Shop Floor Time Clock for Fabrication Shops
FabWise Kiosk is a shared terminal time clock built for the shop floor — not an office. Workers tap their name, confirm their shift, and clock in. The interface is large-touch-target, designed for gloved hands and quick interactions. No typing, no individual passwords, no waiting. Clock-out takes fifteen seconds and includes a meal break declaration. Every record feeds straight into payroll export — and, when you add Workstation, into per-job labor costs.
Why Standard Time Clocks Fail on the Shop Floor
Traditional punch clocks capture one thing: that a worker was present. They don't know which job the worker was on. They don't capture task breakdowns. They produce a raw presence record that someone has to manually reconcile against job assignments at week-end.
Web-based time tracking tools designed for remote workers are worse — they assume the worker has a device, an individual login, and a comfortable place to type. None of those assumptions hold in a fabrication environment.
FabWise Kiosk was built for the specific constraints of a shop floor: shared access, physical environment, multiple jobs running simultaneously, workers who don't have individual work computers. The interface reflects those constraints at every design decision.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook notes that production occupations — the majority of fab shop workers — are among the least likely to have individual computer access during work hours. A time clock designed for this reality must work without it.
How the Kiosk Works
The kiosk runs on a tablet or touchscreen mounted at the shop entrance, break room, or wherever your current time clock lives. It stays logged in permanently — there are no admin credentials exposed on the kiosk surface.
Clock-in flow:
1. Worker taps their name from a scrollable list of active workers
2. Enters their four-digit PIN
3. Confirms the shift they're starting
4. Taps "Start Shift" — record created instantly
Clock-out flow:
1. Worker taps their name
2. Taps "Clock out"
3. If their shift schedule includes a meal break: prompted to confirm whether they took it
4. Record closed
The entire clock-in flow takes under 30 seconds. Clock-out takes under 15 seconds. There is nothing to read, nothing to type, and nothing to decide.
What the Kiosk Captures — and What It Deliberately Doesn't
The kiosk answers one question completely: who was here, and when. Presence, shift times, and meal-break declarations, captured accurately by people wearing gloves in thirty seconds.
It does not ask a worker which job they're on. That is a deliberate boundary, not a gap.
A shared terminal is the wrong place to capture job data. The crew is queued behind one screen at shift change; every extra tap is multiplied by the whole shop and paid for in the line at the door. Worse, a worker at the entrance is being asked to predict their day — and the answer they give at 6:58am is the one your job costs inherit, whether or not the day goes that way.
So the kiosk captures the thing it can capture accurately, and the job data comes from where the work happens.
Job Costing Comes From the Workstation
Per-job labor lives on Workstation, the individual screen at the machine or bench — part of the Professional package.
Two ways it lands there, and shops use both:
Tapped as it happens. An operator taps the job and task they're starting. The clock runs against that job until they tap something else. This is the accurate one, because it's recorded at the moment the work changes rather than remembered afterward.
Allocated at the end of the day. The worker sees the hours their shift captured and assigns them across the jobs they worked, then confirms the day. For a shop where operators move constantly and tapping every change is unrealistic, this gets real attribution without pretending the floor is tidier than it is.
Either way the hours reconcile against the same shift the kiosk captured — one set of hours, attributed rather than re-invented. That's what makes job costing real numbers instead of a week-end reconstruction.
The practical split: kiosk for the whole crew's time, workstation for the jobs that time went to. A shop can run kiosk-only and get accurate payroll. Adding workstations is what turns those hours into job costs.
English or Spanish, Per Worker
The kiosk runs in English and Spanish, and the choice belongs to the worker rather than the tablet. A worker taps their language once and it sticks — every time they walk up to that kiosk afterward, it's already in their language.
The shop sets a default and each worker can override it. That distinction matters on a floor where the crew isn't uniform: one setting for the shop doesn't help the two people who needed the other one.
The preference follows the worker across surfaces, not just the kiosk — Workstation and the web app read the same setting. Someone who set Spanish at the tablet by the door sees Spanish at their machine.
This is not a translation layer bolted over an English product. Dates, times, and day names render in the conventions of the selected language, because a Spanish-speaking worker reading an English date format is still reading a foreign interface.
Meal Break Declarations — Built Into the Clock-Out Flow
Meal break tracking is a compliance and cost issue for most fabrication shops. Workers who work through meal breaks need to be recorded differently from workers who took their break. Supervisors need to see which workers flagged a missed break for review.
FabWise handles this at clock-out without adding friction. If a worker's shift schedule includes a scheduled meal break, the clock-out flow includes a single-tap declaration: "Did you take your meal break?" Workers who took it confirm; workers who worked through it flag it. The supervisor sees flagged records immediately in the admin dashboard.
The declaration is part of the shift record — not a separate report, not a form to fill out later. It happens at clock-out, in the normal flow, in under five seconds.
For shops in states with mandatory meal break laws, this record is your documentation. Your payroll provider uses it for compliance calculations. FabWise captures the record; your provider handles the compliance math.
Supervisor View — Real-Time Floor Visibility
The FabWise admin dashboard shows which workers are currently clocked in and how long they've been on the floor. This is real-time: any supervisor with admin access can see the current state of the shop without asking anyone. On accounts running Workstation, the same view shows what job each person is currently on.
When a worker clocks in or out, the dashboard updates. When a meal break is flagged, the supervisor sees it. When a record needs a correction — a forgotten clock-out, a start time that doesn't match reality — the supervisor attaches a correction carrying their name and reason. The original capture is preserved, always.
See time tracking for the full supervisor correction workflow and how it integrates with payroll approval.
Setup and Installation
The kiosk runs on any modern tablet with a browser. FabWise recommends iPad (10" or larger) mounted in a secure enclosure near the shop entrance. No app installation required — the kiosk is a web application that runs in the browser in full-screen mode.
Setup involves:
1. Mounting the tablet in a fixed location (FabWise works with any standard tablet enclosure)
2. Pointing the browser to your FabWise kiosk URL
3. Configuring your worker list, active jobs, and task list in the admin dashboard
4. Workers start clocking in — no training required beyond "tap your name"
FabWise's onboarding includes same-day kiosk setup as part of the standard onboarding package. The NIST Manufacturing Extension Partnership recommends no more than 30 minutes of worker training for new time-capture systems — FabWise kiosk typically requires less.
Kiosk vs. Workstation — Two Surfaces, One Record
FabWise has two capture surfaces: Kiosk (shared) and Workstation (individual). Both write to the same shift record database. A supervisor reviewing shifts in the admin dashboard sees a unified record regardless of which surface captured it.
Shops typically use the kiosk for floor workers and the workstation for supervisors, office staff, or anyone with an individual workstation. The two can be used simultaneously in the same shop — they don't conflict, and the data merges cleanly into a single pay period record.
For the full time-tracking workflow from clock-out to payroll export, see the time tracking and payroll export feature pages.