Klees Desk is the Klees desktop app for Mac and Windows. It is for the people on your payroll who work at a computer rather than a job site — office staff, dispatchers, estimators, bookkeepers, and anyone working from home. They clock in from the menu bar or system tray, and their hours land in the same timesheets, approvals, and payroll exports as the crew in the field.

It is the same product and the same seat. Klees Desk is included in every plan at no extra cost. If you pay for Klees, your team has Klees Desk — there is nothing to add to your subscription and nothing extra per user. One person can use both: a supervisor who runs a crew in the morning and does payroll from a laptop after lunch is one seat, not two.

Time tracked from the desktop app is recorded with the source DESKTOP, so you can tell desk hours from field hours anywhere Klees shows a time entry.

Who it is for

Field time tracking answers where were they. Desk work has no job site, so it needs a different question: what did the time go to. Klees Desk answers that without turning into surveillance — recording is off until you turn it on, every employee acknowledges a notice before anything is captured, and the sensitive parts (screenshots, app names, web addresses) are individually switchable.

Turning it on

Klees Desk is off for every company until an owner or admin enables it. Nothing is captured, and no employee is prompted, before that.

In the Klees web app, go to Settings → Klees Desk.
Turn on Enable monitoring. A Klees Desk item appears in the main navigation.
Choose your capture settings (below) and write your disclosure notice.
Have your team install the app and sign in with their normal Klees credentials.

Until monitoring is enabled, the Klees Desk navigation item stays hidden — the settings page is the only entry point, and it is always available to owners and admins.

Installing

Download the installer, open it, and drag Klees Desk to Applications (macOS) or run the installer (Windows). Employees sign in with the same email and password they use for Klees on the web — there is no separate account and nothing for them to purchase.

On first launch the app registers the machine as a device. The device identifier is generated once and stored in the operating system’s keychain (macOS Keychain, Windows DPAPI), so reinstalling on the same computer reuses the same device rather than creating a duplicate in your device list. The refresh token is stored the same way — it never sits on disk in plain text.

Klees Desk updates itself. When a new version is published the app downloads and installs it in the background.

macOS permissions

macOS requires explicit permission for the things Klees Desk reads. On first run the app asks for:

Screen Recording — required for screenshots and for reading the foreground app name.
Accessibility — required to read the active browser tab when URL tracking is on.

If a permission is declined, that capture type stops and the rest keeps working. Klees will flag a device whose permissions are missing so an admin can see why a machine is reporting nothing.

What employees see before anything is recorded

The first time an enrolled employee opens Klees Desk, they get a consent screen. Nothing is captured until they acknowledge it. The screen states plainly:

What is recorded while clocked in — the specific list is generated from your settings, so it matches what you actually turned on, not a generic boilerplate list.

What is never recorded — the content of what they type (Klees Desk does not log keystrokes), anything at all while clocked out or on break, and their camera, microphone, or clipboard.

Your company’s notice — the disclosure text you wrote, shown verbatim.

The exact text shown is snapshotted onto the acknowledgment record. If you later edit your policy, the record still shows what that person actually agreed to. This doubles as the signed or electronic acknowledgment New York requires of employers who monitor, and as the transparency record GDPR expects.

Raising the policy version forces everyone to re-acknowledge before tracking resumes — use it when you change what you capture. An employee may withdraw acknowledgment at any time from Settings, which stops recording for them.

What it captures

Everything below is off or minimal by default. You choose each one.

Time and activity

Klees Desk records work in buckets — 5, 10, or 15 minutes, your choice. Each bucket carries an activity level derived from whether the keyboard and mouse were in use. Activity level is a measure of how much input happened, never what was typed.

Idle time

If there is no input for the idle timeout (10 minutes by default), Klees Desk can:

Prompt — ask the employee what to do with the idle stretch (the default),
Discard — drop it automatically, or
Keep — count it as worked time.

Applications and websites

App tracking records the name of the foreground application — “Excel”, “Chrome” — never its contents.
URL tracking records the site being visited. By default this is the domain only (docs.google.com), not the full path. Full-path capture is a separate switch, off by default, because a full URL frequently contains information the domain does not.

Screenshots

Off by default. When on, you set 0 to 3 screenshots per bucket, taken at random moments inside the bucket rather than on a predictable clock. You also control:

Blur — screenshots are blurred on the employee’s computer before they are uploaded, so the unblurred image never leaves the machine and never reaches Klees.
All displays or primary only — primary display only by default.
Employee deletion — whether an employee may delete their own screenshots. Allowed by default.

Excluded applications

You can list applications that are never captured — banking, health, HR, personal messaging. An excluded app in the foreground suppresses the screenshot too, not just the app name. This is the control to reach for when someone has a legitimate reason to open something private on a work machine.

Retention

Screenshots and activity segments are purged automatically after the retention period, 30 days by default. Set it to match your own data-retention policy. Purging is permanent.

Reviewing the data

Klees Desk in the main navigation shows, per employee and per day: hours tracked, activity level, the applications and sites the time went to, and any screenshots. Click through to a specific day for the detail.

Employees can see everything recorded about them in the Klees web app — the same view their manager sees. This is deliberate. Monitoring that an employee cannot inspect is the kind that becomes a dispute.

Privacy and legal notes

Monitoring employees is regulated, and the rules differ by jurisdiction. Klees Desk gives you the mechanisms — disclosure, acknowledgment, minimization, retention limits, exclusions — but the policy is yours. A few things worth knowing:

Several US states (New York among them) require written or electronic notice before monitoring. The consent screen and its stored snapshot are built for this.
Recording only while clocked in is a deliberate limit. Klees Desk captures nothing on breaks or after hours, and there is no setting that changes that.
Blur, domain-only URLs, primary-display-only, and excluded apps all exist so you can collect the minimum that answers your question. Collecting less is usually the better answer.

If you operate outside the United States, or in a jurisdiction with works-council or GDPR obligations, have your own counsel review your configuration and disclosure text before you enable it.

Time tracking — how hours, breaks, and approvals work
Timesheets — where desk hours land for review
Security — how Klees stores and protects your data
Pricing — Klees Desk is included in every plan