know how to record time. Managers need to know what they are expected to review and correct. The person responsible for payroll needs a dependable way to retrieve completed, approved information.
Timekeeper records and manages time. It does not process payroll, calculate deductions, file taxes, or pay employees. Your goal is to reach Payroll Ready: the period has been reviewed, legitimate corrections are complete, required approvals are current, and an appropriately authorized person can retrieve the information your organization needs for its normal payroll process.
Your organization decides its timekeeping and employment practices. Before configuration, confirm applicable requirements with the people who own them—such as ownership, payroll, HR, managers, site leads, accounting, or legal advisers, as applicable. Then configure Timekeeper to reflect those decisions.
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Many small organizations can prepare in several working sessions over one or two weeks. A larger team, several sites, mixed Entry Methods, or kiosk hardware may need more time. Readiness matters more than a fixed countdown. Do not choose a launch date until the people, process, configuration, and full workflow have been tested.
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Make business decisions first. Configure software second.
Bring together the people who understand your current process. Depending on your organization, that may include the owner, payroll contact, HR, managers, site leads, accounting, or an outside adviser. A very small business may have one person filling several of these roles.
Record these decisions in ordinary business language. This gives you a reference during setup and prevents one screen at a time from making policy for you.
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Employees should receive clear expectations before training. Timekeeper can enforce access and preserve records, but it cannot decide your organization’s policies.
Your written expectations may need to address:
Do not ask workers to invent a workaround when a record is wrong. Give them a simple reporting path, then have an authorized person make the legitimate correction in Timekeeper so the change remains accountable.
For detailed product behavior, use the Quick Setup Guide and Book of Timekeeper.
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Use your planning decisions to build the smallest configuration that accurately represents your operation. This is a readiness overview: the linked product guides explain how to operate individual controls.
Confirm the reporting timezone, Default Entry Method, Business Hours, pay cycle, cycle start where applicable, weekly thresholds, Break Settings, and payroll contact information. Defaults guide new-worker setup; they do not necessarily update existing workers.
Create clear Jobs / Work Types and Locations / Sites. Add Projects only when you need to attribute time to customers, contracts, or defined work. Use names that remain meaningful in later reports.
Create each Worker once. Confirm identity, Payroll ID / Unique ID if used, Entry Method, assignments, schedule, and applicable settings. Grant Manager Access only to people who should perform authorized management workflows.
If you use a Shared Kiosk, create it, place its link on the intended device, and test its configuration. Worker QR and Kiosk Only are relevant when the business has at least one kiosk. Share Work Links and QR material privately.
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Do not treat a successful Clock In as a completed test. Test the complete business process, including the correction path when a test scenario requires it.
Use representative workers and the real devices you expect people to use. If your business is mixed, test both Clock and Manual workers. If sites or Managers operate differently, test each meaningful variation.
Compare your test results with the hours and activity you expected. A report that looks complete isn’t necessarily correct.
If testing reveals unexpected behavior, record the worker, date, action, expected result, actual result, device/browser, and message shown. Report it to GetSkipa before go-live.
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Workers should not meet Timekeeper for the first time at the beginning of their first live shift.
Explain why the organization is changing before teaching buttons. Use the practical reasons that apply to your team: more consistent time records, fewer handwritten corrections, easier review, clearer responsibility for timecards, or a cleaner handoff of approved information to payroll. Describe the change as a shared process for dependable records—not as employee surveillance.
Before launch:
Managers should practice signing in, finding assigned workers, reviewing payroll periods, inspecting detailed records, making an authorized correction, understanding Needs Reapproval, and completing approval.
The person responsible for payroll should run the planned Payroll Report, verify its fields, and retrieve the result using Copy or Export CSV. If they access Timekeeper directly, confirm their Owner or Manager authorization is appropriate and working.
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Whenever practical, begin Timekeeper on the first day of a new timekeeping period.
The first day of a timekeeping period is not necessarily payday. Many organizations pay after a period has ended. The previous period may still be under review or moving through the existing payroll process while employees have already started recording the new period in Timekeeper.
Starting at a new-period boundary gives the business a clean answer to a basic question: which system contains the authoritative time for this period? It also reduces split records, duplicate entry, and confusion during review.
Plan how prior records will coexist during the transition. Complete the earlier period in the prior system when appropriate, retain the records your organization requires, and begin new-period time in Timekeeper.
If you cannot begin at a clean boundary, document the exact cutoff, tell every affected person which system is authoritative on each side, and test the resulting payroll retrieval before launch.
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If a critical item is unresolved, move the launch rather than beginning with an unclear authoritative record.
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On Day 1, keep the process calm and visible.
Owners and Managers should:
Avoid changing several settings at once in response to normal first-day uncertainty. Distinguish between a training question and a system problem, and preserve the details needed to tell them apart.
Resolve clear issues while the facts are fresh, without rewriting correct records simply to make the first day look perfect.
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Timekeeper makes reviewed time available for payroll; it does not run payroll. Keep exported records according to your organization’s established recordkeeping and security practices.
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After the first period, review what caused confusion. Improve training where people misunderstood the process. Correct genuine configuration issues deliberately. Reinforce who handles missing time, corrections, approvals, and payroll retrieval.
Then move out of implementation mode. Do not keep redesigning a workflow that is working. Review assignments when people or sites change, keep access current, test replacement kiosk equipment, and use the same end-of-period review each cycle.
A good implementation is not one with a flawless first week. It is one where workers know how to record their time, Managers can review and correct it responsibly, and payroll can consistently retrieve complete, approved information when the period ends.