Services · Klok
Klok: working time recording under RDL 8/2019 for schools and colleges
Daily recording of working hours is compulsory for schools and colleges too: it is required by RDL 8/2019, Spain's working time recording rules, it is enforced by the Labour Inspectorate and failing to comply can be penalised. Klok handles it with schedules designed for school staff – teaching hours, non-teaching hours, supervisors, part-time – with clocking in by mobile, kiosk or NFC, and it includes the whistleblowing channel under Law 2/2023, Spain's whistleblower protection law. From €1.50 per user per month: a school with 80 staff pays €120 a month, and in July, with fewer staff active, the bill drops automatically.
Sign your school up for free at https://klok.penwin.cloud: no card, no minimum term and the whistleblowing channel included.
Who it is for: the staff of a school or college
Klok is built for a varied workforce: the school sets its schedules by phase of education, approves corrections and absences according to its own organisation chart, and the evidence stays organised, kept for the four years the rules require and exportable in the format expected when someone asks for it. We cover on our blog why a school is not an office for the purposes of time recording.
- Teachers with teaching and non-teaching hours and a different timetable every day.
- Support staff, reception, cleaning and maintenance.
- Lunchtime supervisors and after-school club staff, with short and split shifts.
- Part-time staff, cover and people who work on more than one site.
- Publicly funded private schools (concertados) and private schools, vocational training (FP), business schools and universities.
How staff clock in: mobile, PIN kiosk and NFC card
From a mobile: the person opens the app and taps in or out. The school can switch on geolocation and set a geofence for each site – requiring staff to be within X metres of the school to clock in and, if it considers it necessary, blocking clocking outside that radius – leave it switched off or use it purely for information.
For anyone who does not carry a mobile there is kiosk mode: a tablet at the entrance where people clock in with a four-digit PIN or an NFC card, with four configurable modes – PIN only, NFC only, NFC or PIN, and NFC plus PIN for two-factor authentication. Those tablets are managed remotely: QR enrolment, kiosk policy, Wi-Fi credentials, restart, lock and retire commands, and remote app updates.
- Staff app for iPhone, on the App Store as ‘Klok’.
- Kiosk app for Android, on Google Play as ‘Klok Kiosk’, for the tablet at the entrance.
- Web access from any browser, at https://klok.penwin.cloud, with or without a personal mobile.
- Multiple sites within one school and multiple schools for school groups.
Schedules, school calendar and lunch breaks
Schedules are defined with templates: time slots for each day of the week, a grace period in minutes and the type of activity – teaching, non-teaching or outside working hours – so Klok detects late arrivals and early departures on its own. The same template can be assigned in one go to early years (Infantil), primary, ESO (compulsory secondary education), Bachillerato (upper secondary), vocational training (FP), non-teaching staff or any other phase.
The working calendar is built from the official one: Klok imports public holidays and non-teaching periods by autonomous community, province and municipality and by school year, all editable by hand, and preloads the teachers' Christmas, Easter and summer holidays; there is also a work mode for institutions that run on the calendar year. The lunch break supports four policies: no break, automatic deduction once a threshold is exceeded, explicit clocking out and in, or hybrid mode.
Absences, clocking corrections and residential trips
Holidays, leave and personal days are requested from the app, with the supporting document attached straight from the camera, and are approved by each person's line manager according to the organisation chart. Forgotten clock-ins are dealt with through correction requests – adding a missing one, correcting a time or deleting a wrong one – with an approval workflow: there is a record of who asked for the change and who authorised it.
Residential trips – school trips, retreats, camps – are handled in their own way: voluntary participation, chargeable hours capped at 8 hours a day, compensation in pay or in time off in lieu, and an allowance counter for each school year, according to the criteria the school sets under its collective agreement.
Reports, daily dashboard and who sees what
Klok produces the printable daily time record for each member of staff and the summary of hours per employee over a date range, exportable to CSV and Excel, plus the analysis of hours clocked against hours planned and the monthly and annual balance for each person. Day-to-day activity is followed from the daily dashboard and from a conversational artificial intelligence assistant that works with the school's data: you can ask it in plain language who is in or which absences are still awaiting approval.
Access is split into four roles per school – owner, administrator, read-only and approver – and, in groups, the owning body sees all its schools in read-only mode. The school is the data controller and PenwinEdu the processor, under the corresponding data processing agreement.
- Daily dashboard: who is in right now and who has not clocked in today.
- Sessions left open and clock-ins recorded away from the site.
- Who arrived late and who left early, based on the grace period set.
- Summary of hours exportable to CSV and Excel for payroll or for the employment adviser.
The Law 2/2023 whistleblowing channel, included
Organisations with 50 or more employees are required to have an internal reporting system, an obligation separate from time recording. In Klok the channel is included at no extra cost, because the staff list and the organisation chart are already in it: anonymous or named reports with a tracking code, ten categories, attachments of up to 10 MB, acknowledgement of receipt within seven days and two-way messaging, with access restricted to the internal reporting system officer appointed by the school. We explain on our blog how those fifty employees are counted.
Pricing, sign-up and set-up
The Standard plan costs €1.50 per user per month (excluding VAT), with no minimum term and monthly billing based on active staff: if there are fewer staff in July, you are billed less. It includes mobile and kiosk clocking, absences, reports, export to Excel, unlimited users and schools, and email support. Sign-up is free and no card is required.
Set-up is self-service: the school registers at https://klok.penwin.cloud and configures it the same day. The real work is loading the staff list – there is bulk import with automatic PIN suggestions – importing the holiday calendar and assigning schedules by phase of education. Klok sends invitations and reminders by email and push notification, the interface is available in Spanish, Catalan, Basque and English, sign-in is by password, magic link or one-time code, and there is a built-in manual with search.
Behind Klok is PenwinEdu, the trading name of Baby Penguin, SL, which has specialised in education for more than twelve years. It shows in what a generic product does not cater for: phases of education, the school calendar by autonomous community or residential trips.
- Platform: https://klok.penwin.cloud · free sign-up, no card required.
- Enterprise plan for more than 1,000 users, price on request: assisted onboarding and migration, priority support, custom integrations and SLA.
- Contact: info@penwin.org
- Offices in Spain: Benet Cortada 14, 08174 Sant Cugat del Vallès · Av. de los Poblados 151, 28025 Madrid · Almagro 14, 23002 Jaén.
Frequently asked questions
Is working time recording compulsory in a school?
Yes. Royal Decree-Law 8/2019 requires every company in Spain to keep a daily record of each employee's working hours, with the exact start and finish times, and a school or college counts as a company for these purposes, whether it is a publicly funded private school (concertado) or a private school, a university, a business school or a vocational training centre. The obligation covers all staff: teachers, support staff, lunchtime supervisors and after-school club staff, and part-time contracts. Records are kept for four years and made available to employees, their legal representatives and the Labour Inspectorate.
How do teachers who come and go at different times each day clock in, and what about non-teaching hours?
With schedule templates that set different time slots for each day of the week, instead of the same hours every day, and that distinguish three types of activity: teaching, non-teaching and outside working hours. That way, department meetings, parents' meetings, cover duties and staff meetings are recorded as working time. In Klok each person has their own template, with the grace period in minutes set by the school, and the same template can be assigned in one go to a whole phase – early years (Infantil), primary, ESO, Bachillerato, vocational training (FP) or non-teaching staff – and then adjusted case by case. Clocking in is done from a mobile, or from the tablet at the entrance with a PIN or an NFC card.
Can staff clock in from home?
That depends on what the school decides. Klok allows clocking in from the mobile app with optional geolocation and a geofence for each site: staff can be required to be within X metres of the school to clock in and, if the school switches it on, clocking can be blocked outside that radius. A school that needs to record work done off the premises can leave the geofence switched off or use it purely for information; in that case, clock-ins away from the site are flagged on the daily dashboard.
How long do working time records have to be kept?
Four years. Royal Decree-Law 8/2019 requires the employer to keep working time records for four years and to make them available to employees, their legal representatives and the Labour Inspectorate. Klok produces the printable daily time record for each member of staff and lets you export the summary of hours to CSV and Excel, so the school can hand it over, file it or pass it to its employment adviser whenever it needs to.
Is the whistleblowing channel included in Klok?
Yes, it is included and not billed separately. It is the internal reporting system that Law 2/2023 requires of organisations with 50 or more employees: anonymous or named reports with a tracking code, ten categories – workplace harassment, sexual harassment, child protection, fraud and others – attachments in PDF, image or audio format of up to 10 MB, acknowledgement of receipt within seven days and two-way messaging with the whistleblower. Access is restricted to a single internal reporting system officer appointed by the school.
How much does Klok cost?
The Standard plan costs €1.50 per user per month (excluding VAT), with no minimum term and monthly billing based on active staff. It includes mobile and kiosk clocking, absences, reports, export to Excel, unlimited users and schools, and email support. For more than 1,000 users there is an Enterprise plan, price on request, with assisted onboarding and migration, priority support, custom integrations and SLA. Sign-up is free and no card is required: it is done at https://klok.penwin.cloud.
How long does it take to set up Klok?
Schools sign up on a self-service basis at https://klok.penwin.cloud, free and with no card required, so you can start the same day. The real work lies in loading the staff list – there is bulk import of employees with automatic PIN suggestions – importing the holiday calendar for the autonomous community, province and municipality, and assigning schedules by phase of education. Because a single schedule template covers the whole of primary, the whole of ESO or all non-teaching staff in one go, and individual cases are fine-tuned afterwards, all the teaching staff can be set up in a few working sessions.
Which devices can staff clock in from with Klok, and how do people without an iPhone clock in?
In three ways, and the school can combine them. From a mobile, with the iPhone app published on the App Store as ‘Klok’, with geolocation and a geofence for each site if the school switches them on. From the tablet at the entrance, with the ‘Klok Kiosk’ kiosk app published on Google Play, clocking in with a four-digit PIN, an NFC card or both for two-factor authentication. And from any browser, at https://klok.penwin.cloud, with nothing to install: web clocking works the same way from an Android phone, a tablet or the staff room computer, so all staff can clock in, with or without a personal mobile.
Let's talk about your school
Email us at info@penwin.org with details of your school, or fill in the contact form, and we'll reply with a specific proposal.