PIN Time Clocks: The Simple Way for a Crew to Share One Device
A PIN is the whole login: four to six digits, typed at a shared tablet, and the punch belongs to the right person. For a crew of 3 to 25 it beats badges, fobs, and biometrics on cost, speed, and simplicity. The catch is that PINs can be shared, so here are the hygiene rules that keep a PIN clock honest, and the sixty-second onboarding that makes turnover painless.
JULY 16, 2026 · BY THE CLOX TEAM
Every shared time clock needs a way to know who is punching. Badges get lost in truck seats, fobs cost money and walk off, and biometric readers bring privacy laws into a decision that should have stayed simple. For a field crew of 3 to 25, the boring answer is usually the right one: a PIN. Four to six digits, typed at the tablet, done in three seconds.
This is the short, practical guide to running a PIN time clock well: why PINs win at this crew size, the hygiene rules that keep them honest, and what turnover looks like when a login is just a number you issue.
01
Why PINs win for small crews
Nothing to buy, nothing to lose. A PIN needs zero hardware beyond the tablet you already stood up. There's no badge to print, no fob to replace at $10 a loss, and no reader to break. A worker can't leave their PIN in yesterday's jeans.
Fast at the door. The punch ritual has to survive 6:55 am with gloves in one hand and coffee in the other. Typing four digits clears that bar. Anything slower than a few seconds per person backs up the doorway and quietly kills compliance.
No privacy tangles. Fingerprint and face readers implicate biometric privacy laws in a growing list of states, with real penalties attached and consent paperwork you don't want to administer. A PIN carries none of that weight. It identifies without measuring anyone's body, which is also simply an easier conversation with the crew.
Trivial turnover. Hiring means issuing a number. Termination means deleting one. No collecting badges from someone who stopped answering texts.
02
The known weakness, and the honest fix
A PIN proves the punch came from someone who knows the number, and numbers can be told to a friend. That's the entire threat model of a PIN clock: the shared PIN and the bought punch.
Two layers close it. The first is the optional clock-in photo, which we covered fully in Clock-In Photo Verification: with a camera on the punch, knowing Danny's PIN no longer lets anyone be Danny without being photographed trying. The second is a record where every punch is signed, timestamped, and hash-chained, which makes after-the-fact edits visible and turns any investigation into minutes instead of arguments. With those in place, a PIN stops being a security decision and goes back to being what it should be: the fastest usable login.
03
PIN hygiene: five rules
- Assign PINs yourself rather than letting workers pick. Self-picked PINs converge on birthdays and 1234, and crews learn each other's birthdays.
- Never reuse anything meaningful. Not the last four of a Social Security number, not phone digits, not the worker's number on the softball team. A PIN should mean nothing.
- One person, one PIN, no house accounts. A shared "laborer" login destroys the whole point: hours that belong to nobody in particular belong to every dispute in particular.
- Rotate on suspicion, not on schedule. Scheduled rotation mostly generates sticky notes on the tablet case. But the moment a punch looks bought or a PIN seems known, reissue it and say why.
- Retire PINs the day someone leaves. An active PIN for a departed worker is a punch waiting to be invented. Make it part of the same-day offboarding step, next to collecting keys.
04
Onboarding in under a minute
The full lifecycle on a PIN kiosk, with Clox as the example: you add the new hire in the web app, assign a PIN, and tell them the number. Their first punch works immediately, lands on the week's timesheet tagged to the site's job, and flows into the same approvals and payroll export as everyone else's. No app install, no account setup on their phone, no password reset ever. For crews that also run phone clock-in, the two coexist; the PIN kiosk covers whoever is planted at the site, the phones cover the rovers, as laid out in the kiosk guide.
For the worker, day one at the clock is a ten-second orientation: type this, tap in, tap out at the end. There's nothing else to teach, which is exactly the point.
05
The bottom line
For a crew of 3 to 25 sharing one clock, a PIN is the right default: free, fast, private, and painless to administer. Its one weakness is social, and a clock-in photo plus a tamper-evident record covers it. Save the badges and biometrics for operations big enough to need them.
PIN kiosk mode, photo capture, and the signed punch record are all included in the one Clox plan: $29 a month with the first 3 users included, then $6 per user per month. Clox is free for 14 days with no credit card, with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Start a free trial, issue a few PINs, and give the crew a clock that takes three seconds.