Do employees need their own login, or can everyone just use the kiosk?

Updated September 30, 2026

We get this one a lot, usually from an owner who has just set up the screen by the register and is wondering how much further they have to go. The short answer is that the kiosk works fine on its own. You can run Storeboard for weeks with nothing but the shared screen and never hand out a single password. The longer answer is worth a few minutes, though, because the kiosk and a personal login do different jobs.

What the kiosk is for

The kiosk is one shared login that belongs to the store, not to a person. It shows the board: opening and closing checklists, today's priorities, deliveries, team notes, item requests, online orders, standard procedures and the week's schedule. Anybody walking past can tick off a checklist item or mark a delivery received. It also carries the time clock. You tap your name, put in your PIN, and you're on.

There's one thing the kiosk won't do on purpose, and that's reply to a thread on the team board. Everyone on shift shares that screen, so a reply from it wouldn't really belong to anybody. We'd rather a reply have a real name on it.

What a personal login adds

A personal login is the employee's own page, on their own phone. It opens on Home: the shift they're working, clocking in if the store allows it from a phone, and only the tasks that fall inside those hours or have their name on them. From there they can see their shifts week by week, grab an open shift, offer one up for cover, book time off, mark when they can and can't work, message the team or one coworker, pick an online order, and check their hours against what was scheduled. None of that makes much sense on a screen by the register, so it lives on the phone.

Why we built it this way

The first version we built was for our own shop, Macarthur General Store, and it was kiosk only. The schedule was a PDF on the board. That was fine until the schedule changed on a Wednesday and the person it affected wasn't working until Friday. Now a published week goes to each person's own page and their own inbox, and the two always say the same thing because they're built from the same data.

We also didn't want getting people in to turn into a project. Plenty of shop floors have never given the owner an email address. So there are three ways in. You can send an invite by email, set up a username and password in person and hand it over, or let people ask for a login from your store's sign-in page. Somebody you invite is in the moment they set a password; somebody who asks from the sign-in page gets nothing until the owner has looked at them and picked their role.

So which should you do?

Start with the kiosk. Add personal logins the first time you publish a schedule or someone asks to swap a shift, whichever comes first. One setting worth knowing about: clocking in from a personal phone is off by default. A screen by the till and a phone on the bus aren't the same thing, so turning that on is the owner's call, under Timesheets → How the clock behaves.

Got a question you'd like us to answer next Wednesday? Send it our way.