Simple Clock In & Out is a staff timeclock that runs on a free Google Sheet you own. Staff tap Clock In on their phones; every punch is time-stamped and GPS-checked against your work sites; you watch the live board, fix the odd forgotten clock-out and approve the period's hours in one tap. £50 + VAT, once. Unlimited staff. No subscription.
Built for our own team first — in daily use ever since.
The problem
Every small employer ends up in the same corner:
Scribbled start times, "about half eight I think", a text from Tuesday you have to scroll for. Every payroll run starts with detective work, and the person doing it is you.
A timesheet says 7:30 at the unit. Nothing tells you whether that punch happened at the unit or from home. You don't want to surveil anyone — you just want the record to mean something.
The timeclock SaaS tools are decent — and priced like a tax. Ten staff is £600+ a year, every year, for what is fundamentally a spreadsheet with buttons. Stop paying and your history is behind their login, not yours.
How it works
The included setup turns a free Google Sheet into a full timeclock. The sheet holds the records — every punch visible, exportable and yours.
Create a blank Google Sheet and follow the included guide to add the app to it — the setup runs once. Add your sites (a map pin and a radius) and your staff list, then share one link. The guide walks through every click.
They open the link on their phone, enter their number, choose a PIN and accept a plain-English location notice — once. From then on it's one green button in, one red button out. No app store, no Google account needed.
The manager view shows who's in right now, everyone's hours per pay period, and anything worth a look — a forgotten clock-out, a punch flagged away from site. Fix shifts in the app, tap Approve period hours, and a payroll-ready tab fills itself: one row per person per day.
What you get
Each clock in/out records the phone's location at that moment and measures the distance to your nearest site. In range passes; out of range, weak GPS or location-off gets flagged for your review — never blocked, never auto-docked. Fair by design.
Open the manager view and see who's clocked in right now, since when, and today's hours per person — from your phone, wherever you are.
One green button approves a whole pay period into a clean payroll-ready tab — one row per person per day, breaks and rounding applied. Press it as often as you like: it syncs, it never duplicates.
Forgotten clock-out? Add, edit or delete any shift from the manager view. Every manual change is written into the record with an audit note, so the log stays honest.
Set your pay period start day, optional rounding, and automatic unpaid breaks on long shifts (e.g. 30 minutes over 6 hours). Hours come out calculated, not guessed.
Staff pick their own 4–6 digit PIN on first use — stored only as a one-way hash, unreadable to anyone. Five wrong tries locks it for five minutes. Staff see their own hours and nobody else's.
Warehouse, shop, yard — add each as a pin and radius. Every punch matches the nearest site automatically; staff never pick from a list.
Location is captured only at the moment of clocking — there is no tracking in between, by design. Staff see a clear notice and consent before their first punch, and the consent is recorded. Sensible under UK GDPR, and decent to your people.
Everything lives in a Google Sheet you own. Open it, filter it, export it, archive it. No third-party server, nothing held hostage — if you ever stop using the app, you still have every record.
Pricing
Ten staff on a typical timeclock SaaS: £600+ every year. This: £50, ever.
Not sure it fits your setup? Email ln3@sitelead.co.uk with how your team works and we'll tell you straight — before you pay.
Requirements
Exactly what it does
Security & privacy
After PIN sign-in each person sees their own hours and nothing else. Nobody can open the spreadsheet itself through the app — it stays private to your Google account.
Before the first punch, each employee reads a plain-English notice — what's captured, when, and why — and their agreement is stored with a timestamp and version.
Your attendance data goes in your sheet and nowhere else. It never touches our servers — there's nothing to send it to.
Everything it records lands in your own sheet, in plain sight. What you can see is all there is — no hidden storage, no surprises.
Every copy sold is individually watermarked to its buyer, which is how we can sell it once instead of renting it.
Untick one box and a leaver can't sign in — while their history stays in your records, exactly as employment paperwork wants it.
Guarantee & change policy
If Simple Clock In & Out stops doing what this page says in your first three months, we fix it free.
Rarely. Google Sheets is among Google's oldest, most stable products, and the app leans only on its plainest features. If Google does change something in your first three months, that's covered.
Fixes and new features are quoted at a fixed price — no subscription, no obligation, and it keeps working regardless.
FAQ
No — and that's deliberate. Location is captured at the moment someone taps Clock In or Clock Out, and at no other time. There is no background tracking of any kind — by design.
The punch is recorded and quietly flagged (with the distance, if there was a GPS fix). Staff see their punch went through; you see the flag in the manager view and decide what it means. Nothing is ever blocked and pay is never touched automatically.
Neither. They open a link in the phone browser they already have and sign in with their number and PIN. "Add to Home Screen" makes it feel like an app if they want an icon.
Yes. It's your spreadsheet — add as many rows to the Employees tab as you like. Ten staff for five years is under 40,000 punch rows, a fraction of what a Google Sheet handles.
The approved-hours tab is one clean row per person per day — exactly what payroll wants. Type it in, or export the tab as CSV and import it. It doesn't push into payroll systems directly.
Yes — pay period start day (calendar months, 21st-to-20th, whatever yours is), rounding to the nearest X minutes or exact, and automatic unpaid breaks on shifts over a threshold you set. All plain settings in the Config tab.
It's built to be proportionate: moment-of-clocking capture only, an explicit recorded consent step, PINs stored as one-way hashes, and the data held in your own account under your control. The guide covers your obligations as the employer, and the pack includes a printable staff privacy notice — fill in your details and hand a copy to each employee. (We're software people, not your solicitor.)
Fine — each signs in with their own number and PIN. One tap switches user.
Within your own organisation, yes — the licence covers adapting your copy to how you work. Rather we did it? We quote a fixed price for exactly the change you want.
Email us before you buy and describe your setup — we'll tell you honestly whether it fits. After purchase, the three-month guarantee covers anything that doesn't do what this page says.
£50 + VAT, once. Unlimited staff. Your sheet, your data.
Buy Simple Clock In & Out — £50 + VAT